Given the importance of climate changes and their potentially dramatic consequences for human beings, designing precise and reliable evolution models is of prime importance. Unfortunately, current data collection techniques are rather limited as they make use of huge and very expensive sensing stations, leading to a lack of dense spatial and temporal observations. Wireless sensor networks are an alternative solution well-fitted to this problem, and may as such have a considerable impact on this domain. In this paper, we present SensorScope, a multidisciplinary project that aims at providing such an ''out-of-the-box'' monitoring system, from the sensing stations to the data management infrastructure. Here we especially focus on data gathering and on the communication protocols used for this task. We also describe one of our deployments, carried out during two months on a rock glacier in Switzerland, which led to the modeling of a micro climate that plays an important role in dangerous mud streams.