Deep in the Rocky Mountains, outside of Cook City, Montana, there's a glacier that's melting.

It sits at an elevation of around 11,000 feet, and in its heyday it was miles wide.

Today it kind of looks like a thin veil of ice, a gray splotch clinging to the northern

face of the mountain.

That is retreating year after year is, sadly, not surprising nor unique.

Here's what is surprising.

As the glacier melts, it leaves behind this deposit of strange, sickly, sweet smelling debris,

piles and piles of stuff that's been trapped inside this glacier for hundreds of years.

Maybe from a distance, it kind of looks like seaweed that's washed up on shore.

But it's not seaweed.

It's not until you start kind of working your way through that agglomeration that

materialize its all-locust bodies.

I am Abby Peralt, and this is Atlas Obscura, a daily celebration of some of the most

strange, wondrous and extraordinary places.

Today we're digging into this enormous pile of bugs, dead decomposing bugs, and what

we'll find is nothing short of forgotten species, some serious entomological drama, and

in opera.

After this.

See, grasshoppers, they're coated like most insects in a waxy layer.

And that does an incredible job of picking up spices.

If you were to present me with a bug, roasted and salted, let's say.

A little bit of curry, a little bit of garlic powder, whatever it is you like.

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