Glacier National Park Before and After: Nine USGS Repeat Photo Pairs

In the mid-1800s Montana’s Glacier National Park held an estimated 150 glaciers larger than 25 acres. By 2010 only 25 of them were still big enough to count as active glaciers. Nine pairs of historic and modern photographs from the US Geological Survey’s Repeat Photography Project show that retreat more clearly than any statistic.

The USGS Repeat Photography Project

In 1997 scientists at the USGS Northern Rocky Mountain Science Center began searching the park’s archives for old glacier photographs and hiking them back into the mountains. The goal is to stand at the exact same vantage point and shoot the scene again. Staff locate the original photo point with approximate coordinates from Google Earth, then fine-tune it by triangulating landscape features and moving up or down the hillside until the ridges line up.

Timing is everything. Glaciers can be photographed only in a narrow late-summer window, from late August into October, after the winter’s snow has melted off the ice and before the first autumn snow arrives. Wildfire smoke, long shadows and early snowfall regularly get in the way, and most glaciers take several days of backcountry travel to reach. The historic images date from 1887 to 1943 and were made by photographers including Morton Elrod, T. J. Hileman, W. C. Alden, M. R. Campbell and F. E. Matthes. The collection now holds around 60 repeat pairs covering more than twenty glaciers.

Nine glacier before-and-after photos

1. Boulder Peak on Boulder Glacier

2. Ice cave on Boulder Glacier

3. Chaney Glacier and Chaney Notch

4. Grinnell Glacier

5. Boulder Glacier near Boulder Pass

6. Swiftcurrent Glacier

7. Grinnell Glacier from Elrod’s Rock

8. Iceberg Glacier

9. Shepard Glacier

How Glacier National Park’s ice has changed

Retreat is the most striking change in the whole collection. Grinnell Glacier, the most photographed because it is the easiest to reach, has broken apart, with The Salamander now sitting as a separate ice body above it, and a new lake, Upper Grinnell Lake, has formed where ice once lay. Blackfoot Glacier has split into Blackfoot and Jackson Glaciers, and Logan and Red Eagle Glaciers were once a single continuous glacier. Plants are already colonising ground freshly exposed at the glacier edges, including at the foot of Jackson Glacier.

The numbers tell the same story. One USGS study found that the total glacier-covered area of the region fell by about 35% over 50 years, and a 2017 USGS and Portland State University dataset tracks the areas of 37 named glaciers in the park. When comparing the pairs yourself, start with a fixed ridge or rock face shared by both images, then follow the edge of the ice.

For more glacier stories, explore Kilimanjaro’s summit ice or see Vatnajökull in Iceland.

Visiting Glacier National Park

Established on 11 May 1910, Glacier National Park covers just over a million acres (4,100 km²) of northwestern Montana along the Canadian border. Together with its Canadian neighbour it forms Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park, the world’s first international peace park, designated in 1932 and a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1995. More than three million people visited in 2025.

The park’s showpiece drive, the 53-mile Going-to-the-Sun Road completed in 1932, crosses the Continental Divide at Logan Pass, 6,646 ft (2,026 m). In the northeast, the Many Glacier area is home to the historic Many Glacier Hotel, built by the Great Northern Railway in the 1910s on the shore of Swiftcurrent Lake, close to Swiftcurrent Falls. Plan for summer: deep snow and avalanche risk keep much of the backcountry closed until early June, and vehicle-accessible campgrounds usually open from mid-June to mid-September.

Related reading

• Photos of Alaska: Then and Now
• Antarctic Icebergs in Motion: Drift, Collapse and Meltwater
• Curling Snow on a Cabin Roof: A Small-Scale Winter Transformation
• West Antarctic Glacier Retreat: What the 2014 Research Actually Found
• The Ilulissat Calving Sequence in Chasing Ice

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