Glacier at 100: A storied past. An uncertain future
Story By Justin Franz - Published in the Montana Kaimin April 23, 2010
It’s understandable that stunning mountain vistas do little to surprise people who grew up in a place like western Montana. But when standing along the shores of Lake McDonald at night, it is hard not to be rendered speechless. Gazing at the horizon, you’re greeted with the jagged peaks of the Lewis and Clark Range shooting skyward into the darkest of nights. Leaning back and staring into the heavens above, an endless number of stars stare back, each one brighter than the next. The sky is untarnished by the light pollution of civilization. This is a rare jewel of unblemished nature. This is Glacier National Park.
In 2010, Glacier is at a crossroads. On May 11, it will celebrate its 100th anniversary, just one event in what will become a yearlong tribute to America’s 10th national park. Throughout the year, the park and other organizations will present numerous lectures, displays and celebrations featuring Glacier’s long and storied history.
Though the present is a time of celebration, the future is a time of concern. In the last decade, the earth’s temperature has increased by 1 degree Fahrenheit. In that same time, Glacier’s temperature has increased by 2 degrees Fahrenheit. This result of climate change has put the park’s iconic glaciers at risk of extinction. In 1910, when the park opened, approximately 150 glaciers dotted the landscape. Today there are only 25, all of which will be gone within the next two decades, according to scientists.
HISTORY AT EVERY TURN
It’s mid-April and at the Lake McDonald Lodge construction crews are busy preparing for the hordes of summer tourists who will stay here in the coming months. They repair the historic building and the surrounding grounds as dust flies into the air and backhoes go back and forth with loads of dirt and gravel. The construction site looks undeniably out of place against the mountain backdrop.
The first hotel built on this site was the work of George Snyder in 1895, 15 years before the park’s creation. According to Kass Hardy, centennial coordinator for the park, the first settlers came to this region in the 1850s in the hope of finding riches in the form of minerals. Instead they found another type of moneymaker — natural beauty.
“Those miners decided to stay and settle in the region and tried to make a buck another way,” she said. “They were really the first people (to) come about who said, ‘Gosh, we can create a tourist hot spot here and really take advantage of the natural resources in a more conservative way.’”
To do this, they would offer visitors tours of the area in boats and on horseback, as well as act as fishing and hunting guides.
Those visitors had a new way to get to the area, in the form of the Great Northern Railway, which was completed over Marias Pass in 1891. Owned by the legendary “Empire Builder” J.J. Hill, the Great Northern connected St. Paul, Minn., with Seattle and crossed northern Montana along the Hi-Line, an area of high plains just south of the Canadian border.
Hill saw opportunity in the section of northwest Montana that would eventually become Glacier National Park.
At the time, most wealthy Americans on the East Coast vacationed in Europe and the Swiss Alps. But Hill saw a way to attract people to “America’s Alps” — a term the railway’s advertising men would eventually coin — and they would get there on his trains.
At the same time, George Bird Grinnell, a naturalist and writer, began exploring the area. His writings in various magazines intrigued wealthy easterners to come west. They began vacationing at Lake McDonald. Together with Hill and his son Louis, who took control of the railroad in 1907, Grinnell became one of the biggest supporters of the establishment of a national park.
But not all were in support of the idea. The main opposition came from people who were already in the area.
“The public outcry of having this park established was huge because it would draw more people to the park (and) it would take away people’s rights to hunt, fish and trap,” Hardy said.
But the white settlers who came in the mid-19th century were not the only ones who would be affected by the establishment of a national park.
In the early 1700s, Native Americans who would eventually form the Blackfeet, Salish and Kootenai tribes migrated west and settled in the areas around Flathead Lake and east of the mountains on the Hi-Line. They used to summer in the area that would become Glacier National Park, using it for hunting, fishing and spiritual purposes. The descendents of these people still feel the effects of the park’s creation.
“The centennial is not a celebration for everyone,” Hardy said. “To the tribes it is a loss … It is very important to realize that these people are still here and that it’s not history. It is a continuing story.”
Hardy added that the park tries to work with members of the tribes as often as possible, meeting with them a few times a year and including them in the planning for the centennial.
But the locals weren’t alone in opposing the creation of the park. In 1907 and 1908, two bills attempting to establish Glacier were introduced in Congress, but both failed to pass. At the time, it appeared that the dream of some would never be realized.
Then, in the summer of 1909, Montana Sen. Thomas Carter introduced a third bill that would then spend six months stuck in committee, nearly forgotten. But not by everybody.
Louis Hill used his contacts to champion the cause. On May 11, 1910, Glacier National Park became a reality when the bill was signed into law by President William Howard Taft.
A PARK IS BORN
Now the real work began. Even though the park was under the control of the federal government, the chore of developing it fell to Hill and the Great Northern.
