Many-Storied Mountains: the Life of Glacier National Park

Part 1

★GPO:1978-261-215/3 For sale by the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC 20402. Stock Number 024-005-00709-1.

Library of Congress Cataloging In Publication Data

Beaumont, Greg, 1943- Many-storied mountains.

(Natural history series) 1. Natural history—Montana—Glacier National Park. 2. Glacier National Park. I. Title. II. Series: Natural history series (Washington, D.C.) OH105 M9B43 500.9′786′52 78-606071

Many-storied Mountains The Life of Glacier National Park

Written and photographed by Greg Beaumont

1978 Natural History Series Division of Publications National Park Service U.S. Department of the Interior

About This Book

This natural history of the mountain wilderness called Glacier National Park is not a guidebook, but provides an overview of the ecology of the region. At the same time, it is a personal statement, revealing one individual’s response to this rugged, delicate land.

For their consistent cooperation and helpfulness, I wish especially to thank Chief Naturalist Ed Rothfuss and his capable staff. Technical and field assistance came from many; for special thanks, I would like to single out Art Sedlack, Francis Singer, Bert Gildart, Walt Martin, Craig Kuchel, and Danny On. The manuscript profited greatly from the criticism of Douglas Chadwick, to whom I am deeply grateful.

—G.B.

The National Park Service Division of Publications gratefully acknowledges the financial support given this book project by the Glacier Natural History Association, Inc., West Glacier, Mont.

Contents

Song of the High Peaks 1 Cycles and Seasons 5 Bedrock: The First Story 6 The Rising of the Sun and the Running of the Deer: A Glacier Year 39 Plant-and-Animal Communities 43 Over Going-to-the-Sun Road 44 Groves and Grasslands: The Prairie Sea 46 The Forest 70 Scrub Forest 105 Tundra 109 Water Communities 114 Shooting Stars 121 Appendix 125 Pictorial Features The Mountains of Glacier 10 The Forests of Glacier 48 The Vital Predator 78 Protective Coloration 84 Ursus arctos horribilus: The Vulnerable King 88 Bald Eagles and Kokanee Salmon: A Recent Gathering 92 A Triumph of Many Colors 96 Fire Succession: Key to Continuity 100

Illustrations by Celia Strain/Morgan-Burchette Assoc.

Song of the High Peaks

April again and the wind turns on the Great Plains. Wedges of geese, high and determined, began this storm of spring, their voices sharp as the morning frost. Sicklebills cry to claim the land, sandhill cranes wheel and talk overhead, and everywhere the killdeer shout. Pasqueflowers push the bleak soil aside, beginning the westward rush that I must join, seeking again the sight of mountains.

In Glacier National Park the land is folded up. On the east, Chief Mountain, Curly Bear, and Rising Wolf break the prairie’s hold. When the early French fur trappers saw these peaks glistening in the distance with summer-long snows and perpetual ice, they named this region “the land of shining mountains.” But for all the ice and snow that reflect the summer sun, the park’s present glaciers are but snowflakes compared to the mighty rivers of ice that carved this land. Glaciation, the magnificent sculptor, left its bold signature everywhere, and this park honors with its name the force that shaped it.

But the essential excitement of this land is more than cliff face, spire, and sudden storm. It comes to you when you realize that here is an aggregation of dramatically differing life zones, where a day’s walk can easily take you from prairie and forest to treelimit and tundra; where a dense forest of redcedar and hemlock, similar to the rain forests of the Pacific coast, exists a score of kilometers from the great prairie sea.

Or it comes when you discover that these mountains—young and sharp with shadows, snow-jeweled and newly gowned with forests—are chiseled from the oldest unaltered sedimentary rocks on earth.

I come from the prairie and love its broad strokes; I’ve learned to hear the singing in the grass and to see those long, slow seasons soar the level horizons like gliding hawks. But here I learned to match my days against a wild earth, and in me grew the mysterious need to know a mountain from its every side. Mountains that wear the dawn like yellow hats, repeated in the named and nameless lakes. Mountains that stretch the storms between them and balance rainbows ridge to ridge.

