He returns to his car and pulls onto the highway. He’s not sure where the route goes, but it winds up the mountain toward the sky.

He doesn’t realize how far he has driven until he sees the sign reading WELCOME TO THE COLUMBIA ICEFIELD. The face of the mountain is covered with wire mesh. A yellow sign flashes CAUTION: ROCK SLIDES.

He pulls into a gravel parking lot at the base of the mountain. It’s empty except for a few cars. It looks vaguely familiar, then he remembers. A grade two field trip. Ms. Clarke. He hasn’t been here since.

He steps out of his car, shields his eyes from the afternoon sun, and surveys the mountain. The glacier seemed so much bigger, so much grander when he saw it as a child. He turns back to the highway and double-checks the sign. It’s the right place. Strange. He remembers the ice sheet sweeping down from the top of the mountain to the edge of the parking lot in one uninterrupted mass. Now, the ice sheet stops halfway up the mountain, like a blanket that’s been yanked up from the other side. Below the ice, there’s only a jumble of exposed rock and rubble like a quarry. He reaches in for the bottle of water, tucks it into his jacket, and follows the arrows to the trailhead.

A giant handrail with dates and a sign, THIS IS WHERE THE GLACIER WAS, runs along the trail. It starts at 1970. He hikes up the rocky path to 1980, the year he would have been here, and continues until he arrives at 1998, eighteen years later. Here, the icecap is cordoned off by a yellow plastic banner, like police tape. A couple of tourists stand at the border between ice and rock, snapping photographs. Another sits on the jagged edge of the ice sheet bundled in a parka, her feet dangling under her.

Ashif glances back down the trail. He’s in awe. A massive body retreating slowly but steadily. A centimetre, maybe a millimetre, every day until one day it’s gone, quietly disappearing into water. He feels a strange sense of sadness and loss. He lowers himself onto a boulder and focuses his gaze upward, past the yellow tape, to where he can see only snow and ice. A mass of white.

A bus with tracks for tires, like a Zamboni, ferried Ashif’s class up the mountain. It crawled over the ice like a giant caterpillar. Ms. Clarke stood at the front bundled in a knee-length down-filled jacket, red curls sticking out from under her green wool toque.

“Okay, people. Listen up,” she said, swaying to and fro even as she held on to the railing above her. She always called them people, not kids or children like the other teachers. Ashif liked that. Ashif liked her. She was his favourite teacher ever.

Ms. Clarke explained that a glacier was actually a long, deep river of ice and the melting ice flowed down through a system of other rivers, right into three oceans.