At River’s End

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From the peaceful shore of  Josephine Lake, looking up at Mount Gould in early morning, with just a sprinkling of snow from yesterday’s little storm, it’s hard to believe that such sprinklings carved out this entire valley. 

Harder to believe is that some of the rock high on this valley wall was once one-celled creatures, living in cities called Stromatolites over a billion years ago.  Individuals, called Cyanobacteria, built cabbage-like groupings, which, when cut by glaciers, look like tree rings.  See their traces preserved here in hard rock as fossils.

It has been so windy and stormy the last few days that any lake I saw has looked rough as a miniature North Atlantic Ocean in mid-winter.  But not today.  This small pond, beside Josephine Lake, carved by the same glacier that carved the larger lake, a replica of that lake, imitates the larger lake it represents.  It reflects, in a small way, some of the trees that Josephine Lake reflects.  And when we see the insignificant pond from a different perspective, it reflects a morning cloud from high above both it and us. 

As we climb up the valley, and the sun climbs up the sky, Mount Gould speaks more loudly and clearly, telling us of its past:  “Though my rock is very old, the surfaces you see were hidden until just yesterday in my time, a mere 20,000 years ago.”  That’s  when the glacier that sculpted Mount Gould began to melt, the glacier we are on our way to see.  

Below Mount Gould, we see what looks like a snowfield with a shiny spot at its center.  The map calls it Salamander Glacier, and it’s hard to imagine so small a river of ice carving anything, much less this entire valley.  

Big Horn Sheep

Mountain Goat

They see it too—the big horn sheep and the mountain goats.  But theirs is a different understanding.  We come to visit and share ideas regarding geology and climate; the sheep and goats stay here and make it through winters, through millennia, climate change, and upheaval of rocks.  They live as we did many thousands of years ago.

Moraine of debris left by a glacier

Unlike the sure-footed sheep and goats, we need a trail to get around this cliff-face and onto the moraine leading to the glacier.

Standing on the terminal moraine, we see three glaciers and a lake—Salamander Glacier on the right, Grinnel Glacier below it on the left, and a small unnamed glacier on the upper left.  Below them is Upper Grinnel Lake.  You might ask why we call them glaciers; they look too small to carve anything.  It’s a fair question and begs a definition of “glacier” verses “snowfield.”  A “glacier” is thick enough to compress snow into ice, and it is heavy enough to slide slowly down a valley.  These three qualify, but just barely.  Let’s look closely at them.

Salamander Glacier has solid ice, as seen where the snow has melted or slid off its surface, revealing layers of its icy past as it slid down this steep valley.  It is still moving as shown in aerial photos taken each year.  But its life as a glacier will end in just a few years unless something changes.  Estimates are that all of the glaciers in Glacier National Park will be gone by 2030.

Grinnel Glacier lies on the shore of Grinnel Lake and below Mount Gould, which we have seen all the way, hiking up this long valley.  It reminds of the tidewater glaciers we saw earlier on this blog in Alaska, in this “Rivers of Ice” adventure.  Pieces of it break off and float away into Grinnel Lake.

Small icebergs break off from Grinnel Glacier and float away in Grinnel Lake.

Why are rocks and gravel riding on top of Grinnel Glacier?  It’s because the glacier is melting.  Material it carved from the valley above, perhaps a thousand years ago is left on top as the last of its ice melts.  This glacier is now too small to do any more sculpting of valleys.  

What about that little unnamed glacier clinging to the rock high above Grinnel Glacier.  It was once part of a larger mass of ice that included all three of the glaciers shown here, a Pleistocene river of ice that did indeed carve out this large valley.  

Cathedral on High

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Morning is the best time, before morning even.  Drive up Going-to-the-Sun Road, up to Logan Pass before daylight, then coast down toward St. Mary with Sunrise painting your face in reds, oranges, and yellows.  

Across the road from St. Mary Lake

Drive along St. Mary Lake and turn north on Hy 89 just as the sun pops up.  You’ve been on the road two hours, and in another hour you’ll come to the end of the road in Many Glacier on the east side of Glacier National Park.  

Two hotels are here, boats on the lake, and horses to rent for the trails.  But everything is closed now, shut down for the winter.  So you park the jeep, put on your backpack and head up one of the trails, happy not to be sharing it with anyone.  

