The Glacier Drawing Project

“Like a pencil marks paper, a glacier marks the land.”

Jonathan Marquis drawing on the summit of El Capitan in the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness. Photo by Richard Forbes

The Glacier Drawing Project is a long-term practice of place-making and radical remembrance of Montana's glaciers. It is the only on-site, hand-drawn visual record of the fifty-nine named glacial features in Montana's Crown of the Continent and Greater Yellowstone ecosystems. I began the endeavor in 2014 to draw each glacier in Montana before a warming climate melts the ice beyond recognition. Every year, I visit new glaciers, revisit others, and often draw from mountain summits that grant glimpses into some of Earth's most iconic and intact wildland geographies. A decade of drawing explores a personal connection with glaciers through color, mark-making, and careful attentiveness.

"You better hurry up," people often joke when I describe my project to draw every glacier in Montana. The response is likely harmless banter, yet the knee-jerk, cynical reply deflects personal responsibility for global warming and assumes a glacier-less future is already a foregone conclusion. I fear such narratives reinforce apathy and the stories of loss that often frame climate change. If glacial disappearance and climate change are inevitable, why change our behavior?

Drawing is a creative and sensory response to these stories of loss. Like a pencil marks paper, a glacier draws the land. Drawing attends to the ice, puts us on the ground, and establishes a personal relationship. Like a glacier, drawing is slow. Repeated layers of material and movement shape the land and reveal a picture. How we hold a glacier in our minds is crucial to the ecosystem's health on the ground.

The Glacier Drawing Project reminds us that glaciers are still here, and like paper and pencil, we hold glaciers in our hands. I am often asked, "Is the project over when you visit every glacier?" No, I will keep drawing glaciers until I can't get there. We need to think and act on a glacier's time, and like a glacier, the work is slow and never complete.