A conversation with longtime interpretive ranger Diane Sine about a lifetime of watching change in Glacier. This episode was recorded in May of 2023.

Glacier Conservancy: https://glacier.org/headwaters Frank Waln music: https://www.instagram.com/frankwaln/ Stella Nall art: https://www.instagram.com/stella.nall/

Overview of the park’s glaciers: https://www.nps.gov/glac/learn/nature/glaciersoverview.htm

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TRANSCRIPT:

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Lacy Kowalski: Headwaters is brought to you by the Glacier National Park Conservancy.

Peri Sasnett: You're listening to Headwaters, a show about how Glacier National Park is connected to everything else. My name is Peri, and this episode is an interview that my co-host Daniel did with longtime park ranger and educator Diane Sine about telling stories about our glaciers to park visitors.

Peri: This is one in a series of conversations we've been having with a wide variety of climate change experts. They don't have to be listened to in any order. Each one stands on its own and they all focus on a particular aspect of the way the world is being altered by the burning of fossil fuels. Over the past century and a half, human activity has released enough greenhouse gases to warm the Earth's climate more than one degree Celsius, with only more warming on the way. Throughout 2023, Daniel sat down with experts to talk about how that warming is altering Glacier National Park, our lives, and our futures.

[Theme music fades in.]

Peri: This is one of my favorite interviews in a long time. Diane is an amazing person, a local legend, really. And I found her stories surprising and resonant. She's been visiting the park's glaciers for decades and has seen so much change firsthand. I think you'll really enjoy this conversation.

Daniel Lombardi: So, Diane Sine, welcome to the podcast, welcome back to the podcast.

Diane Sine: Thank you, Daniel.

Daniel: Will you remind people who you are, where you work, how long you've been doing it?

Diane: My name is Diane Signe and I work at Many Glacier. I'm the lead interpreter over there and I have been in the park for quite a while. I've been in interpretation pretty much all my adult life during the summers here and even before that, when I was a college student, I worked at the Many Glacier Hotel. So I've been hanging around Many Glacier since 1980.

Daniel: Wow. So maybe let's start with what is many glacier for someone who's, like, never been to Glacier. And then I am curious to hear about your first time visiting many Glacier.

Diane: So Many Glacier as a region of the park with a rather confusing name. Yes, we get the fact that it's improper English, "Many" is plural, "Glacier" is singular. So there's one of the first problems right there, but it's simply a region of the park. The Many Glacier Hotel is there. And the name came about in the early years of the park, simply referring to the fact that there were multiple glaciers at the head of the valleys, pretty much a glacier at the head of each one of the valleys.

Daniel: Yeah. Which is like four or five glaciers or something. It's not like many, many glaciers, right? A few, right? It's Many Glacier.

Diane: And it sort of sounds like "mini" glacier, as in "tiny glacier." So we get confusion about people thinking that it's "mini glacier." Sure. Hey, maybe that's an appropriate name in some ways.

[Music fades in and then concludes.]

Daniel: What is a glacier? What makes Grinnell Glacier actually a glacier?

Diane: Remember, I'm not a geologist. I'm an elementary teacher. So a glacier, whether we're talking about those massive ice age glaciers that were thousands of feet thick, that carved out these valleys in Glacier National Park, or whether we're talking about the comparatively small glaciers that were here. Well, are here today. And we're part of the Little Ice Age. Places such as Grinnell Glacier.

Diane: To have a glacier, you simply have to have a place where more snow falls every winter then can completely melt during the summers. So over the years, that snow builds up, it accumulates. It actually recrystallizes fairly quickly and it forms a dense ice. And once you have this thick, dense ice, you eventually get—and there are lots of variables—but say when it gets to 70 to 100 feet thick, there is so much mass or so much weight pressure that it actually starts to flow. And so the bottom of the glacier starts to flow and there's actually movement. So a glacier is a mass of a moving ice. And that confuses people sometimes. Sometimes they think, well, is it rolling down the valley? And in the case of all these glaciers in Glacier National Park, they're actually becoming smaller all the time. But there's movement within the mass of ice. There's more accumulation of ice at the upper elevation of the glacier, and then the ice flows through. So whether a glacier is growing or receding is simply a matter of economics. Is there is there more snow and ice being added to that mass every year or is there more melting happening? And the reality here is there's more melting happening.

Daniel: Right. Is there is your summer more intense? Or your winter more intense? And that that balance has shifted.

