Before it became the Comox Glacier, it was Dome Glacier -- the name used by early European climbers in the 1900s who saw in its rounded ice cap a simpler geometry. The Comox & District Mountaineering Club proposed the current name in 1939, drawing from the K'omoks First Nation whose territory encompasses the Comox Valley and the surrounding mountains. The name was officially adopted that year, replacing the prosaic with something rooted in thousands of years of habitation. The glacier sits within Strathcona Provincial Park, part of the Vancouver Island Ranges that form the island's mountainous spine. These ranges belong to the larger Insular Mountains, the chain of peaks that rose from the ocean floor through tectonic collision and now define the skyline of Canada's largest Pacific island.

Two main trails lead to the Comox Glacier, and neither is casual. The most direct is the Comox Glacier Trail, sometimes called the Frog's Pond Route, which begins where Datsio Creek meets Comox Creek. The route climbs quickly from the valley floor, gaining the ridge to the west and following its crest up to Lone Tree Pass before reaching the glacier's south flanks. The alternative is the Kookjai Route, starting at Cougar Lake near the Comox Gap and traversing over Kookjai Mountain and Black Cat Mountain before linking up at Lone Tree Pass. More ambitious mountaineers can reach the glacier by traversing west from neighboring Argus Mountain, which rises just one kilometer to the east, or by climbing up from Milla Lake to the north. None of these approaches is short, and all demand route-finding skills and comfort with exposed alpine terrain.

At 1,960 meters, the glacier's highest point is technically an unnamed rocky outcrop on its north side, referred to simply as the Comox Glacier summit. The glacier itself is a remnant of the ice sheets that once covered much of Vancouver Island, and like glaciers worldwide, it is retreating. From the communities of Courtenay and Comox, 30 kilometers to the northeast, the glacier remains a commanding presence -- a white beacon against the dark green of subalpine forest that dominates the view to the southwest. For the K'omoks people, Kwenis has been a landmark and a story for generations, a place where the natural and the mythic intersect on the same ridgeline. The whale is still up there, frozen in ice, waiting for the next flood or the final thaw.