Bouncing 30 miles along dirt roads in southwestern Wyoming, heading towards the jagged skyline. It's early September and the aspen is beginning to turn yellow. When you climb towards the mountains, the air gets colder. Soon you'll see snow on the roads.
Jeff Munroe, a professor of geology at Middlebury College, Vermont, is bringing us back in time. A small group of scientists and adventurers backpack into the Winta Mountains to recreate a series of photographs created in 1870 by William Henry Jackson, who worked in the US Geological Survey under the direction of geologist Ferdinand van Diewere Hayden. Jackson and Hayden documented the landscape and natural resources of Wyoming Territories that will help the US expand. See exactly how your environment has changed.
Re-photograph – Capture the same scene from the same location and capture the same scene after time – scientists can track long-term changes such as rising alpine lineage, erosion of coastlines, and glacial retreats. This technique is more challenging than you might think. Finding a general location is the first hurdle. This is because place names change over time and explanations are separated from historical images. Next, researchers need to identify the exact coordinates of the original tripod arrangement. This can be particularly troublesome in landscapes caused by rocks and erosion. Subtle variations in photography equipment can make it difficult to create matching images as cameras, films and lenses change sizes.
In our case, the difficult terrain coupled with the now unstable weather meant we weren't even able to reach a general area, let alone finding a half-dozen tripod locations. And some again photo projects rely on drones to scout their location, but as Jackson had, we do all the work on foot.
Jeff first re-shots these winter sites in 2001. What he saw was unimaginable in the 19th century. From “permanent snow” to “upper cap” on the tree line, elements of the landscape, which Hayden described as eternal snow, had changed. For 131 years the climate was warmed. Jeff's new photos clearly showed ecological changes. The trees were filled with open meadows and rose to the slopes of the mountain. Low-altitude species established themselves higher. All this change was squeezing unique alpine regions and species adapted to them. Soon they would have been nowhere left.
Before our trip, when I asked Jeff why he planned to repeat these sites again just 23 years later, he explained that the pace of climate-driven change was accelerating. “If I had seen this landscape between 1950 and 1975, it might have been a bit different,” he said. “But I think I would have changed more between 2001 and 2024 in about the same time.”
Working from Jackson's photographs, Jeff and his collaborator Townsend Peterson, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Kansas, can see changes over 150 years, overlaying them over hundreds of millions of years buried in the landscape.
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An hour on the road, we cross the Utah line. Jeff predicts that he will be lonely here at Uitas. After all, we only saw three other people during our trip.
Pull into the parking lot. At the tailgate of Jeff's rental truck, two graduate students, Joanna Colimanya and Quezada, from the University of Kansas, are wrestling with heavy backpacks. In addition to backpacking gear, I carry a camera and GPS equipment to record views of the later analysis in Peterson's lab. Also joined by former Army green beret Eric Grasco. He began exploring and taking photos at Untas when he retired from the Special Forces.
A few minutes after our hike, a heavy rain began to unleash the scent of the forest. While zipping up the rain gear, Eric says a week ago his tent had been shredded at Untas by “peanut-sized” hail. This is an extreme place. The East-West oriented range boasts a vast area of ​​uninterrupted high-altitude terrain, including at least 19 summits over 13,000 feet. A sudden temperature swing and storm occurs, and the landscape has few cover options.
You will climb into a series of steep switchbacks, and eventually pass through a reddish cobbled valley. This is a lateral moraine, a debris picked up by ancient glaciers and deposited at their edges, Jeff explains. We continue our climb and enter the wilderness of Hiuntas, managed by Wasatch Cash and Ashley National Forest. At this point, no mechanized equipment or vehicles are permitted.
At about 11,000 feet, our group reaches a wide plateau of short tan grasses. Intermittent clusters of stunted shrub trees are dotted, which is the beginning of the tree line, and the trees cannot grow on it. We gather under the tarp and boil water for dinner. Lightning tears through the forest. I look around nervously, but Jeff is calm. He speculates it was hit a quarter mile away.
The storm passes through our campsite several more times overnight. I wake up to find my tent looks like limp laundry like the laundry that told me, but I'm still dry and warm.
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After breakfast, we pack up and head back to the trail where dark-eyed juncos sing from the bushes. Jeff believes that in September 1870 the Hayden Party may have passed here a few days later than us. From here you can see Bald Lake, where we will be camping. Beyond, the classic Uintas skyline view begins to uncover, featuring Gunsight Pass and Kings Peak, the highest point in Utah, at 13,528 feet.