Diane: So one of the fascinating things you mentioned, the moraine, and of course, that's the end of the maintain trail today. And it's a very impressive mass of accumulation of unsorted material. We call it glacial, glacial till. So there are large rocks and boulders in there. And there also is a lot of just very small, almost sand and gravel. But it's it's fascinating to my brain to try to imagine how long the edge of Grinnell Glacier sat at one place for that amount of moraine material to pile up on top of itself in that one location. And the glacier still moves that moraine material. There's still there's still rocks and boulders and gravel and sand within the layers of the ice and being scraped from beneath and become part of the mass of moving ice. But throughout my lifetime, the glacier has been receding so quickly that the modern, quote, marine material is just sort of smeared across the limestone ledges up there. There's no accumulation compared to what created that moraine. That was the edge of the ice when George Bird Grinnell was up there.

Daniel: So it's a mass of ice that moves.

Diane: That's right. The ice within the glacier moves.

Daniel: How did Grinnell Glacier get its name?

Diane: Grinnell Glacier is named for a guy named George Bird Grinnell and George Bird Grinnell was a well-to-do Easterner. He was very interested in the West. He was interested in conservation issues, really. He came from the background of sort of a gentleman hunter. So at that point, George Bird Grinnell was editor of Forest and Stream Magazine, which was kind of the the big outdoorsman journal of that time. And so in that role, he got to know James Willard Schultz. He read Schultz's writings about this area and became interested in exploring it. So Grinnell first came into this area in 1885, and on that trip he got up up into the Swift Current Valley and could could see Grinnell Glacier from a distance and was interested in it. But then he came back in 1887 with a group of other guys, and they actually hiked up to Grinnell Glacier. And it was on that trip that the friends that he was with basically named the big old chunk of ice that they got to for him for Grinnell.

Daniel: So Grinnell didn't name the glacier after himself. His buddies named it for him.

Diane: Right. It appears that his his buddies named it for him, although it also appears from his writings that he probably was very agreeable to having something named after him, would be my guess.

Daniel: And he did then name a ton of mountains and lakes and everything all around the park. He he was throwing out names pretty easily.

Diane: George Bird Grinnell did name all sorts of features in the park. I think it's it's, it's interesting because if you think about it, any noticeable feature, any real obvious kind of feature would have had multiple names already. It's not like there hadn't been people on this landscape for as long as time goes back. So, you know, the Blackfeet, the Kootenai, everybody would have had names for all of these obvious features, but those names hadn't been written down. Some of the names that George Bird Grinnell applied to features in what is today Glacier National Park, very much reflect the kind of trip that he was on in the 1880s. If you go into the Saint Mary Valley, we have names that he gave such as Gunsight Pass, Fusillade Mountain, Single Shot Mountain. And all of those names came from the fact that George Bird Grinnell was on a hunting trip and was thinking a lot about hunting.

Daniel: Yeah.

Diane: So Single Shot Mountain is actually where he did it. In fact, shoot a bighorn sheep with a single shot.

Daniel: Okay. All right, George. So his friends name this glacier for him. He went back many, many times, from my understanding, to Grinnell Glacier and and saw it over the course of his whole adult life, was making trips up to the ice. And I'm curious if you know anything about kind of his how he saw the glacier and how that might have changed over time, because I think early on he made predictions that, you know, this glacier is going to disappear soon.

Diane: Right. In a way, we're really fortunate that George Bird Grinnell, was a writer, and so he very much left evidence of how he thought and his impressions. And even that very first trip up to Grinnell Glacier is well documented because he wrote the whole story in various installments so that he could publish them in Forest and Stream Magazine. So we know that after those first trips where where this area really inspired him, as it does so many of us. And he he first suggested in an article that he published that perhaps this was an area that should be protected with national park status. And that didn't happen right away. There were a lot of people who weren't excited about that idea. But finally the park was established in 1910 and he continued to come back periodically and visit it. So he went from coming into the Swift Current Valley, hiking up to Grinnell Glacier, where there was no trail. They were just finding their own route. Certainly people had been there before, but there wasn't a record of people having been there before. And then he came back in later years after the Many Glacier Hotel was built, a road all the way into the valley, and then a developed park service trail from the hotel up to Grinnell Glacier. And he saw those changes both in visitation and the changes in the glacier, the ice itself.

Daniel: Yeah, we think about like today, we think about living in a an era of such fast and profound change. You know, now. But from his perspective, he was in an era of profound change, too. He went from really an undeveloped wild area to some extent, and then saw that become a tourist hub and a national park and also saw the climate and the environment really changed the glaciers throughout that time, too. And that would have been, what, from the 1880s to the 1930s. Right.

