In Washington's Olympic Mountains things are looking dryer than normal. On a recent day, Maureen Ryan is out looking for the wet spots. She's a researcher with the University of Washington and an expert on amphibians that live at high elevation.

These mountain trails are Ryan's lab, so to speak. She studies tiny snow-fed potholes of water, cupped in the folds of high mountain ranges in the Northwest, a perfect habitat for Cascades frogs. But as the global climate warms, that habitat is receding.

"What's happening to these frogs is in no way dissimilar to what's happening to us, even if we can't necessarily see it," Ryan says. "These frogs are reliant on snowmelt for the water they need to live."

People in the Pacific Northwest also rely on snowmelt to supply water for agriculture, industry, hydropower and drinking water.

Cascades frogs spend most of the year beneath dozens of feet of snow. But for a few short months in the summer, the frogs come to warm sunny ponds to feed and mate. While they're at it, they make what some describe as a "chuckling" sound.

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"Last year we had a good number of ponds ... [that] dried up before the tadpoles had metamorphosed, so they didn't survive there," she says.

Ryan worries that with less snowpack and hotter summers, more egg sacks and tadpoles will be stranded out of water. That could ultimately decimate the population, unless they can move into deeper alpine lakes that are more resilient to the warming climate.