Hill realized that with the park’s creation, even more people would begin making the trek west. The Great Northern began to build trails, roads, chalets and hotels within the park. In 1914, the White Motor Company began operating bus tours throughout the park, a predecessor to the “reds” or “jammers” that were built in the late 1930s and became an instant icon of Glacier. It was the same year that Hill, wanting even more control over the park’s formation, created the Glacier Park Hotel Company and began to dive into an even more detail-oriented oversight.
It was this attention to detail that helped the Great Northern secure the business of thousands of passengers destined for Glacier. In the first seven years of the park’s existence, the railroad spent more than double what the American government had. By the late 1920s, the money spent reached over $2.3 million.
With its investment, the railroad had created a world-class tourist destination. Many say that without the heavy influence of J.J. and Louis Hill and the Great Northern, the park would not exist as it does today, and maybe not at all.
But soon the government would be doing its part to maintain and expand the park as the Great Depression put millions of people out of work and in soup lines.
To counter unemployment, President Franklin D. Roosevelt created the Civilian Conservation Corps in 1933. The corps was a move to put unemployed men back to work. Many found themselves in Glacier building trails, roads, campsites and buildings, as well as fighting fire and cutting burned timber.
It was about the same time that one of the park’s most iconic aspects was constructed. The idea for the 52-mile road that would eventually be known as Going-to-the-Sun Road had come shortly after the park’s creation. Surveying began in the early 1920s, but construction wouldn’t begin until the 1930s. The road would finally be complete in 1934, connecting West Glacier to St. Mary, Mont., by way of Logan Pass and the Continental Divide.
However, there wouldn’t be much time to enjoy the new road as the 1940s dawned and America entered World War II. As the nation focused its attention on the war front in Europe and the Pacific, Glacier National Park fell silent as hotels and facilities closed. Even the Great Northern, which had worked so hard to create the tourist destination, rarely stopped at Glacier.
But the buildings, trails and lands still had to be maintained. That job fell to conscientious objectors, people who wouldn’t go to war on the basis of religion and formed the Civilian Public Service Camp in 1942. Between 1942 and 1946, the men at Belton would maintain the park and fight forest fires, as well as build new fire lookouts.
With the conclusion of the war, Glacier National Park reopened on June 15, 1946. In an effort to regain what they had before the war, Great Northern promoters printed a series of advertisements that invited people west and said “Welcome Back to Glacier Park.” Two hundred thousand Americans took them up on the offer that year and even more followed suit in the years to come. Today, that number reaches well over 2 million visitors a year. In 2010, that number could get even higher as the park entices visitors with a year of celebration.
A YEAR TO REMEMBER
A basement cubicle is quite the contrast to the stunning scenery that’s just outside, but that’s the view of Kass Hardy’s office at park headquarters in West Glacier. Over the past year it has been her job to plan and coordinate the more than 100 events that will be taking place this year.
“We’re honoring a lot of different things for the park this year,” she said. “A lot of people who think of Glacier think of the natural scenery, the mountain peaks and the glaciers themselves … but there is a lot of cultural history that’s taken place here and that’s what I think is most significant about honoring the 100th anniversary of a place like Glacier.”
More than 180 organizations have been involved with the celebration by either hosting events outside the park — a major help, considering the park isn’t suited for such events — or donating money. The largest donation came from the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad, descendant of Hill’s Great Northern, which gave a half-million dollars to kick off fundraising early on in the centennial planning.
Other funding for the centennial celebration has come from the Glacier National Park Fund, which has been gathering money through the sale of products featuring the centennial logo.
But according to Hardy, funding will also support a series of legacy projects aimed at enhancing the park for years to come. Over the course of the year, seven projects will be under way, including handicap accessibility improvement, the construction and restoration of various scenery and wildlife lookouts, and an attempt to reduce the amount of light pollution at night.
“It’s a special time for a lot of people here, whether they worked here in the past or are a first-time visitor,” Hardy said.
A SUMMER THAT NEVER ENDED
One of those people is Brad Blickhan, who has been a park ranger at Glacier since 1994, but started working in the park in 1987, driving the historic red buses. Working in Glacier was his uncle’s idea.
“He was a priest and he said that he had the time of his life, and I’m not a priest, so I figured I’d come out and have more fun,” Blickhan said with a laugh, checking up on things at the Apgar Campground.
Blickhan said he realized he was in the right place soon after getting to Glacier.
“The first night I was here I went to a bar and saw cowboys and Indians and then I walked down a trail and saw a sign saying, ‘Be careful of grizzly bears, people have been killed,’ and I was like, ‘This is pretty cool and, you know, this place feels like home,’” he said.
Blickhan grew up in the Midwest and went to college there to study business, but said it wasn’t something he really wanted to do. When he took the job as a “jammer” — a name given to the bus drivers because they often had to “jam” the gears on the steep roads — he knew he was home. This became particularly clear in the summer of 1991, when he didn’t return west.
