Glacier National Park
By Bill Yenne
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About this ebook
delighting visitors since well before it was set aside as a park in 1910. Through the years, countless people have come to Glacier to hike its nearly thousand miles of trails, marvel at its unrivalled scenery, and drive the Going-to-the-Sun Road, America's most spectacular alpine highway. Glacier is also home to remote mountain chalets and magnificent grand lodges. While most national parks have a singular signature lodge, Glacier has three.
Bill Yenne
Bill Yenne is the author of ten novels and more than three dozen non-fiction books, his most recent being America's Few: Marine Aces in the South Pacific (Osprey, 2022). His work has been selected for the Chief of Staff of the Air Force Reading List. He is the recipient of the Air Force Association's Gill Robb Wilson Award for the “most outstanding contribution in the field of arts and letters [as an author] whose works have shaped how thousands of Americans understand and appreciate air power.” He lives in California, USA.
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Reviews for Glacier National Park
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- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Well written, with interesting historical tidbits that would be liked by anyone interested in Glacier National Park.
Book preview
Glacier National Park - Bill Yenne
Service.)
INTRODUCTION
Far away in northwestern Montana,
hidden from view by clustering mountain peaks,
lies an unmapped corner—the Crown of the Continent.
—George Bird Grinnell
Those words, penned in 1901 by the great naturalist George Bird Grinnell, clearly summarize the magic and mystique of these 1,013,572 acres of mountains, lakes, alpine meadows, and glaciers straddling the Continental Divide that became Glacier National Park in 1910.
John Muir called the area the best care-killing scenery on the continent,
counseling visitors to Wander here a whole summer, if you can … big days will go by uncounted…. The time will not be taken from the sum of your life.
Glacier National Park is located on the Continental Divide in northwestern Montana. Contained within it is the point where the Hudson Bay Divide intersects the Continental Divide, meaning that the runoff from streams within Glacier flows into three oceans: the Atlantic, the Pacific and—via Hudson Bay—the Arctic. It is the only such place in North America.
Glacier is adjacent to the Canadian border, and to Waterton Lakes National Park in Alberta. In 1931, members of the Rotary Clubs of Alberta and Montana suggested joining the two parks as a symbol of the peace and friendship between the two countries. In 1932, the respective national governments voted to designate Waterton and Glacier as Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park, an honorary rather than administrative designation. The parks are both now recognized as biosphere reserves, and were named as a World Heritage Site in 1995.
Grinnell’s Crown of the Continent may well be the most spectacular of all of America’s great national parks. Dr. George Cornelius Ruhle, the park’s first naturalist, points out that Some of the most sparkling wilderness of the Rocky Mountains is held within these 2,000 square miles. It is a land of precipitous peaks, pointed spires, sharp knife-edges and deep valleys whose lowland is wrapped in verdant forests. Several score glaciers glisten in the shadow of mighty cliffs. From the lofty summits, streams glide to the distant Pacific, Hudson Bay, and the Gulf of Mexico.
Ruhle served as chief naturalist in Glacier from 1929 to 1941, during which time he completed the scientific documentation that forms the basis for everything done since. This writer never met George Bird Grinnell, but I was privileged to have met Doc
Ruhle, who was a friend of my father, several times. I wish I could reach back in time and talk with both of them tonight around a campfire on the shores of Lake McDonald.
As Ruhle points out, Glacier’s geology is of particular importance. For the geologist, landscape features are exposed as though part of a textbook diagram. The oldest sedimentary rocks clearly retain attributes dating from the distant epochs when the sediments were deposited, with the overthrusts having distinct fault lines despite their dividing strata with ages spanning nearly a billion years. Fossils present are those of some of the earliest distinguishable forms of life.
This historic map illustrates the enduring nature of Glacier National Park, adjacent Waterton Lakes National Park, and their institutions. It dates from the middle of the 20th century and indicates how little has changed. The town of Belton was renamed West Glacier in 1949 but is still listed as Belton
on railroad timetables. The Sperry and Granite Park Chalets, closed for long periods in the late 20th century, are now open again, albeit as more primitive facilities than they once were. The only additional paved road within Glacier is the one that has connected Apgar to the mouth of Camas Creek since 1965. It proved vital in combating the major forest fires of 2001 and 2003. Both the roads seen here paralleling the North Fork of the Flathead River remain unimproved. (Courtesy author.)
A young mountain goat looks on curiously as a group of wildlife photographers use high-power telephoto lenses to scan the high ledges of the south face of 8,760-foot Clements Mountain—looking for mountain goats! (Photograph by Bill Yenne.)
Sedimentary rocks formed from deposits during the Proterozoic age, 1,600 to 800 million years ago. About 170 million years ago, the Lewis Overthrust fault began fashioning the mountain ranges that include the Montana Rockies. It was 20,000 years ago, during the Ice Age, that glacial ice sheets covered the northern tier of what is now the United States. In what is now Glacier National Park, these glaciers moved through the sedimentary deposits, carving the deep valleys and sharp cliffs that form the topography of the park as we see it today. The more than four dozen glaciers within its boundaries today are the remnants of this ancient ice sheet. Indeed, Glacier National Park is named, not for the glaciers of today, but for the glaciers that created its rugged landscape 20 millennia ago.
In terms of its biodiversity, Glacier is one of the richest areas of its size on the continent. Glacier contains plant species from distant corners of the continent, the Pacific Coast, the Arctic slopes, the broad midcontinent, and the arid Southwest, as well as those typically found in the northern Rocky Mountains and on the Great Plains. Included are ponderosa pine and Douglas fir forests, dark groves of western red cedar, crowded stands of lodgepole pine and aspen, as well as open parks of alpine larch and white bark pine. The wildlife of Glacier is equally diverse. It is home to essentially every species of megafauna found anywhere in the United States, including the grizzly bear, which is found virtually nowhere else in the country outside western Montana. Indeed, the grizzly has become Glacier’s signature predator.
In its dense forests and on its rugged mountains,
Ruhle once mused, is a rich diversity of forms, types, and associations of living things.
Avalanche Lake, located at an elevation of 3,905 feet, is surrounded by the sheer, 2,000-foot cliffs of an ancient glacial cirque. The waterfalls that spill into the lake include runoff from Sperry Glacier, located high above. Dr. Lyman Sperry named the lake after the avalanche tracks in the clefts of the cliffs. The most prominent peak seen at the head of the lake is the 7,886-foot Little Matterhorn. The lake is just two miles from the Going-to-the-Sun Road in the upper McDonald Valley. (Courtesy National Park Service.)
The tracks of a lone traveler follow the course of the Going-to-the-Sun Road. The road is buried under snow for much of the year and usually open only between June and September. For example, snow on the road at the Big Drift, seen ahead on the left, may be as deep as 98 feet. In the distance is