Saint Mary's Glacier, Colorado

Although he had just come back from an extended camping trip in Nevada, Glenn agreed to come with me this weekend to test-drive my new equipment, which is good because I had no idea where I was going to go, and my indecision had already cost me a night of my precious three-day weekend. We spent the night at St. Mary’s Glacier, which is *not* a glacier, as I found out to my great disappointment. It’s just a permanent snowfield not too far from the Mount Evans area. Permanent might be too strong a word, though – Glenn told me about an older guy he’d spoken to a few years ago who said that the snow had dramatically receded since he first saw it, so St. Mary’s might be on borrowed time.

We set up camp using some extra heavy-duty stakes so my brand-new tent didn’t get torn up in the winds that St. Mary’s Glacier is famous for. The winds are so strong on St. Mary’s that half of every tree is completely bare of branches and foliage. Glenn frightened me with a horror story about his friend’s tent in which the poles snapped and sliced through the tent fabric in the wind on St. Mary’s; however, I’m charmed when it comes to weather, so we never experienced more than a breeze for the entire time we were there.

The way you set up a tent in the snow is by tramping the snow down in an approximate outline of the tent, staking it out, and then rolling around on the tent before it’s put up to flatten out the middle part. Glenn also dug out a small hole at the front of the tent so we could sit on the edge and have our feet hanging down like sitting in a chair (Glenn advice: don’t ever put your equipment in this hole, because there’s a good chance the wind will blow snow into it and you will have to dig out your stuff from underneath two feet of ice and snow).

We brought ice axes and practiced self-arrest techniques in the snow all day. We saw some cross-country skiers, a lot of tourists who stood around at the bottom of the glacier for ten minutes taking pictures before leaving (one woman spent the entire time on her cell phone), and a couple of other people practicing with ice axes, but it was actually pretty quiet.

Anticipating more snow, I had rented snowshoes and dragged the things up to the glacier only to find them completely unnecessary. However, we snowshoed out just to justify my spending the $15.