Diane: He very much wrote about the changes in the area due to the, quote, development and visitation. And of course, that was actually something that was partly due to his efforts. It was significantly influenced by his efforts. But basically, he he felt like he had promoted the idea of establishment of a national park for for a greater good. And yet he felt like what had happened as a result of that had basically ruined or certainly compromised the experience that he had personally first had when he had come into this remote wilderness area.

Daniel: Yeah.

Diane: So it's also interesting because he also wrote about the changes in the ice itself. So glaciers such as the Grinnell Glacier were probably at their largest size in the mid 1800s. So when George Grinnell was up there in the 1880s, you know, that wasn't that long after the maximum size of, quote, modern Grinnell Glacier. And already by his later trips up into the into the valley, I know in the twenties he was documenting that it had changed dramatically and it was a much smaller glacier than he had originally seen. And of course, that was long before any of us were talking about climate change or really understanding what was going on. But he certainly knew what he was observing and understood that there were changes.

Daniel: He saw those changes happening. Yeah. Hmm. Yeah. So we here in the park, we have a chance to see, you know, in recent decades, climate change and glacier melt that is really almost entirely caused by human climate change. But in George Bird Grinnell's era, that was climate change that was mostly naturally the ending of the Little Ice Age.

Diane: And then we have a lot of records from the park naturalists that were were going up there in the 1920s and 1930s. Morton J. Elrod was the first person employed as a Ranger naturalist, leading hikes up to Grinnell Glacier. And he he was a biology professor from the University of Montana. And so in the mid 1920s, he started to document he had noticed that, you know, every year he was having to actually walk farther to get to the edge of the ice when he went to Grinnell Glacier. So Morton J. Elrod started to document, you know, how many steps it was, how many paces, to get from a certain big rock on the moraine that we now refer to as "Elrod's Rock." And so he set the stage for actual scientific research documenting the changes up there. And so we know that there were pretty dramatic changes, quite dramatic changes in the twenties and thirties. And then it appears that that recession of the glaciers slowed down significantly and then took off again actually after I started working here in the in the 1980s.

Daniel: So one of the things that Grinnell was big on was creating a national park here. He was involved in this area for decades before it was a national park. Then in 1910, Congress makes Glacier National Park a reality. One of the things I know you are particularly fascinated in is how does that name get picked? Glacier National Park. Why is it called that?

Diane: Yeah, I am fascinated by by the whole issue of the name of the park. Because while we have really good documentation for a lot of things, we do not have a document that said, "We are going to establish Glacier National Park and give it that name because," fill in the blank.

Diane: So you come to a place called Glacier National Park, and one of the first questions at a visitor center is, you know, "Where is the glacier?" "Where can I drive to a glacier?" "Where can I touch a glacier?"

Diane: And often people are expecting massive ice fields like you have in Patagonia or up in Alaska. They're they're visualizing something different from what we have today. And so I noticed that in my earlier years as a ranger, I would overhear a lot of other people sort of trying to make it okay with visitors saying, "Oh, well, you know, you're not going to be able to drive to a glacier. But really, the park was named for this glaciated landscape from the Ice Age glaciers. So you're experiencing everything Glacier has by, you know, driving up the St. Mary Valley or the Lake McDonald Valley."

Daniel: So it's kind of confusing because the park does have active existing small mountain glaciers. And 10,000 years and more ago, the park was carved by massive Pleistocene Ice Age glaciers. So both are true. But which one was the park actually named for? That's a little bit murky.

Diane: That that's the question. And that's the question I tried to answer in looking back through the historical documents, it's very evident that before the park was established, before they came up with the name, one of the things that people were really excited about was that this was a place south of Alaska in the United States where you could take the railroad up to the mountains and then you could actually get to glaciers. You know, folks, folks were working really hard to hike up to places like Grinnell Glacier or Sperry Glacier. It was really the West Side glaciers like Sperry Glacier that I think led to that name, because in those early years people would come on the Great Northern Railway and they would make their way up to Lake McDonald, take a boat up the lake. There was no no road at that point. And then they would hike up to Sperry Glacier, and this was a place you could actually hike to a glacier. We have plenty of original documents that make it clear that people were really excited about the fact that there were honest to goodness glaciers here. And we have every reason to believe that. That's why they named it Glacier National Park.

