Sean Schoville slips an elastic loop around his waist, securing a square piece of foam to his backside. “It’s a trick I learned from an entomologist in Siberia,” he says casually. “It helps you stay warm when you’re sitting on cold rocks all the time.” It may be June, but it’s frosty here at Summit Lake, the highest pass along the Alaska Highway in far northern British Columbia. Standing before us, the 1,905-meter (6,250-foot) Mount St. Paul looks like a scoop of stracciatella gelato, with dark slivers of limestone slicing through the pillowy white snow.

We’re here to hunt for an elusive and unassuming group of insects utterly unperturbed the cold weather. In fact, they love it. Less than an inch long, these creatures—ice crawlers—look a little like an earwig that hasn’t been getting enough sun. They are wingless, have six legs, and a pale, segmented body that ends with two tail-like appendages known as cerci. When the Canadian entomologist Edmund Walker discovered them in Banff, Alberta, in 1913, he was so dumbfounded by their appearance that he gave the group the scientific name Grylloblatta, which roughly translates to “cricket-roach.” Entomologists aren’t known for their media savvy, but that name certainly landed with a thud. “It’s not particularly flattering,” Schoville sighs. “It doesn’t sound great, and it doesn’t help you understand the group.”

But ice crawlers, as their common name suggests, have a thermal superpower, which allows them to flourish at the edges of glaciers. After the sun sets, they emerge from their hideouts deep within rock crevices to scavenge decaying plant matter along with comatose moths, flies, and other insects that have blown onto the snow. The genus Grylloblatta includes almost 40 described species in the western U.S., Canada, Russia, and the Far East. Highly adapted to their frigid environments, ice crawlers remain active at temperatures in the 20s—the same temperatures that cause other insects, including their prey, to shut down or freeze solid. Hold an ice crawler in the sweaty palm of your hand for too long, however, and they’ll go belly-up. One species has been found at 9,000 feet on Washington’s Mount Ranier. Others spend their lives at lower elevations, albeit in the cool crevices of talus piles or inside ice-filled caves.

As a relic from a frozen Earth, ice crawlers’ dependence on cold environments has made them a bellwether for climate change. “If warming is severe enough, it could drive them to extinction,” says Schoville. And of course warming is already taking place, even in northern British Columbia. Since 1900, the average temperature in the region has increased by more than 3 degrees Fahrenheit. By 2050, it is predicted to rise an additional 3 to 6 degrees. The temperature rise alone is probably not enough to kill off ice crawlers, but climate change will reduce the snowpack that insulates their subterranean habitats when it’s hot out, and that allows them to forage when the temperature is right. Although British Columbia has on average been getting wetter in recent decades, its snow cover has decreased by 10 percent since the 1960s, and snowmelt now begins almost a month earlier than it used to.

Because ice crawlers tend to be found only in tiny pockets where climate and habitat are just right, Schoville and other scientists consider almost every species at risk of extinction. Unfortunately, they are collected so rarely that no one has really been keeping track of how they’ve been faring as the climate shifts. Schoville, a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, has made it his mission to return to the original localities where ice crawler species were first discovered in order to understand both their evolutionary history and, more pressingly, their response to climate change.

Kavanaugh was one of many curators who had loaned Kamp type specimens over the years and, by 1985, was delicately asking for their return. “About your Grylloblatta, have I worked on them recently, Hell no,” Kamp replied. “Will I ever work on them I wish I knew for certain.” In 1990, Kamp died at the age of 60 without publishing another species description. “So much had taken a toll on his body,” says Taylor.

Kamp sent Kavanaugh the specimens he requested, but the whereabouts of many other specimens he had borrowed or collected himself are unknown. Kamp told one researcher who sought them that they were in a safety deposit box. Taylor remembers Kamp giving his personal specimens to museums in Australia, Europe, and Michigan, but admits his records from that period were “sketchy.” So far, scientists who have gone looking for them have come back empty-handed. Replacing these valuable specimens might be the only option.

Schoville’s prize is brownish with long antennae, eyes the size of a pepper grain, and a plump abdomen. He sets her on the snow to keep her cool and we watch her zip around as nimbly as a centipede in the summertime. Kamp’s G. c. athapaska still existed after all. It’s a promising sign, an indication that even after searing, snowless days, ice crawlers can persist. Schoville drops the insect into a small plastic cup, pops the lid on, and sticks it into his pack.

Although a few specimens of G. c. athapaska do exist at the Canadian National Collection in Ottawa, Schoville explains to me he needs the fresh ones he collects here for their DNA, and he is bringing a few live ones back to Wisconsin to understand how they cope with extreme high and low temperatures.

He suspects that G. c. athapaska may be genetically distinct enough from other ice crawler populations that it ranks as its own species. In fact, it may represent one of the most ancient branches of ice crawlers in North America, and could help explain how and when the insects originally spread here from Asia. Did they cross via the Bering land bridge in the last 5 million years? Or do they date to an earlier time when the two continents were connected? These specimens, he hopes, will help him answer that question, and to make predictions about how future climate change could impact the group.

In the ten years since Schoville began this research, he has collected ice crawlers from all over the world. Eyeless ones from a cave in Korea. Subterranean ones from sea level around Nagasaki, Japan. High-altitude ones from the Altai Mountains in Siberia. He’s published descriptions of three new species from California and Oregon, and is working on a monograph about the entire group—the kind of treatise that Kamp never managed to complete in his lifetime. “Sometimes I wish I could talk to him,” Schoville says. “He would have been a great colleague.”

Other researchers have also been working to tie up Kamp’s loose ends. Chris Marshall, the curator of insects at Oregon State University in Corvallis, recently described two new species from Oregon and designated a neotype to replace a type specimen of Grylloblatta rothi that Kamp never returned to Gurney. “It could be that the type specimen will turn up,” Marshall says. But designating a neotype allows science to move forward. “The goal of taxonomists is to make names work for conservationists and ecologists,” he says.

Back on our rock, we’re making ourselves a celebratory cup of hot cocoa under the grey-blue sky when Schoville informs me that it’s too soon to celebrate. To be certain—absolutely certain—that we have the right species, we need to collect an adult male so that he can examine its genitalia under a microscope, as the earlier taxonomists would have done. The rub is that males are far more difficult to find than females. “We usually get one male for every nine females we find,” he says. “It may be because the females cannibalize the males.”

The wait for dusk is painful as my toes begin to go numb and my butt is quickly losing heat on this cold rock. At 11:30 p.m., Schoville declares it dark enough to begin hunting. We put on our headlamps and scramble up a treacherous, 30-degree slope over patches of rock and snow. Within minutes, we’ve already spotted a second ice crawler silhouetted against the white snow. Another female.