The ice in question

This is a piece of the Emerald Glacier in British Columbia. It sits above Emerald Lake on one side, and the Little Yoho Valley on the other, and if you’re in reasonably good shape, you can hike up to its base in less than a day. It’s one of two real places that inform the imaginary place where my first novel is set.

Emerald Glacier, on the Iceline trail north of Field, BC.

The plot of The Ice Coffin hinges on a discovery at the edge of a melting glacier, but not just any glacier. I needed one that could be accessed without technical climbing gear with a few hours of hiking, and one that had a certain characteristic. It had to be receding up the face of almost vertical walls of mountain peaks as opposed to the wide, flat character of places such as the Wapta Icefield, which is a tourist attraction and can be accessed by anyone with a short stroll from a parking lot in Banff National Park.

In the book, two of characters hike up to an alpine tarn, which is a small lake at altitude, like this one at the base of the glacier

As I was creating this setting, I had the Emerald Glacier in mind because of its accessibility from a popular trail called the Iceline. Despite the fact that this place is in the Canadian Rockies, hundreds of kilometers east of the place in the southern interior of BC where the book is set. The mountains there are glaciated, so it’s not a total leap, but the ice there, notably the Kokanee Glacier, is much harder to access in a day.

At the approach to the tree line on the Iceline trail, we came across a marmot, who likely lives somewhere in this rockfall.

I’ve never hiked all the way to where the ice is receding, and probably never will. There’s something imposing about ice like this, a sense that I hope I got right in the book. It’s enough for me to observe it from several hundred meters away. I don’t have to get right up close to see what it may be ready to reveal.