For more than three decades, professional climber Conrad Anker has dazzled the world with mountaineering exploits that push the limits of what was thought possible in the alpine realm of rock and ice. The Bozeman-based mountaineer has scaled rock walls and icy pillars in far-flung places like Mount Everest and Antarctica, as well as those close to home, such as Hyalite Canyon, a Montana climbing mecca.

That puts him in a unique, and sometimes precarious, position to witness the effects of climate change on alpine environments up close.

“As an ice climber the threat of climate change is very real. We can look at the statistics of a shortened winter, but it really strikes home when you go to your favorite area and a climb that you’re familiar with, that shapes up every year, is absent,” Anker wrote in an amicus brief filed in support of 16 youth plaintiffs who won a landmark victory in the climate lawsuit Held v. Montana last summer.

By Micah Drew