Invited by the king of Bhutan, CU Boulder PhD student Clare Gallagher completed the 109-mile Snowman Race to bring attention to the realities of climate change

Usually when Clare Gallagher runs 100 miles, she does it all at once—a day that’s alternately punishing and exhilarating and at the furthest boundaries of what her body can do.

The 109-mile Snowman Race was different. It spanned five days across the Himalayas and saw 16 of the most elite ultramarathoners from around the world traversing multiple mountain passes approaching 18,000 feet.

Clare Gallagher (left) was invited by Bhutanese King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck to run the 109-mile Snowman Race ultramarathon. (Photo: Snowman Race)

“As far as ultramarathons go, it was not that crazy a distance—we were doing about a marathon a day,” Gallagher explains. “But it took so, so long because these mountains are just so high. We started in Laya (Bhutan), which is about 13,000 feet in elevation, and went up from there.”

Gallagher, a PhD student in the University of Colorado Boulder Department of Environmental Studiesand the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR), was invited by the king of Bhutan to participate in the 2024 Snowman Race held at the end of October. It was the second time the race was held—an event envisioned by Bhutanese King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck to draw international attention to the stark realities of climate change in Bhutan and around the globe.

“Once we actually got there and were literally on top of these glaciers, I could see his point,” Gallagher says. “His goal is for international trail runners like myself to help share the story of what we saw, and what I saw is that the glaciers are melting.”

Running 100 miles

Before she vividly learned that a journey of 100 miles begins with a single step, however, Gallagher was simply a girl who liked to run. She ran track as an undergraduate at Princeton and kept running in Thailand, where she moved after graduating to teach English. While there, she signed up for the inaugural Thailand Ultramarathon almost on a whim and ended up winning.

The races she entered grew in length, and in 2016, at age 24, she ran the Leadville Trail 100 for the first time and won. “I had been reading Outside magazine, and I always looked up to some of the women who preceded me (in ultramarathons),” Gallagher says.

“I thought they were really badass, and trail running seemed a lot more interesting than track—I’d gotten really burned out in undergrad, but to race in a beautiful mountain environment, in places that are so remote, really appealed to me.”

Clare Gallagher (front row, far left in purple shirt) and 15 ultramarathon colleagues from Bhutan and around the world completed the five-day Snowman Race. (Photo: Snowman Race)

She won the 2017 Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc CCC, setting a course record, and went on to win the 100-mile Western States Endurance Run in 2019, the Black Canyon 100K in 2022 and the Leadville 100 again, also in 2022. She was invited to run the inaugural Snowman Race in Bhutan that year, but she’d started her PhD program, and her schedule couldn’t accommodate the training.

When she was invited to the second Snowman Race in 2024, despite still being in graduate school, she eagerly accepted. The 16 participants were evenly split between Bhutanese and international runners, “and the Bhutanese runners destroyed us,” Gallagher says with a laugh.

“The physiology of running at altitude is pretty fascinating. A lot of the literature is finding that aspects of this ability are genetic, so if you don’t live at these altitudes and if you can’t afford to be acclimating for a month, your experience is going to be really different. It’s probably the gnarliest race I’ve ever done, and I got wrecked by altitude. People thought I might do well because I’m from Colorado—and I was using an altitude tent beforehand a little bit, but I was also taking my PhD prelims and didn’t want to be sleeping in it. So, I got destroyed.”

She did, most importantly, finish the race, and the slower pace she adopted in acquiescence to the altitude allowed her more time to look around.

‘Please send our message’

The Snowman Race course follows the historic, high-altitude Snowman Trek route, beginning in Laya and ending in Chamkhar, and summitting a series of Himalayan passes—the highest of which is 17,946 feet.

"My experiences in Bhutan reminded me that I also feel a lot of hope and a lot of motivation to do what I can do, and smile while I’m at it," says Clare Gallagher (foreground, running in Bhutan), a CU Boulder PhD student in environmental studies. (Photo: Snowman Race)

“On day three we were up almost to 18,000 feet, and I’m walking and kind of sick with altitude, but I still had never felt the immensity of what I felt in the Himalayas,” Gallagher says. “The race route goes really close to glaciers well over 18,000 feet, and I’ve honestly never felt so scared. I could tell these glaciers were melting and the sun was so hot.

“The story of Bhutan is that these glaciers are melting at a much faster rate than predicted and are then creating these big alpine lakes that break through their levy walls or moraines and flood villages. We ran through one of these most at-risk villages—it takes seven days to get there by horse—and the people who live there don’t want to be forced to move. So, they were saying, ‘Please send our message back to your countries, we’re scared of our glaciers obliterating us.’”

And even though her PhD research focuses on plastic pollution in oceans, “even the issue of plastic pollution was apparent up there,” Gallagher says. “The interconnectedness of our world became so, so apparent up there. A piece of plastic trash up there is going to degrade really fast because of the high altitude and super harsh alpine environment, and then all those chemicals are going to go downstream. There’s not ton of trash in Bhutan, but plastic pollution is still a part of this story.”

She adds that Bhutan, like many smaller nations, is vulnerable to the impacts of climate change despite having one of the smallest carbon footprints on the planet, and she rues that it takes runners from western nations flying there—another carbon-intensive activity—to draw attention to the seriousness of climate change.

“A really surprising take-home from this journey was how spiritual the experience was,” Gallagher says. “All of my fellow Bhutanese runners were praying at mountain passes, and any time there was a meditative stupa, they were stopping and praying to the mountain deities, thanking them for safe passage.

“I really do feel there’s some connection between caring for this planet and each other and all the plants and animals on this planet. I feel like that reverence is something I’ve been missing in my work as an environmentalist. The phrase ‘climate change’ has taken on an almost corporate flavor, but in Bhutan things aren’t emails or PowerPoints or slogans, they’re real. Climate change is not just a phrase; it means melting glaciers. So, I’m interested in taking that depth and reverence for the land and living things and beings and asking, ‘OK, what are our problems here in Colorado? What are our challenges?’”

A hazard of the field in which she’s immersed is extreme climate anxiety, and Gallagher says she’s worked to focus day-to-day on “taking care of what I can take care of and acknowledging my present. My experiences in Bhutan reminded me that I also feel a lot of hope and a lot of motivation to do what I can do, and smile while I’m at it. I feel a lot of gratitude for being alive at this time in history and asking, ‘What are we going to do with this moment?’”

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