Daniel: It was kind of a or it was actually a a tourist package, basically come stay in our hotel and we will take you to a glacier in Glacier National Park. So you look through early park documents, you look through advertisements that the Great Northern Railway had to try and get people to come visit this place. We look at newspaper articles from when the park was established in 1910, and for the most part everyone's talking about the active, small, glaciers in the mountains here. So it seems that that's probably what they named it for.

Diane: Even even the very first superintendents annual reports that we have in the archives, when they just give an overview of this new national park and what it has to offer to the American people. They emphasize that it has glaciers. And none of those writings ever say. They talk about it being a beautiful place with nice scenery. But they never say, "and it has a glaciated landscape, so it should be called Glacier National Park.".

[Music fades in and then concludes.]

Daniel: How what was your first visit? How did you first come to many Glacier?

Diane: I grew up in Seattle and I grew up in a family that did a lot of camping and hiking and visited national parks with our tent. And so I had come to Glacier on family camping trips a couple of times in my childhood, and I actually distinctly remember the first time I was in the Many Glacier area. We spent a night at Granite Park Chalet. We hiked the Highline in from Logan Pass, and then the next day we hiked over Swiftcurrent Pass and actually hiked into the Many Glacier area coming down from the Continental Divide.

Daniel: Wow. Today, most people take the long, bumpy road in from Babb, but you came in on foot, which is seems really special.

Diane: Yeah. We can almost pretend like I'm an old pioneer or something, but it wasn't quite like that.

Daniel: Tell me how that that led into a career in Many Glacier.

Diane: Yeah, I was one of those nerdy national park fans as, as a child, I loved it when our family camping in national parks. I always was excited to go to the ranger talks in the evenings. So I also remember on on that same trip we came back into Many Glacier another day and we went on the Ranger-Guided boat trip and hiked to Grinnell Lake. And I distinctly remember that that hike was being led by a female ranger, and I believe that was the first time I had ever seen a female ranger, because they weren't that common at that point. And I don't know that it was it was an "aha moment" that set the track, but it was certainly an awareness that, oh, that would be a really cool job.

Daniel: You're in an inspiring place, having a good time and you see someone leading a path that maybe you could follow.

Diane: Absolutely. It looked like it looked like a good life and turns out it is a good life. You know, I want to clarify. I really don't feel like I've had a career in Glacier National Park or career as a ranger, because for me, Glacier has always been a passion more than a career. I had a career as an elementary teacher, and then I would spend my summers working as a ranger in Glacier because I was passionate about it. And even though I do it for a little bit longer and I no longer teach, I'm retired from teaching. For me, the park has always been a passion and a choice rather than something that I felt I was stuck in. I guess career doesn't have to be a negative word, but for me I think of it differently.

Daniel: Oh, I like that. Yeah. That the word "career" implies... Uh, it implies an amount of work that you don't necessarily feel. This is just a good way to spend the summer.

Diane: Exactly. And not to gloss over it. There's plenty of work involved. But but I've I've chosen to have Glacier be a positive in my life, more than a negative at any time.

Daniel: But for that, though, you were working for the hotel and you went on a hike up to Grinnell Glacier. I don't know. What do you remember about about seeing the glacier for the first time?

Diane: I very much remember that that first time I hiked up to Grinnell Glacier, I got to the end of the trail at the top of the moraine where where you look, you know, down at Upper Grinnell Lake and across at the glacier itself. And my impression and actually I have photographs of it to back it up was the glacier itself wasn't very far away.

Diane: From from the moraine the glacier was right there, in your face. As opposed to now where it's quite a distance across that basin to get to the ice itself. And now when people hike up there, people get to the moraine and they they look and they take it all in and then they always seem to be enticed to... They want to get closer to the glacier itself.

Daniel: The glacier was big enough. You didn't have to hike further once you got to the edge, that was good enough.

Diane: Exactly. And in those first years when I visited, I never did actually go out on to the glacier itself. For many years then after I started working as a ranger here and leading interpretive hikes up there, we would actually walk on the ice and go out onto the ice itself. But it seems like in those those early years when I was hiking up there as a college student in the summers, it was a more intimate experience just being able to see it from the moraine.

Daniel: You know, On that first trip you took to the glacier in '81, did you think, Oh, this is all going to be gone someday? Or did you see that change coming?

Diane: My memory of when I started working as a ranger and really paying attention to bigger ideas having to do with the Grinnell Glacier. We were fascinated by the stories from the twenties in the thirties when when Upper Grinnell Lake first appeared as the meltwater lake, as the glacier receded and pulled away from the moraine.