“I was miserable and I was like, ‘I’ve got to get back to Glacier,’” he said. “I came out here and loved it.”
In 1994, Blickhan became a seasonal park ranger and in 2002 was hired year-round to work the Lake McDonald District. It was a move that surprises him even now, and he added that in years past he would have never considered being a ranger.
“But here I am behind a badge and a gun, but I love being here and sharing my backyard with folks,” he said.
As a park ranger there isn’t much Blickhan doesn’t do, he said, but law enforcement is his primary job. He and the other rangers also serve as first responders, search and rescue teams and firefighters.
“You name it, I do it,” he said. “(But) our main job is to educate people.”
He’s forever grateful for getting that summer job back in 1987.
“I guess it made me understand more about what I wanted to do,” he said. “Glacier is home to me and I know it so well that I don’t ever want to leave … Glacier Park made me who I am today.”
He can’t wait for this year’s celebration.
“I’m really looking forward to it. There is a big jammer reunion in September and I’m looking forward to seeing a lot of old friends … I think it’ll be a real neat summer, to see how people have changed and to see that the park hopefully hasn’t changed since those folks worked here,” he said.
SLOW DEATH OF A GLACIER
But the park has changed and scientists say that forces far beyond its borders will permanently alter the landscape.
A report released earlier this month by the Rocky Mountain Climate Organization and the Natural Resources Defense Council said that all of the park’s glaciers could be gone completely within two decades. The report also said that of the 37 named glaciers in the park, only 25 are still big enough to actually be considered glaciers.
It’s a fact that is being confirmed by scientists familiar with Glacier and its namesake.
“I think that it’s an iconic statement that people register worldwide: ‘Here is a place called Glacier National Park that no longer has any glaciers.’ I think the day that that’s announced, it’ll make worldwide headlines. Think about that. You don’t make worldwide headlines on stuff out of Montana very often,” said Steve Running, a University of Montana professor of ecology who won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for his work on the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Running said the loss of glaciers in Glacier National Park is the most visible example of climate change in the United States.
“The snow and ice is just so obvious. You can see it. You don’t need a degree in earth science to be able to see what the snow pack is doing,” Running said.
But no one has done as much direct study of what is happening to the glaciers as Daniel Fagre, a research ecologist for the United States Geological Survey in West Glacier. Fagre came to Glacier in 1990 after Congress passed the Global Climate Change Research Act, which created a position at Glacier for someone to study climate change. It was one of many parks selected for the project, mainly because they’re some of the few ecosystems that remain intact in the United States.
Fagre said Glacier has made the effects of climate change obvious.
“You can look at a glacier and know it is responding to long-term climate change because it is basically a big checking account for the climate. It’s just a balance of precipitation and temperature and if it is shrinking or expanding, you know that you’re having long-term climate change,” he said. “Of course, since it is so visual and people can see it, it’s a lot easier to believe than a bunch of numbers about carbon, so that makes it more in tune, because everyone knows that when ice gets warm, it melts, and you don’t have to explain a lot of complicated physics, so it’s a very iconic symbol of climate change.”
Fagre said many glaciers in the park have now shrunk below what is normally considered a glacier — a pack of moving ice that must be at least 25 acres in size.
“When you’re only 25 acres in size and you have increasing temperatures, your future is pretty limited,” Fagre said.
Fagre said Glacier started to warm up in about 1917, but when people noticed the change in the 1920s, many brushed it off as a return to “normal” after the Little Ice Age, one of the earth’s most recent cooling periods. But by the 1980s, people realized that temperatures were going past what was normal.
According to Fagre, this is the warmest the earth has been in more than 1,000 years, with some estimates even saying the warmest in 10,000 to 160,000 years.
Fagre said the earth has always gone through cycles, but some of these most recent changes have to be caused by humans because there hasn’t been an elevated amount of volcanism that would release so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. What could cause it is pollution by a growing human population of nearly seven billion people.
But at least for his studies, that doesn’t matter, because his job, or that of the geological survey, is not to figure out what’s causing it or make recommendations to stop it, Fagre said. His job is to study what is happening inside the park.
One reason why he’s shied away from recommending ways to prevent global warming or save the glaciers is because, according to him, there is nothing that can be done. Based on the computer modeling he’s done, the glaciers will be gone within two decades and nothing will stop that.
“A computer simulation model showed that the glaciers on the biggest basin in our park would be gone by 2030 under a climate change scenario that was developed earlier. More recent climate change scenarios are much more aggressive and predict much more rapid change and so that model is too conservative,” Fagre said. “If that continues, that 2030 model won’t last and they’ll be gone before that, and we don’t see anything on the horizon that’s going to slow down the melt of the glaciers.”
Both Running and Fagre said the glaciers could be gone as early as a decade from now and that it is not a matter of if they melt, but when.
The loss of glaciers and a smaller snowpack could have a greater impact than just the loss of a tourist attraction, Running said.
