The View at The End

Three scientists chronicle life, death, and the last stand of the Grizzly Glacier.

- By Bill Donahue

Usually, geology is a slow drama, large and impersonal, unfolding over millennia. On the evening of September 12, 2009, however, the movement of rocks and ice sped up crazily on the steep slope of Grizzly Glacier, 8,000odd feet above sea level in the remote Trinity Alps of northern California. It was as though the cacophonous sound of frozen blocks crashing and the low grinding of ice against bedrock granite was a geologic symphony directed at a single man.

Justin Garwood, a wildlife biologist, was camping solo at the foot of the glacier that night, just uphill from Grizzly Lake, a deep reservoir of glacial melt. He was 35 years old and days removed from completing his master’s thesis, which involved censusing an amphibian, the Cascades frog, in the high lakes of the Trinity Alps, a subrange of the Klamath Mountains that sprawl across an area the size of Maryland.

Garwood is a fervent believer in field science, so that even then, on a six-day Klamath Mountains backpacking trip conceived as an escape from the rigors of thesis writing, he was keeping a journal whose neat all-caps block lettering revealed a hunger to imbibe and decipher the wonders of the natural world. “Here,” the journal reads, “the stream is very low gradient and sinuous with small cobble substrate. … On the third low gradient shelf is a grove of quaking aspen. ... Last frog seen @ 2135M elevation.”