Soon, you’re far from cars, stores and pollution.  It feels like the world is as it was a million years ago, and all of it unconcerned about your wellbeing.  It’s just doing what worlds do, indifferent to human intrusion.  Bears aren’t angry with you for stealing most of their habitat, they just want to eat enough at this time of year, enough to last them through a long sleeping winter.

The sun is up now, you’re feeling the elevation, it feels lightheaded, far away, like whatever happens you’re on your own.  It’s part of a very logical idea you hold: that the older you are, the more risk is appropriate.  So you enjoy your lone journey up the mountain, as life’s journeys are, and you take only those precautions that might help in most circumstances; the rest is up in the air. 

And after while, you’re faced with a cirque, a cutout in the rock where a glacier melted and left behind piles of the debris it carried from up above.  Usually it leaves a lake or two where it carved out basins in the rock.  And that’s your destination for this particular day in the alpine terrain above timber line. 

The cirque is closer now and the trees are smaller, bushes lively with color as their summer of daylight soon gives in to total darkness under snow.

Having climbed for three hours, you stop awhile to consider the rocks.  Sometimes you think you understand them, their layers bent under heat and pressure millions of years ago.  Other times they mystify.  Oh, you have ideas about their formation, but it’s like they went out of their way to confuse and to inspire with art forms, which they didn’t have to do.

Now you enter the cirque, vertical-walled, ice-carved, adorned with snowfields, and occupied by a lake.  This is Iceberg Lake, placed in this cathedral by one long gone, one who sculpted for its pleasure. And along its banks, small supplicants, petitioners in pews, created in its image—not mere snowfields, but the faithful, remembering an ancient truth.

And then you go back down—to the world as you knew it.  But it is not the same, because up there is the way it was, and to where it may return.  Up there is not just an escape, but a reality, diminishing, worthy of holding, and to which some like me will have to return.

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Fall Colors

Weather has not been good for hiking in the high country for nearly a week.  Clouds hang over the peaks and rain often falls in the valleys.  I am holed up in Whitefish, committed for at least a month here to get the off-season rate.  Most of the tourist businesses are closed now, and they are even removing the bridges on some of the hiking trails so winter avalanches will not destroy them.  I have the next three days to get into those areas while bridges still swing across the deep canyons.  Tomorrow I plan to go up there, because the forecast is only mildly bad.      

If you thought I was headed for the edge of sanity by coming here at this time of year, I’m beginning to agree.  But insanity has no limits, and I have plenty of treks in mind the lower country if those mysterious rocky heights close their doors.  I can only visit when they invite me.

For example, there is a ski area just outside of Whitefish.  Yesterday I trekked there, heading up a trail called Danny On.  I hoped for fall colors, photogenic bears, and something else I can’t describe.  I could not have been more pleased with the outcome.

Soon after leaving the trailhead, I looked down on “The Village.”  Its several hotels and restaurants will thrive with skiers about two months from now.  Today, you might be able to see my white jeep as one of a dozen or so parked cars.  

As I climb higher, Whitefish Lake and the town of Whitefish become distant scenery, giving way to the colors close at hand.

Where the trail crossed a ski run, the cleared land is home for bushes and small trees.  They shine with reds, yellows, and pinks, as the cold of fall replaces their flowers of summer.  All of the bushes, no matter their species, seem to gleam in the prospect of being buried under ten feet of snow.  It’s like a little death for them, buried all winter.

I wonder if they will feel the vibrating skis above them or hear the shouts of winter visitors.  Theirs is to stay where they are and seemingly to rejoice, not despair.  Brilliant now, in total darkness through winter, waiting for spring.  And spring, I wish I could see them then.

Today, the sun came through gaps in storm clouds sometimes, and I was allowed the brilliant pictures you see here.  But often the clouds were dark, and their edges allowed rainbows for brief moments.

The trees in these north mountains know about winter.  Their tops are pointed, their branches short and sloping downward.  To spread like a magnolia would be to fall apart when the snow and wind come.

This tree and I met for the first time today but we know each other.  We both start with the letter, “S.”  We both love this place; and we are both alone.

This moose was not photogenic, but ran from me.  Why do they run?  He weighs four times as much as I, and he has that in-charge look in his eye.  Why do I scare them off?

Finally I reach the top where a warm retreat awaits with coffee, and a ride back down if I choose.  They keep the lift running in summer, mostly for mountain bikers.  Here you see a bicycle riding up, to be ridden down by some dare devil.  

I rode the chair lift down, a fifteen-minute ride, compared to the three hours it took me to hike up.