Swiftcurrent Lake from Many Glacier Hotel. Photo © Greg Stahl.
Where all seems right with the world, it is clear that all is not–or at least that it’s not what it used to be.
Glacier National Park is a stunning testament to the diverse beauty of the natural world, but even here in the Rocky Mountains of northern Montana the effects of the world’s environmental woes are apparent. If the Earth’s warming continues, as scientists predict it will, Glacier should need a new name by 2020.
Since 1850, the park has lost 124 of its glaciers, down to 26, and glaciers that remain are mere remnants of what they used to be. In 1997 the U.S. Geological Survey began a Repeat Photography Project to compare how glaciers have changed in the past 100 years, and photographers returned to locations where men and women of generations past had captured images during the park’s early exploration.
The photographs are surprising. Some glaciers have transformed into mere puddles while others have vanished to reveal the naked, striated rock of their beautiful glacial cirques.
Scientists say global warming gets most of the credit for the great glacial retreat, but soot pollution is also to blame. Clean ice reflects sunlight and remains cold. Dirty ice absorbs warmth.
In 2006 I had the opportunity to visit the U.S. National Ice Core Laboratory in Denver, where ice cores from polar regions around the world are shipped for research and safekeeping. By examining layers of historic and prehistoric ice the way a botanist studies tree rings, scientists are able to determine how warm or cold historic time periods have been. The evidence for man-induced warming is overwhelming.
As CO2 emissions continue to rise under the world’s industrial onslaught, so too do the layers in the ice cores shrink. Another way of putting this is that as CO2 emissions go up, the Earth’s temperature goes up with it.
But to reduce the wonder that is Glacier to an isolated analysis of a politically-charged scientific discussion is to miss a significant part of the point. The preservation of this landscape is also a stunning testament to everything that’s right and true, a capitalistic enterprise that managed to protect and simultaneously promote one of the nation’s most stunning landscapes. With vision, passion (and, one might say, a solid dose of micro-management and government meddling) from Great Northern Railway President Louis Warren Hill, Glacier was founded on May 11, 1910, and remains a wild outpost on the perimeter of a developed nation.
During an early-June trip to Glacier with my family, I was humbled by the imposing, timeless landscape. In fact, Glacier’s vanishing glaciers hardly crossed my mind. On one afternoon near one of the park’s developed areas, I found myself silently watching a succession of waterfalls tumbling from cliffs that might as well have been transported from the pages of some fantasy novel into the thin air of the Northern Rockies.
“If a place as wonderful and grand and wild as this exists,” I pondered, “then all must be right with the world.” While naive, the thought underscored my contentment at that moment at simply being. And I certainly found verification in my nephew’s electric smile and my parents’ awe and wonder with the West.
If a place as wonderful and grand and wild as this exists, then all must be right with the world.
At least for a moment.
Glaciated cobbles in Avalanche Creek, fed by Sperry Glacier. Photo © Greg Stahl.
False hellebore near Running Eagle Falls a couple miles downstream of Two Medicine Lake . Photo © Greg Stahl.
An unnamed peak near the Middle Fork of the Flathead River. Photo © Greg Stahl.
Swiftcurrent Falls is formed by the same limestone bedrock that holds back Swiftcurrent Lake. Photo © Greg Stahl.
I have pondered your simplistic thought for a few days now. And, coincidentally, just returned from a morning visit in the sun with a friend. We weren’t speaking particularly of Glacier, but I was describing a hike through one of the mountain ranges which happens to be a piece of the endless peaks connecting Glacier to home – Libby.
As I spoke, they said to me, “You really should write a book.” After giggling at the notion, knowing how much editing one would need to put anything of mine to print, I heard them out. “The way you describe the places and moments you have experienced is really quite entrancing.”
I find little, if any, truth to your claim of naivety in feeling that all must be right with the world. The proof is in the pudding. However, the recipe for said pudding is not something just anyone can whip up. For, in truth, it’s not something I’m sure could even be documented well enough to follow.
I was born and bred by that country. There is a level of faith you acquire in such an environment that simply doesn’t waiver. Until you travel to far away places, much of it you truly might not even come to understand.
Simply put. There is nothing naive about it. In the grand scheme of things, as you paddle across a dwarfing passage, as you listen to the ever changing power of moving water, as you look at every last pebble resting it’s story for the moment on a river bed, as you take note of the intricate and ever endless patterns of life abounding… you know. You simply know that life is balanced in such a way that we could forever spend our lifetimes striving to understand even a piece of the wonder.
But, me. I was given the gift to rest on the faith that having such a place so deeply rooted in my being provides. Listening to others try to describe what you simply know as a result of that gift… well, it’s a gift all over again.
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