“Our landscapes tend to live on mountain snowpack for summertime water flow. Our rivers in the summer are flowing from snowpack, not from summer rainfall,” he said.
Running said losing the snowpack could have massive implications for the people of western Montana because they would have to find new sources of water or new ways to save water for more of the summer season. If not, the effects could be hard felt by farmers and fishermen.
According to the April report on the state of climate change in Glacier, the effects are already being felt there and across the West. Spring run-off from snowmelt in creeks has started one to four weeks earlier than in the past all across the American West. In Montana, spring run-off started anywhere from five to 20 days earlier than in the past.
Another thing that will greatly affect spring run-off is a loss of glaciers that provide consistent amounts of water.
There were once 23 watersheds in the park that had a glacier; today only 14 do.
This lack of water could greatly affect the types of plants and wildlife that are able to survive and prosper inside the park. A loss of glaciers and snowpack could also have a much deadlier consequence.
Less water and a dryer landscape could lead to bigger and more devastating fires, Running said.
“We have no capacity to predict, sitting here in mid-April, what a fire season is going to be like and how extreme a fire season may get. (But) because of the low snowpack we can almost guarantee that we’re going to have a bigger fire season than normal, but whether its going to be a 1910 holocaust or not, nobody can predict,” he said.
According to Running, the conditions are similar to that of 1910, which could serve as an eerie foreshadowing, as the 100th anniversary of the 1910 Big Burn is this year as well. The Big Burn was one of the most devastating fire seasons in Montana’s history, with thousands of acres burning late that summer.
The year 2003 was one of the worst fire years on record in Glacier. The Robert Fire started in mid-July and shut down much of the west side of the park from late July until mid-August. That summer, 145,000 acres burned in Glacier. However, park officials say fires are a natural part of the landscape, and important for thinning out dead organic material, trees and plants, and making the forest more resilient to attacks from droughts and insects.
But it also has huge negative effects on park visitation. When 10 percent of the park burned in 2003, visitation to the park fell greatly compared to previous years, according to the park. In August, as fires raged through the western part of the park, forcing the evacuation of both West Glacier and Apgar, the park saw a 50 percent fall in visitation — equaling about 258,000 fewer people — compared to the previous August. Even though there were no fires to the north, Glacier’s sister park, Waterton Lakes National Park in Canada, saw a significant fall in visitors: 7 percent fewer in July, 17 percent fewer in August and 15 percent fewer in September.
THE ECONOMICS OF THE ENVIRONMENT
More fires and a loss of attractions like the glaciers could have an enormous effect on both the park and Montana.
According to the report, Glacier supports more than 3,000 jobs, which includes people who work for the Park Service and hotels, restaurants and shops inside the park. It doesn’t include the estimated 850 jobs that exist outside the park but are supported by its existence.
According to a 2002 park estimate, visitors to the park pumped $160 million dollars into the state economy. The report estimates that the amount could now approach $1 billion. The money generated by visitors is a major addition to the state’s economy and the Kalispell area, which is currently in one of the toughest economic situations in the state.
However, a big chunk of this could disappear with a changing landscape.
Although no one has done a study about how visitors would react to the loss of glaciers, the report about climate change in the park referred to study numbers from Waterton Lakes in Canada. According to those statistics, 19 percent of people would consider not returning to the park because of extreme changes to the landscape caused by climate variation; 38 percent said they would visit less often.
While there is little the park can do to stop the melting of its iconic glaciers, what it can do is adapt, said Jack Potter, chief of the Division of Science and Resource Management for the park.
This includes lessening the park’s carbon footprint by using more fuel-efficient vehicles; preserving as much of the unspoiled nature as possible and studying ways to make the landscape, plants and animals more resilient to change; and, of course, educating the public about what is happening.
According to Potter, one question that’s often asked is if the park would change its name once the iconic glaciers have melted away. The answer is no.
“The park was named for the glacier features, not the glaciers left from the Little Ice Age,” he said.
But regardless of the changes the park could see in the coming decades, there is nothing denying the stunning scenery that is there now.
It is that scenery that has brought the Amick family from Kalispell and back time and time again. As the late evening sun reflected on the waters of Lake McDonald, Jon, Kristin and their three children cooked a dinner of hot dogs.
“It’s so close and there are lots of family activities,” Kristin said. “It’s just very accessible for us.”
She said the family tries to spend as many weekends as it can in the park, sometimes even twice a month during the summer.
“There is no need to go on vacation when you have this here,” she said.
Potter said the scenery that brings families back time and time again won’t be going anywhere.
“Obviously the main geological features will still be here — the peaks, the streams, the sunrises and sunsets. It’ll still be here,” Potter said. “For our future ancestors it’ll still be a spectacular place. It’ll just be different.”
Whatever the future may be for Glacier National Park, it is hard not to be lost in the present, as water crashes on rock, stars soar overhead and peaks stretch for the heavens. Just as they have for a century, and beyond.