I must see again the secret forest places, where the paleflowered wood-nymphs hover like a breath, and know once more the endless meadows painted camas blue.

I need the perfect freedom of this land, to be able to say, today I will climb Siyeh: to stand, for a time, on the rugged shoulders of this upright earth.

Cycles and Seasons

Bedrock: The First Story

On the trail that connects the Logan Pass visitor center to Hidden Lake overlook there is a shallow pond. Near Hidden Pass, it collects its meltwater from the Continental Divide and sends it down the shallow gorge that drains the Hanging Gardens; as a waterfall it plunges into the upper St. Mary Valley where it becomes Reynolds Creek; joined by other tributaries, it continues its long journey to Hudson Bay.

The surface of this pond is seldom still, for the wind treats it like a sea. Because the water is shallow, the wave action wrinkles the bottom mud into ripple patterns, mimicking the churning waves.

I like to come here early in the morning. Sometimes, arriving before the wind awakes, I catch reflections of the surrounding mountains. Beyond the low bench of Logan Pass the Garden Wall begins, running northward with the Divide. In the eastern valley the pitched peak of Going-to-the-Sun hunkers in the morning light like a tensed warrior. To the south, the incisor Bearhat, beautiful cloud cutter of Hidden Lake Valley, juts above the nearby saddle of the pass. But over this place, standing as fresh monuments to an age of ice, tower the cliffs of Clements and the pyramid Reynolds.

Part 2

I am sitting on a wedge of red rock. Its surface exhibits a wrinkled pattern identical to the ripples in the soft mud of the shallow pond. The distance is not great; with a stick I could reach out and touch the mud. Yet this represents a gulf no bird can fly, for between the ripples of this rock and the ripples of this mud lie billions of vanished mornings, a constellation of years.

These red, green, tan, white, black and purple bands of rock that layer Glacier’s mountains comprise the oldest unaltered sedimentary rocks on Earth. They were laid down in Precambrian time, more than a billion years ago, when life was just beginning, as the deposits of an inland sea.

For millions of years, sand, mud and carbonates washed into the ancient sea, compressing the lower layers into mudstones and limestones, building up a sediment thickness that may have been as much as 10,000 meters (see metric conversion table on page 136).

When we look at the sharp contours of Glacier’s mountains, we see the evidence of uplift, overthrust and glaciation. But on the geologic clock these are recent events, a mere eyeblink of time ago. For the vast majority of years, the rocks lay undisturbed and level beneath the sea and land.

To understand better the tremendous time scale these rocks represent, we need a way to visualize the vast collection of years. If we were to make a movie of these geologic events, we would first need to determine how many years each minute should represent. Since the Pleistocene lasted about 3,000,000 years (its four ice ages sculpting the present muscle of this land), let us make each minute portray a million years. To chronicle these rocks we will then need a film 60 hours long!

Not until the fifty-seventh hour of our film will the Mesozoic lowlands begin to bulge with the coming Rocky Mountain chain. During the long preceding hours we would have seen little else but sea—withdrawing, advancing, deep and shallow; yellow, green, and brown with great colonies of algae. Unseen below the water, lava has spilled out occasionally on the sea bottom; once, it intruded between the rock layers below, forming the conspicuous, 60-meter-thick band of black diorite that we see today on many mountain faces in Glacier.

During this time of initial uplift an amazing process is going on deep underground. A major fault has developed, fracturing the buckled layers of rock. A vast mountain plate begins to slide eastward, over-riding and submerging the rock layers to the east and opening the wide trench that is today the North Fork Valley. Known as the Lewis Overthrust, this gigantic earth-force has created an unusual situation: ancient rock strata lying atop recent rock strata.

Now less than 3 minutes of film remain. The arrival of the ice is imminent. We look at the landscape of featureless mountains and wonder at the dramatic difference that this last 3 million years will make. We do not see the familiar forests and lakes, the savage peaks, and the broad, deep valleys of this present land. These mountains are gentle, arid, and shallow-valleyed. The vague outlines are there; we recognize the general alignments of the drainage systems, the bloated domes from which sharp peaks will be cut. The mountains are connected to one another by blunt ridges and smooth saddles, and the shadows they cast are dull, dunelike.

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