Beneath the sun-baked slopes of the American West, a hidden archive of freshwater has been quietly waiting — ice entombed inside mountains, shielded from view by centuries of accumulated stone. Researchers at Brigham Young University are now learning to read this camouflaged landscape, using gravity mapping and field observation to locate and measure rock glaciers across Utah and the broader region. Their work arrives at a moment of reckoning, as the Colorado River system strains under historic lows and communities confront the limits of water systems built for a wetter world. What they are un