It’s understandable that stunning mountain vistas do little to surprise people who grew up in a place like western Montana. But when standing along the shores of Lake McDonald at night, it is hard not to be rendered speechless. Gazing at the horizon, you’re greeted with the jagged peaks of the Lewis and Clark Range shooting skyward into the darkest of nights. Leaning back and staring into the heavens above, an endless number of stars stare back, each one brighter than the next. The sky is untarnished by the light pollution of civilization. This is a rare jewel of unblemished nature. This is Glacier National Park.
In 2010, Glacier is at a crossroads. On May 11, it will celebrate its 100th anniversary, just one event in what will become a yearlong tribute to America’s 10th national park. Throughout the year, the park and other organizations will present numerous lectures, displays and celebrations featuring Glacier’s long and storied history.
Though the present is a time of celebration, the future is a time of concern. In the last decade, the earth’s temperature has increased by 1 degree Fahrenheit. In that same time, Glacier’s temperature has increased by 2 degrees Fahrenheit. This result of climate change has put the park’s iconic glaciers at risk of extinction. In 1910, when the park opened, approximately 150 glaciers dotted the landscape. Today there are only 25, all of which will be gone within the next two decades, according to scientists.
HISTORY AT EVERY TURN
It’s mid-April and at the Lake McDonald Lodge construction crews are busy preparing for the hordes of summer tourists who will stay here in the coming months. They repair the historic building and the surrounding grounds as dust flies into the air and backhoes go back and forth with loads of dirt and gravel. The construction site looks undeniably out of place against the mountain backdrop.
The first hotel built on this site was the work of George Snyder in 1895, 15 years before the park’s creation. According to Kass Hardy, centennial coordinator for the park, the first settlers came to this region in the 1850s in the hope of finding riches in the form of minerals. Instead they found another type of moneymaker — natural beauty.
“Those miners decided to stay and settle in the region and tried to make a buck another way,” she said. “They were really the first people (to) come about who said, ‘Gosh, we can create a tourist hot spot here and really take advantage of the natural resources in a more conservative way.’”
To do this, they would offer visitors tours of the area in boats and on horseback, as well as act as fishing and hunting guides.
Those visitors had a new way to get to the area, in the form of the Great Northern Railway, which was completed over Marias Pass in 1891. Owned by the legendary “Empire Builder” J.J. Hill, the Great Northern connected St. Paul, Minn., with Seattle and crossed northern Montana along the Hi-Line, an area of high plains just south of the Canadian border.
Hill saw opportunity in the section of northwest Montana that would eventually become Glacier National Park.
At the time, most wealthy Americans on the East Coast vacationed in Europe and the Swiss Alps. But Hill saw a way to attract people to “America’s Alps” — a term the railway’s advertising men would eventually coin — and they would get there on his trains.
At the same time, George Bird Grinnell, a naturalist and writer, began exploring the area. His writings in various magazines intrigued wealthy easterners to come west. They began vacationing at Lake McDonald. Together with Hill and his son Louis, who took control of the railroad in 1907, Grinnell became one of the biggest supporters of the establishment of a national park.
But not all were in support of the idea. The main opposition came from people who were already in the area.
“The public outcry of having this park established was huge because it would draw more people to the park (and) it would take away people’s rights to hunt, fish and trap,” Hardy said.
But the white settlers who came in the mid-19th century were not the only ones who would be affected by the establishment of a national park.
In the early 1700s, Native Americans who would eventually form the Blackfeet, Salish and Kootenai tribes migrated west and settled in the areas around Flathead Lake and east of the mountains on the Hi-Line. They used to summer in the area that would become Glacier National Park, using it for hunting, fishing and spiritual purposes. The descendents of these people still feel the effects of the park’s creation.
“The centennial is not a celebration for everyone,” Hardy said. “To the tribes it is a loss … It is very important to realize that these people are still here and that it’s not history. It is a continuing story.”
Hardy added that the park tries to work with members of the tribes as often as possible, meeting with them a few times a year and including them in the planning for the centennial.
But the locals weren’t alone in opposing the creation of the park. In 1907 and 1908, two bills attempting to establish Glacier were introduced in Congress, but both failed to pass. At the time, it appeared that the dream of some would never be realized.
Then, in the summer of 1909, Montana Sen. Thomas Carter introduced a third bill that would then spend six months stuck in committee, nearly forgotten. But not by everybody.
Louis Hill used his contacts to champion the cause. On May 11, 1910, Glacier National Park became a reality when the bill was signed into law by President William Howard Taft.
A PARK IS BORN
Now the real work began. Even though the park was under the control of the federal government, the chore of developing it fell to Hill and the Great Northern.
