40 Years in the North Cascades

Watercolor, Colored Pencil, Acrylic, and Conte, 12” x 16”, 2023

This painting is an emotional piece for me. It is an updated version of the very first data-art painting I created when I came up with the idea in 2015. I wanted to make a new version that reflects both the changes to the North Cascade glaciers and to my art style. I hope the beauty of this landscape manages to convey a fraction of what I feel for it!

The top surface of the mountain glacier is a line graph that depicts the mass balance of North Cascade glaciers in Washington state from 1984-2022. Mass balance is the health of a glacier: the difference in snowfall gain vs. melt each year. August 2023 is the 40th year of the North Cascade Glacier Climate Project, which my dad, Dr. Mauri Pelto, founded and has run every year since. Each August he and a team spends weeks backpacking and working on the same group of mountain glaciers. This lifelong project has led to over 5,000 miles hikes, over 40,000 measurements taken, and over 700 nights in a tent. To create this piece I made up a landscape that is a compilation of mountains and glaciers in the North Cascades.