In July 1954, while making glacier mass-balance measurements in Northwest Greenland just below the boundary of the dry-snow facies, a team led by C.S. Benson documented a rain-on-snow event triggered by an atmospheric river. This produced extensive surface melt and notable ice layers, lenses and percolation columns in the snowpack that were tracked in subsequent years in snow pits dug nearby. Since 2000, numerous surface-melt events in the dry-snow facies have been documented by satellite observations. We compare and contrast the 1954 event with recent melt events to highlight challenges in monitoring melting in Greenland. Satellite sensors can accurately map melt extent across the ice sheet but cannot reliably quantify the melt intensity. Snow pit and ice core measurements can assess melt intensity but are too localized to capture melt extent. Reanalysis of the 1954 event adds an additional caveat: the extensive surface-melt event produced features only on two of the four sides of a large snow pit, evidence that the notable 1954 event could easily be missed in an ice core extracted years later. This suggests that analysis of historical melt events, using ice cores, probably underestimates both the spatial extent and temporal frequency of past melt events.