Hill realized that with the park’s creation, even more people would begin making the trek west. The Great Northern began to build trails, roads, chalets and hotels within the park. In 1914, the White Motor Company began operating bus tours throughout the park, a predecessor to the “reds” or “jammers” that were built in the late 1930s and became an instant icon of Glacier. It was the same year that Hill, wanting even more control over the park’s formation, created the Glacier Park Hotel Company and began to dive into an even more detail-oriented oversight.
It was this attention to detail that helped the Great Northern secure the business of thousands of passengers destined for Glacier. In the first seven years of the park’s existence, the railroad spent more than double what the American government had. By the late 1920s, the money spent reached over $2.3 million.
With its investment, the railroad had created a world-class tourist destination. Many say that without the heavy influence of J.J. and Louis Hill and the Great Northern, the park would not exist as it does today, and maybe not at all.
But soon the government would be doing its part to maintain and expand the park as the Great Depression put millions of people out of work and in soup lines.
To counter unemployment, President Franklin D. Roosevelt created the Civilian Conservation Corps in 1933. The corps was a move to put unemployed men back to work. Many found themselves in Glacier building trails, roads, campsites and buildings, as well as fighting fire and cutting burned timber.
It was about the same time that one of the park’s most iconic aspects was constructed. The idea for the 52-mile road that would eventually be known as Going-to-the-Sun Road had come shortly after the park’s creation. Surveying began in the early 1920s, but construction wouldn’t begin until the 1930s. The road would finally be complete in 1934, connecting West Glacier to St. Mary, Mont., by way of Logan Pass and the Continental Divide.
However, there wouldn’t be much time to enjoy the new road as the 1940s dawned and America entered World War II. As the nation focused its attention on the war front in Europe and the Pacific, Glacier National Park fell silent as hotels and facilities closed. Even the Great Northern, which had worked so hard to create the tourist destination, rarely stopped at Glacier.
But the buildings, trails and lands still had to be maintained. That job fell to conscientious objectors, people who wouldn’t go to war on the basis of religion and formed the Civilian Public Service Camp in 1942. Between 1942 and 1946, the men at Belton would maintain the park and fight forest fires, as well as build new fire lookouts.
With the conclusion of the war, Glacier National Park reopened on June 15, 1946. In an effort to regain what they had before the war, Great Northern promoters printed a series of advertisements that invited people west and said “Welcome Back to Glacier Park.” Two hundred thousand Americans took them up on the offer that year and even more followed suit in the years to come. Today, that number reaches well over 2 million visitors a year. In 2010, that number could get even higher as the park entices visitors with a year of celebration.
A YEAR TO REMEMBER
A basement cubicle is quite the contrast to the stunning scenery that’s just outside, but that’s the view of Kass Hardy’s office at park headquarters in West Glacier. Over the past year it has been her job to plan and coordinate the more than 100 events that will be taking place this year.
“We’re honoring a lot of different things for the park this year,” she said. “A lot of people who think of Glacier think of the natural scenery, the mountain peaks and the glaciers themselves … but there is a lot of cultural history that’s taken place here and that’s what I think is most significant about honoring the 100th anniversary of a place like Glacier.”
More than 180 organizations have been involved with the celebration by either hosting events outside the park — a major help, considering the park isn’t suited for such events — or donating money. The largest donation came from the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad, descendant of Hill’s Great Northern, which gave a half-million dollars to kick off fundraising early on in the centennial planning.
Other funding for the centennial celebration has come from the Glacier National Park Fund, which has been gathering money through the sale of products featuring the centennial logo.
But according to Hardy, funding will also support a series of legacy projects aimed at enhancing the park for years to come. Over the course of the year, seven projects will be under way, including handicap accessibility improvement, the construction and restoration of various scenery and wildlife lookouts, and an attempt to reduce the amount of light pollution at night.
“It’s a special time for a lot of people here, whether they worked here in the past or are a first-time visitor,” Hardy said.
A SUMMER THAT NEVER ENDED
One of those people is Brad Blickhan, who has been a park ranger at Glacier since 1994, but started working in the park in 1987, driving the historic red buses. Working in Glacier was his uncle’s idea.
“He was a priest and he said that he had the time of his life, and I’m not a priest, so I figured I’d come out and have more fun,” Blickhan said with a laugh, checking up on things at the Apgar Campground.
Blickhan said he realized he was in the right place soon after getting to Glacier.
“The first night I was here I went to a bar and saw cowboys and Indians and then I walked down a trail and saw a sign saying, ‘Be careful of grizzly bears, people have been killed,’ and I was like, ‘This is pretty cool and, you know, this place feels like home,’” he said.
Blickhan grew up in the Midwest and went to college there to study business, but said it wasn’t something he really wanted to do. When he took the job as a “jammer” — a name given to the bus drivers because they often had to “jam” the gears on the steep roads — he knew he was home. This became particularly clear in the summer of 1991, when he didn’t return west.
“I was miserable and I was like, ‘I’ve got to get back to Glacier,’” he said. “I came out here and loved it.”
In 1994, Blickhan became a seasonal park ranger and in 2002 was hired year-round to work the Lake McDonald District. It was a move that surprises him even now, and he added that in years past he would have never considered being a ranger.
“But here I am behind a badge and a gun, but I love being here and sharing my backyard with folks,” he said.
As a park ranger there isn’t much Blickhan doesn’t do, he said, but law enforcement is his primary job. He and the other rangers also serve as first responders, search and rescue teams and firefighters.
“You name it, I do it,” he said. “(But) our main job is to educate people.”
He’s forever grateful for getting that summer job back in 1987.
“I guess it made me understand more about what I wanted to do,” he said. “Glacier is home to me and I know it so well that I don’t ever want to leave … Glacier Park made me who I am today.”
He can’t wait for this year’s celebration.
“I’m really looking forward to it. There is a big jammer reunion in September and I’m looking forward to seeing a lot of old friends … I think it’ll be a real neat summer, to see how people have changed and to see that the park hopefully hasn’t changed since those folks worked here,” he said.
SLOW DEATH OF A GLACIER
But the park has changed and scientists say that forces far beyond its borders will permanently alter the landscape.
A report released earlier this month by the Rocky Mountain Climate Organization and the Natural Resources Defense Council said that all of the park’s glaciers could be gone completely within two decades. The report also said that of the 37 named glaciers in the park, only 25 are still big enough to actually be considered glaciers.
It’s a fact that is being confirmed by scientists familiar with Glacier and its namesake.
“I think that it’s an iconic statement that people register worldwide: ‘Here is a place called Glacier National Park that no longer has any glaciers.’ I think the day that that’s announced, it’ll make worldwide headlines. Think about that. You don’t make worldwide headlines on stuff out of Montana very often,” said Steve Running, a University of Montana professor of ecology who won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for his work on the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Running said the loss of glaciers in Glacier National Park is the most visible example of climate change in the United States.
“The snow and ice is just so obvious. You can see it. You don’t need a degree in earth science to be able to see what the snow pack is doing,” Running said.
But no one has done as much direct study of what is happening to the glaciers as Daniel Fagre, a research ecologist for the United States Geological Survey in West Glacier. Fagre came to Glacier in 1990 after Congress passed the Global Climate Change Research Act, which created a position at Glacier for someone to study climate change. It was one of many parks selected for the project, mainly because they’re some of the few ecosystems that remain intact in the United States.
Fagre said Glacier has made the effects of climate change obvious.
“You can look at a glacier and know it is responding to long-term climate change because it is basically a big checking account for the climate. It’s just a balance of precipitation and temperature and if it is shrinking or expanding, you know that you’re having long-term climate change,” he said. “Of course, since it is so visual and people can see it, it’s a lot easier to believe than a bunch of numbers about carbon, so that makes it more in tune, because everyone knows that when ice gets warm, it melts, and you don’t have to explain a lot of complicated physics, so it’s a very iconic symbol of climate change.”
Fagre said many glaciers in the park have now shrunk below what is normally considered a glacier — a pack of moving ice that must be at least 25 acres in size.
“When you’re only 25 acres in size and you have increasing temperatures, your future is pretty limited,” Fagre said.
Fagre said Glacier started to warm up in about 1917, but when people noticed the change in the 1920s, many brushed it off as a return to “normal” after the Little Ice Age, one of the earth’s most recent cooling periods. But by the 1980s, people realized that temperatures were going past what was normal.
According to Fagre, this is the warmest the earth has been in more than 1,000 years, with some estimates even saying the warmest in 10,000 to 160,000 years.
Fagre said the earth has always gone through cycles, but some of these most recent changes have to be caused by humans because there hasn’t been an elevated amount of volcanism that would release so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. What could cause it is pollution by a growing human population of nearly seven billion people.
But at least for his studies, that doesn’t matter, because his job, or that of the geological survey, is not to figure out what’s causing it or make recommendations to stop it, Fagre said. His job is to study what is happening inside the park.
One reason why he’s shied away from recommending ways to prevent global warming or save the glaciers is because, according to him, there is nothing that can be done. Based on the computer modeling he’s done, the glaciers will be gone within two decades and nothing will stop that.
“A computer simulation model showed that the glaciers on the biggest basin in our park would be gone by 2030 under a climate change scenario that was developed earlier. More recent climate change scenarios are much more aggressive and predict much more rapid change and so that model is too conservative,” Fagre said. “If that continues, that 2030 model won’t last and they’ll be gone before that, and we don’t see anything on the horizon that’s going to slow down the melt of the glaciers.”
Both Running and Fagre said the glaciers could be gone as early as a decade from now and that it is not a matter of if they melt, but when.
The loss of glaciers and a smaller snowpack could have a greater impact than just the loss of a tourist attraction, Running said.
