Cascades frog

In October the surface of a high Cascades meadow pond turns to ice, and somewhere under the mud a frog is still alive. The Cascades frog spends its summer exactly where a hiker would expect, sunning at the edge of a shallow pond in a subalpine meadow, brown-backed with dark spots, rarely longer than a new crayon. What happens to it in winter is less expected. Instead of leaving for lower ground, it burrows into soft lake-bottom sediment or a spring-fed seep that keeps moving water flowing even when everything around it locks solid, and it waits out the cold submerged and unfrozen while the pond above it turns to a sheet of ice a hiker could walk across.

That trick has kept this frog alive at elevations between roughly 1,300 and 8,200 feet, the exact band where a summer visitor and a Cascades frog are both likely to be standing at the same meadow pond. It is not a rare frog to find there, once you know to look at the shallow, sun-warmed edges rather than the open water. What is rare is finding it at all in places it used to be common.

At Lassen Volcanic, the park’s own naturalists now list the Cascades frog in the past tense, one of the species that used to live there and has since disappeared for reasons nobody has fully worked out. It is a species of concern in California, Oregon, and Washington, and in 2023 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reviewed it for federal endangered-species protection before deciding the frog didn’t yet qualify. A kid who finds one at a meadow pond this summer is looking at an animal that survived an entire winter buried alive under the ice, and one that a future visitor to the same pond might not get to find at all.