

We skied madly in the dark months-there wasn’t much else to do-and I went on to climb and ski icy peaks on five continents over the next two decades. I grew up in ice and snow in northern Maine, where ice fisherman parked their cars on frozen lakes in the winter and you could walk across fjords and bays from Christmas to Easter.

To envision just how much ice the planet has lost, and how it is indelibly altering our planet, consider this: melt on the poles in just the past few decades has changed the planet’s rotational axis.