“Our landscapes tend to live on mountain snowpack for summertime water flow. Our rivers in the summer are flowing from snowpack, not from summer rainfall,” he said.
Running said losing the snowpack could have massive implications for the people of western Montana because they would have to find new sources of water or new ways to save water for more of the summer season. If not, the effects could be hard felt by farmers and fishermen.
According to the April report on the state of climate change in Glacier, the effects are already being felt there and across the West. Spring run-off from snowmelt in creeks has started one to four weeks earlier than in the past all across the American West. In Montana, spring run-off started anywhere from five to 20 days earlier than in the past.
Another thing that will greatly affect spring run-off is a loss of glaciers that provide consistent amounts of water.
There were once 23 watersheds in the park that had a glacier; today only 14 do.
This lack of water could greatly affect the types of plants and wildlife that are able to survive and prosper inside the park. A loss of glaciers and snowpack could also have a much deadlier consequence.
Less water and a dryer landscape could lead to bigger and more devastating fires, Running said.
“We have no capacity to predict, sitting here in mid-April, what a fire season is going to be like and how extreme a fire season may get. (But) because of the low snowpack we can almost guarantee that we’re going to have a bigger fire season than normal, but whether its going to be a 1910 holocaust or not, nobody can predict,” he said.
According to Running, the conditions are similar to that of 1910, which could serve as an eerie foreshadowing, as the 100th anniversary of the 1910 Big Burn is this year as well. The Big Burn was one of the most devastating fire seasons in Montana’s history, with thousands of acres burning late that summer.
The year 2003 was one of the worst fire years on record in Glacier. The Robert Fire started in mid-July and shut down much of the west side of the park from late July until mid-August. That summer, 145,000 acres burned in Glacier. However, park officials say fires are a natural part of the landscape, and important for thinning out dead organic material, trees and plants, and making the forest more resilient to attacks from droughts and insects.
But it also has huge negative effects on park visitation. When 10 percent of the park burned in 2003, visitation to the park fell greatly compared to previous years, according to the park. In August, as fires raged through the western part of the park, forcing the evacuation of both West Glacier and Apgar, the park saw a 50 percent fall in visitation — equaling about 258,000 fewer people — compared to the previous August. Even though there were no fires to the north, Glacier’s sister park, Waterton Lakes National Park in Canada, saw a significant fall in visitors: 7 percent fewer in July, 17 percent fewer in August and 15 percent fewer in September.
THE ECONOMICS OF THE ENVIRONMENT
More fires and a loss of attractions like the glaciers could have an enormous effect on both the park and Montana.
According to the report, Glacier supports more than 3,000 jobs, which includes people who work for the Park Service and hotels, restaurants and shops inside the park. It doesn’t include the estimated 850 jobs that exist outside the park but are supported by its existence.
According to a 2002 park estimate, visitors to the park pumped $160 million dollars into the state economy. The report estimates that the amount could now approach $1 billion. The money generated by visitors is a major addition to the state’s economy and the Kalispell area, which is currently in one of the toughest economic situations in the state.
However, a big chunk of this could disappear with a changing landscape.
Although no one has done a study about how visitors would react to the loss of glaciers, the report about climate change in the park referred to study numbers from Waterton Lakes in Canada. According to those statistics, 19 percent of people would consider not returning to the park because of extreme changes to the landscape caused by climate variation; 38 percent said they would visit less often.
While there is little the park can do to stop the melting of its iconic glaciers, what it can do is adapt, said Jack Potter, chief of the Division of Science and Resource Management for the park.
This includes lessening the park’s carbon footprint by using more fuel-efficient vehicles; preserving as much of the unspoiled nature as possible and studying ways to make the landscape, plants and animals more resilient to change; and, of course, educating the public about what is happening.
According to Potter, one question that’s often asked is if the park would change its name once the iconic glaciers have melted away. The answer is no.
“The park was named for the glacier features, not the glaciers left from the Little Ice Age,” he said.
But regardless of the changes the park could see in the coming decades, there is nothing denying the stunning scenery that is there now.
It is that scenery that has brought the Amick family from Kalispell and back time and time again. As the late evening sun reflected on the waters of Lake McDonald, Jon, Kristin and their three children cooked a dinner of hot dogs.
“It’s so close and there are lots of family activities,” Kristin said. “It’s just very accessible for us.”
She said the family tries to spend as many weekends as it can in the park, sometimes even twice a month during the summer.
“There is no need to go on vacation when you have this here,” she said.
Potter said the scenery that brings families back time and time again won’t be going anywhere.
“Obviously the main geological features will still be here — the peaks, the streams, the sunrises and sunsets. It’ll still be here,” Potter said. “For our future ancestors it’ll still be a spectacular place. It’ll just be different.”
Whatever the future may be for Glacier National Park, it is hard not to be lost in the present, as water crashes on rock, stars soar overhead and peaks stretch for the heavens. Just as they have for a century, and beyond.