Mountains Alive

There are other, less dangerous but still-magnificent animals. Mountain goats and bighorn sheep. Wolverines. Elk. Moose. The country is as big and wild as it gets in the lower 48, so the big wild animals are here. And you don’t need a printed sign to inform you of this fact. You sense it.

I did, at any rate, when I started out on my little hike—the point of which was not to get a look at a bear (though I wouldn’t have minded) but merely to get off the road and back into the country where, a ranger had told me, I would find a picturesque beaver pond and a lovely meadow with seasonal wildflowers just coming into bloom. A big animal would be a bonus. A moose, perhaps, hanging around the beaver pond.

But there is a larger purpose in visiting Glacier National Park and that is to experience and absorb country that, even in the epoch of reason and science, strikes one as sacred in the same way that it did the Blackfoot, Flathead, and other tribes, some of whom were here, on grounds sacred to them, 14,000 years ago. They had legends and names, like Rising Wolf, for the mountains, and when you study them today, you can understand in some dim way. It does, you think, suggest a wolf rousing himself for the hunt.

Hard to imagine, in fact, a place where the earth itself could seem more alive and animated. Which can be accounted for by the park’s name: Glacier. The monumental ice formations that moved through this place, as recently as 20,000 years ago, were great disrupters. They carved out these mountains, which do not look like the older, more rounded and gentle ones you find back east. The Appalachians look like they were formed by nature’s hands working with clay. These mountains might have been carved with a chisel. They are angular, abrupt, and pointed. Also slightly fearsome.

Even if you are not inclined to spiritual, pantheistic meditations on the shape of the land, you will still be seduced by this place and the evidence of the geological forces that made it. There are, to begin with, the glaciers themselves. There were more than 150 in 1850. Today there are 25, and in another couple of decades, they may all be gone.

You can still get close to some of the remaining glaciers and see the trail of scree that was ground and scoured out of rock by the tremendous pressure at the base of these massive formations of ice. And, of course, there are the glacier lakes with the unmistakable blue color. This is caused by the suspended glacial sediment, called “rock flour,” that absorbs the other colors of the spectrum and brings up this striking hue.

The magnificence of this place—mountains, lakes, expansive plains—would have been hard for settlers pressing west to miss. And after the early attempts at mining and trapping, it inevitably became a “destination.” The impulse to save it is credited to George Bird Grinnell, a celebrated explorer, naturalist, and writer. Also a very lucky man. He had accompanied George Armstrong Custer and his 7th Cavalry on their 1874 mission to the Black Hills but turned down the offer to join in the 1876 ride to the Little Big Horn.

Grinnell’s efforts led to a formal designation of Glacier National Park in 1910, six years before the creation of the National Park Service. The Great Northern Railway then began building hotels and amenities, some of which have been preserved and are quite charming. Its status as a park has preserved this land, but that does not mean it is inaccessible. Anything but. You can see and “experience” much of it from your car, SUV, camper, or bicycle. In fact, the highlight of many visits is a drive across the waist of the park on something called the “Going to the Sun Road.”

It was blasted and carved out of the hard earth back in the 1920s, and it has been a sort of destination drive ever since. There is a mountain of the same name along the way, but people who have made the drive say that under the right conditions you might actually feel like you are driving into the sun. I couldn’t say, because the season was early and the road was not opened for its entire length when I was there. So I missed some of the spectacular views, the waterfalls, the vast stands of old-growth hemlock and cedar, and the white-knuckle drop-offs and harrowing curves.

The cleared road hadn’t yet reached Logan Pass and the divide where some water runs down to the Gulf of Mexico and some to the Pacific. So I drove, instead, as far as I could go from either end of the road, and the views were sufficiently spectacular that I didn’t feel sorry for myself. I would get to Logan Pass another day. For now, I went to an area known as Many Glacier and found a pull-out and a well-marked trail up the face of a relatively tame mountain. I’d been told I could get a look at some mountain goats here and, in fact, I did. They were some distance from me, and it didn’t seem right to crowd them, especially since a sign along the side of the road asks visitors not to. Just seeing them was something.

There was a lot left to do and not enough time left to do it. The park is not just large and various but also inviting. There are streams to fish, rivers to raft, mountains to climb, lakes to kayak, trails to hike. John Muir, the cofounder of the Sierra Club, put it like this:

Most of us don’t have a month to spare. Immortality will just have to wait. But I did have the afternoon for hiking down that trail where I was reminded to be alert for bears. The walk gives a sense of the vitality of this place. This area had burned a year or so earlier. It was a great fire, covering thousand of acres. Fire did for this piece of the park what ice had done, centuries earlier. That is: transformed it.

The flames had killed lodgepole, Ponderosa pine, Douglas fir, and the scorched, dead trunks of the trees were still standing, sort of mournfully. But the meadow grasses—hard fescue, mountain bromegrass, and beardless wheatgrass—had already come back where the ground had been burned black. The grass was green and thick and healthy. There were flowers blooming in the meadow that the ranger had told me about. Glacier lilies close to the burned spars and out in the open, blanket flower and lupine, yellow columbine and red paintbrush. And it was still early. In a few weeks this meadow would be carpeted with blooming flowers.

The ranger told me the fire had most likely been of “human origin”—as opposed to a lightning strike, that is. But these woods burn however the fires are started, and for a while—weeks or months—the land looks like it will never recover. But it does. And quickly. Things are never static here. The glaciers are ceaselessly grinding rock. The forests are burning, then greening. The rivers carving new channels and building new banks. When you are here, you sense with peculiar force that the earth is an organism.

I reached the beaver pond, and it was barren. No moose. Not even a beaver. I went on until I’d gone three miles, then turned around and went back the way I had come. The light had changed, and everything looked different. More proof that this place is alive.

I was in that vague dreamy state that comes over you when you have walked a ways and are in a rhythm and something like a trance. Then a lodgepole branch snapped. Loud and close.

My first thought was “grizzly.” I went from dreamy to full alert.

But it was merely an elk. A small cow. She was 20 yards from me, more alarmed, even, than I.

So I departed Glacier National Park without having seen a bear or driving the whole 50 miles of Going to the Sun Road.

Next time .  .  . the full month.

Geoffrey Norman, a writer in Vermont, is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard.