Porter Fox - The Last Winter: The Scientists, Adventurers, Journeymen, and Mavericks Trying to Save the World

I didnt know these people before I started writing this book. I didnt know about their lives or how they began studying and living in the dark days of winter. I didnt know how their stories added up to a centuries-long worldwide movement to understand ice, snow, and the winter seasonand how these elements affect and even control most of the major natural systems on earth. This book is not a cog in that endeavor; it merely documents the effort. So I will not spend this valuable space eulogizing my personal affinity for blizzards, mountains, and the chilling cold that I have spent most of my life in. There will be time for that later. Instead, reader, please turn the page and meet the cast of characters who will carry you through this story: scientists, ranchers, adventurers, vagabonds, time travelers, hunters, and guides. Some of them work at the top of their field; some trudge through the snow just to put food on the table for their families. Some are young, some old. One was alive when I began this book and died on the ice before I finished it. Most live and work in the most inhospitable conditions on the planet. Far too much of their research goes unheralded. These snowscapes are their homes, job sites, and laboratories, and the entirety of their work will determine the fate of human civilization and that of our planet.

A third-generation rancher and firefighter living on the eastern slope of Washingtons North Cascade Mountains.

A self-taught professional skier who has traveled the world with his boards and a parachute and descended some of the most outrageously precipitous mountains on the planet.

A rising star in the earth science world who teaches at Portland State University in Oregon and studies the interface between snow and wildfire, usually on a pair of touring skis.

The wizened, soon-to-be-retired official glaciologist of North Cascades National Parkwho had the great idea to measure glacial mass balance and movement in national parks back in the 1990s, giving current climatologists baselines and data from which they can extrapolate what glaciers say about our warming planet today.

An Arctic ice hustler who has been on sixty polar expeditions in his young career, teaches at the University of Maines renowned School of Earth and Climate Sciences, and now directs the Juneau Icefield Research Program on the fastest-melting glacier system in the world.

A visionary bon vivant who fought in World War II, has degrees from Columbia, Cambridge, and Harvard, was on the first American Mount Everest Expedition in 1963, and essentially invented field glaciology.

A badass time traveler from Columbia Universitys Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory who walks the frozen deserts of Antarctica, Greenland, and Upstate New York, searching for answers about where the last ice on earth will survive.

Another young gun from Caltech and now the University of Colorado, Boulder, Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research who specializes in paleoclimatology and climate dynamicsreading the tea leaves of miles-deep ice cores to tell us about ancient ocean conditions, climate change, and what direction the wind was blowing on Christmas Day half a million years ago.

An enlightened Renaissance man and astral soul searcher caught in the body of a ski guide in Italys Dolomite Mountainswhere he once served in the famous Alpini infantry division, then later as a body double in the Sylvester Stallone climbing movie, Cliffhanger.

The master of ceremonies for earths glaciers from his headquarters at the University of Zurichs World Glacier Monitoring Service.

Former curator of the Swiss Alpine Museum in Bern and keeper of mountain culture in one of the fastest-melting mountain ranges on the planet.

Former British commando and professional climber and ski guide who traveled to Greenland as a teenager and never left.

Benevolent soul and climbing and dogsled guide who ventures into the wilds of eastern Greenland every winter with seal hunters, three dozen Greenland dogs, and a handful of wide-eyed foreigners.

Justus Utuaq, Mugu Utuaq, and Mikael Kunak. Three young Inuit men who grew up on the ice and continue to live off it as their neighbors and nation make the transition into the modern world.

The first and final voice on ice melt in Greenland, where he built Swiss Camp in 1990 and alerted the world to the rapid melting there that one day will affect every soul on earth.