Ice and Fire
Glacier is a park carved by the prodigious ice of the Pleistocene and protected today because of the newer glaciers that formed here during the Little Ice Age (1300-1850). These glaciers won’t be around much longer; of the 150 originally found in the park there are only 25 left and those are expected to vanish between 2020 and 2030.
We were fortunate to hike to Grinnell Glacier with an interpretive ranger named Bob. This is Bob’s 50th summer working as a ranger in Glacier, and we were thrilled to be able to listen to his stories and pepper him with questions about the geology and ecology of the park. He showed us where the edge of Grinnell Glacier was in his first summer in 1966, which is difficult for him to fathom given that Grinnell has retreated almost a mile since then, leaving bare rock and the ever expanding Upper Grinnell Lake. Bob also explained how he used to be able to take visitors onto the glacier, but given its precarious state, that is no longer safe.
The melting of the glaciers here is a consequence of our warming world and this place is especially vulnerable. The local mean summer temperatures in northern Montana have increased 3 degrees compared to 1.5 in the rest of the country. Bob made it clear that the glaciers in this park can’t be saved, but if we change our behaviors perhaps the glaciers elsewhere can be, and saving glaciers matters because worldwide over 50% of our drinking and irrigation water is derived from glaciers. We feel fortunate to have stood at the foot of Grinnell, to have seen not just the beauty but the dramatic change, knowing it will soon be gone. The absence of the glaciers will be an incredible loss to this park, and in their absence, there will still be much to learn and so much to do.
Though we didn’t really know what to expect when we arrived in Glacier, we certainly didn’texpect the extraordinary colors. The mountains and rocks are striped with red and green argillite and grey limestone remnants of the ancient Belt Sea, the lakes and streams are brilliant navy blue or cloudy turquoise from glacial flour, and wildflowers of every shade pepper the alpine meadows and fire scars. The ever-changing colors have found us stopping frequently on the trail, to marvel at a shade of rock we have never seen before or doing a slow 360 taking in all of the flowers. This place is surreal and food for the soul.
It’s Saturday, and our legs and feet are resting today; we’ve hiked over 50 miles in the last six days. They say at its core Glacier is a hiker’s park, which makes sense given that there are over 700 miles of trails. We’ve experienced firsthand how spectacularly the park lives up to this core. Most of the hikes here are long and we weren’t sure what we were capable of because we’d never done a hike over nine miles before getting here. Now we’ve done four long hikes in a week, all of them spectacular! In most places we have visited thus far, the longer trails are empty, but not in Glacier. We have loved seeing people of all fitness levels and ages, even tiny kids, out on these huge hikes.
One of our favorite hikes was a trek to Iceberg Lake on Thursday. We’ve never seen anything like it; the lake freezes solid in the winter and by midsummer the ice has broken up into dozens of icebergs floating on cobalt blue water. The water was numbingly cold but a perfect place to dip trail weary feet.
Friday found us on the Highline trail to the Granite Park Chalet, a backcountry inn built by the Great Northern Railroad that is on the National Register of Historic Places. The Highline trail is narrow and etched into the side of the Garden Wall, a skinny ridge of mountain. It’s surrounded by alpine meadows with views of towering peaks and valleys carved by the Pleistocene glaciers. After a picnic lunch at the chalet, we descended through the scar of the 2003 Trapper Fire. The fire narrowly missed the chalet, and burned so hot that the trees will take decades to recover. The trail down was steep, 2500 feet in just four miles, with the temperature climbing with every switchback. The burned trees stood like ghostly sentinels over the small shrubs and wildflowers that have regrown, a reminder that forests do need fire as part of their regeneration process,and that there is beauty in the wake of such destructive forces.
Glacier has been a terrific stop for us—ten days in all. On Monday, we will head west to see what is on the other side of the park, which will set us on a meandering route to Yellowstone, where we hope to arrive sometime around Labor Day.