As the thick clouds are building again, we quickly descend and filter the cold waters of the lake, set up our camp before scouting through the first photo point, Lake Bald. Jackson's photo shows three men sitting in the foreground wearing hats and wool jackets. It's difficult to match the view with the printed photos that Joanna and Anahi brought. The grassy ground that Jackson's colleagues posed is now a tree bush.
After finishing our photos of Lake Bald, we cross the tundra to the Red Castle, a mountain that Hayden's party described as the great “Gothic Church” of purple rock. The view is like something I've seen before. Even the description as a “tundra” is amazed at the term I have heard of it being applied to the Arctic. We are still trying to find a place for our first tripod as the cold wind gushed across the plains and wet snow splashed out.
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On my last day in the mountains, I set out looking for two more photo points. Jeff's saved GPS locations will trail off the trail across the plateau and then lead to the slope. Near the border of the Treeline forest, it passes through several small lodge pole pine. “We're coming down to the Vanguard and referring to the trees. “They're like rising waves.”
Jackson said in 1870 that his photograph was taken at “the upper limit of tree vegetation.” Currently, Lodge Pole Pines, which is not normally seen as high in Untas, settles on old wooden lines. The expanded range of such species indicates changes related to warming climates, including high nighttime temperatures and fewer days of deep freeze.
The location of the GPS is incorrect, so Jeff follows the mental map and goes deep into memory. I offer to show him a copy of the image of my phone, but he doesn't need it.
Joanna and Anahhi take a few photos, knowing that there is at least a Skyline match. When I return to the lab with Peterson, I overlay the photos and lock the image in place with known GPS coordinates. Joanna describes this process as “drawing a string” via layers. The compound allows you to measure treeline height and forest density compared to historical images.
Jeff continues to roam around looking for a better window into the past. When he finds a familiar tree, the rest of the view settles in place. There is a flat rock at the edge of the cliff. This is the low entanglement of the trees, but it has become much larger. I back up, look down and notice a mountain of rocks. Jeff recalls that he built a cairn 23 years ago to mark this place.
Jeff spoke out, “Was you alive when you made this cairn?” Anahhi was four years old and lived in Ecuador. Eric joined the Special Forces that year. I was in university and studied in France. It's a world that's separate for all of us. Still, here we are together now and see this ancient landscape transform at a speed that even human language can see.
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In a formal report published when he returned to Washington, D.C., Hayden, a geologist responsible for the 1870 expedition, promised the railroad “millions of feet of timber,” as well as pasture and abundant water that could be used to irrigate crops. His mission was to make the place widely known and accessible in scientific, economic and cultural terms. The Hayden Party was the Vanguard, and was the trend of that era. Their work has fueled significant impacts, including violent displacement of white settlements and indigenous peoples, expanding railways, grazing, agriculture and mining. All of these changes are related to the long-term impact we are currently seeing: warming climate and tree advancement into the alpine zone.
However, historical photographs are also valuable. “Scientists can be very excited about their data, but they have warnings, footnotes and ambiguity,” Jeff told me. For non-experts, photography can be difficult in ways that photography doesn't. The photo pair says, “We can tell stories about how humans have changed climate, landscapes, and long-standing ecosystems and dealt with consequences.
A few weeks later, Joanna, Anahi, Townsend Peterson and I met on Zoom to discuss preliminary outcomes. In Bald Lake, one of the tree lines was very stable, rising by less than three and a half feet between 1870 and 2001, but since 2001, that same tree line has climbed an astounding 213 feet. Treeline advancements vary across different sites due to factors such as slopes, sunlight exposure, and soil quality. Not all places have experienced such a dramatic increase. Still, the group found that the UINTAS treeline was rising overall.
At the site near Red Castle, only about 260 feet of the tundra remained above the treeline, progressing at a rate of nearly five feet a year between 2001 and 2024. The loss of the tundra means the disappearance of species such as malmots, puttalmigans and rosy finches.
Peterson makes it clear that his group has not designed any conservation solutions. “What we do is raise the red flag,” he says. They are once again aiming to use photos to identify sites experiencing rapid change across UINTAS and around the world.
Standing in the tundra with a photo of Jackson in his hand, I felt like I had squinted my eyes in the past. Compared to then, dark clouds of the future appeared to be gathering on the horizon.
Kim Bale's previous works include enigmatic photos of Ansel Adams and essays on a compilation of historic observatory around the United States.
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