Glacier National Park – Cool and Green at Last

We have been moving steadily north. But we have been staying on the east (dry) side of the Rockies. And of course summer has been settling in, so it has seemed that we could never escape the desert.

Our previous stop was Choteau, Montana. It was a bit more green, and not quite as hot (highs in the 90’s), but still the trees only grew where they were planted and you didn’t want to do much outside in the middle of the day.

Now we are in St. Mary, Montana, on the east side of Glacier National Park, the days are in the low eighties or high seventies and we are surrounded by cottonwoods and conifers.

Yesterday we took a tour with Sun Tours, operated by the Blackfeet Indian tribe. We went from St. Mary Lake…

up and over Logan Pass. Not only did we cross the continental divide, we saw Triple Divide Peak. If you could pour a bucket of water on the very top of that peak some would reach the Pacific Ocean, via the Columbia River, some would flow to the Missouri, the Mississippi and ultimately the Gulf of Mexico, and some would flow to the Hudson Bay and the Arctic Ocean.

Our group was small, just 10 of us on this small bus.

Our tour took us along the famous Going-to-the-Sun Road, which was dedicated in 1933 after years of planning and construction. This tunnel, on the east side, is 408 feet long. Only small blasts were used in the road construction to avoid damage to the landscape and all the rock from the tunnel had to be hauled out by hand as no trucks could reach the site. The contractor could bore 5’4” of tunnel in twenty four hours.

On the west side of Logan Pass we drove on parts of the road where the roadbed had to be built. Only local materials were used in the masonry supporting the road and in the guardrails, which are either stone or logs. The log sections of the guardrails are taken down each winter and reconstructed once the snow plowing in the spring is done.

The road only opened for its full length last week. The last section to be cleared was the path through the huge drift in the center of this photo. The snow on the road here was forty five feet deep!

Along the way we made several stops to take pictures of this beautiful land. Our guide, a member of the Blackfeet tribe, explained that this land was always part of the homelands of his tribe. The tribe signed a treaty with the U.S. taking this land from their reservation to make the National Park. Part of the persuasion for the treaty came from the starvation winter of 1883-1884 when one fourth of the tribe died. The bison all over the west had been exterminated in a deliberate attempt to control and “civilize” the Indians. In the case of the Blackfeet, adequate provisions were not allocated by Congress. The results were devastating. The official census of the tribe went from 7,500 in 1881 when half their sustenance came from hunting and fishing to 2,000 in 1885, when only 8% of their sustenance came from hunting and fishing. This suited the white ranchers who successfully argued that the size of the reservation should be reduced. Perhaps to protect this most sacred part of their homeland from their greedy neighbors the Blackfeet ceded the land to the U.S. and the park was established in 1910.

The Blackfeet retain hunting, grazing, timbering and mining rights to the land, but to all of our benefit choose to keep this place pristine.

We saw the snowfields at Logan pass,

and Adler got to walk on snow again.

We saw big horn sheep, which were too far away to photograph, and these mountain goats, whose image I captured as we drove by slowly.

We saw Jackson Glacier, one of twenty five glaciers remaining of the 150 that were here in 1850. At the present rate of melt, all the glaciers will be gone sometime in the 2030’s, so if you want to see this place, come soon.

Our last stop on the tour was a short hike. Bud is ready with our binoculars and Adler is carrying our new bear spray. We saw no bears, but we hiked back to a point on St. Mary Lake…

where we got some picture postcard views.

A fitting ending to a cool, green day.