Glacier National Park has always been a confluence of conflicting and competing forces that come together in unexpected ways.

TRAILER TRANSCRIPT ANDREW: When you picture Glacier National Park, what comes to mind?

SARAH: Standing in a forest and there's birds chirping.

NATE: Big craggy peaks is what I see.

MICHAEL: Now known as Glacier National Park, this corner of Montana is renowned for its rich cultural history, charismatic wild animals, and scenic beauty, a place of peace and serenity on the surface anyway. The reality... Well, that's a bit more complicated.

ANDREW: I'm Andrew Smith.

MICHAEL: And I'm Michael Faist, and we're both rangers here in Glacier National Park.

ANDREW: We're going to tell you the story of a paradoxical place, a landscape at odds with itself, where all sorts of forces, large and small converge in interesting and unexpected ways.

LISA: Well, our glaciers are going. They're on a track to disappear now.

BILL: It's just one dangerous, damn hard thing that we were involved in.

BOB: Crazy. We could have died using this, but we had a shaved off wooden baseball bat and we'd shout at the bear and run up and whack it in the butt.

MICHAEL: Brought to you by the Glacier National Park Conservancy, this is Headwaters--a seven part podcast exploring the characters and contradictions that shape the park.

ANDREW: Join us as we travel to Glacier's busiest and most remote destinations to see what happens at the confluence of an international border,

MICHAEL: rivers of ice,

ANDREW: grizzly bears,

MICHAEL: more than 10,000 years of human history,

ANDREW: wildfire,

MICHAEL: and pit toilets.

ANDREW: Really pit toilets?

MICHAEL: Even pit toilets.

ANDREW: The result is something creative, destructive, maybe even magical. It's Glacier National Park.