Diane: You know, it was fascinating to think that that lake hadn't been there in the George Bird Grinnell times. And of course, we have wonderful repeat photography showing the thickness of Grinnell Glacier and that Salamander (what we call Salamander Glacier today) up above, was simply the upper lobe of a Grinnell Glacier connected by by an icefall there.

Daniel: When George Bird Grinnell first visited it was just kind of the whole back of the valley is just one big mass of ice. And now we have names for the different pieces because they've separated and a lake has formed at the edge of the glacier. So it's really changed a lot.

Diane: I mean, we spend so much time in the park talking about geology in terms of things being millions and a billion years old, and then to to see these changes happening just, just in the short history of the park actually existing, is kind of mind blowing.

Daniel: Yeah. In your first years hiking up to Grinnell, I'm guessing that not a lot of people were talking about modern human-caused climate change.

Diane: I don't remember people really talking about climate change at all in those early years. I was very fortunate to be mentored by rangers like Bob Schuster, who had been around since the mid-sixties. And, you know, he was documenting that since he had started in 1967, he really hadn't noticed changes in Grinnell Glacier. And then suddenly in those later eighties, everything just seemed to take off with rocket speed. And it's it's been changing, it feels like hourly, ever since.

Daniel: Yeah. So in the at least anecdotally, in the sixties and seventies, it seemed like Grinnell was holding fairly steady. But then that really changed kind of at the start of your time going up there.

Diane: I clearly remember that in my early years, leading the hikes up to Grinnell Glacier, what the very special thing was that we would actually lead our visitor groups out onto the ice. We had an ice ax and we had been trained to to be safe and know what we were doing because glacier travel is not something to to take lightly. There are a lot of potential hazards, and we certainly do not encourage people to go out onto the ice today because not only do they probably not have the background to recognize the risks with the crevasses and hidden dangers, but it has also changed so much since we did lead that hike because the edge of the ice has become much more rotten and undercut.

Diane: But my memory is that a couple times during the summer a friend and I, after we had concluded our organized hikes, we'd we'd take a little excursion on our own down to the outlet of Grinnell Glacier. And this is where the water actually came rushing from underneath the ice. And it led down to into the stream that that went over the waterfall and drains that entire valley. And so when we would walk down there, we would be walking across the basin with this massive wall of ice on our right, and then we would get down to where the water came gushing out from underneath the wall of the edge of Grinnell Glacier. And my memory is that at that point where the outlet was, the ice was rising, at least at least 30 feet above me, if not more. I actually I have photographs of that. I'll have to show you.

Daniel: Okay. Where as now, you'd be... It'd be kind of tricky to find a spot where the ice is, what, ten feet high?

Diane: Yeah, today when you get... So today, to take that walk that I would take. In the late 1980s down to the outlet. You're simply walking across this open limestone wide valley in a way it's it's a hanging valley where where I had ice on my right. Today, there are all sorts of plants and wildflowers growing up. We actually have small trees that are growing up. It's it's like that very first step in plant succession. After that, those soils have first been exposed after they were covered by ice for for thousands of years. And it looks much more raw and rocky. I've heard people describe it as almost a moonscape, as if we had any experience on the moon. But with that raw, open, rocky-ness, I, I see people just wandering all over the place and yet they're not thinking about the fact that they're compact in that soil. They're actually stepping on and tiny plants and and we're really threatening that that future glorious subalpine meadow.

Daniel: Yeah. Do you remember when you first heard about climate change as a concept? Like, modern-day human-caused climate change?

Diane: The first thing I remember is when I was an SCA, Student Conservation Association, intern for the Park Service, working at the St Mary Visitor Center. And I remember that one of the books that was for sale there at St. Mary was what I remember as a as a children's book. It was not a scholarly tome by any means, but basically a children's book about climate change. And I can remember picking that up off the shelf and reading it during my spare time, which even there is a rather amazing change because there's never a spare moment in any of the visitor centers in Glacier today. But there were moments I could read a book and learn at the desk.

Daniel: Wow. Yeah. So you are you find this kid's book in the visitor center and it kind of explains the basics that, humans are changing the climate, and causing the glaciers to retreat. And that's one of your first at least one of the first times you can remember really seeing that put together.

Diane: I feel like that that was the beginning of providing me with a framework to then take in other information, be interested in learning more.

Daniel: All right, then let's talk about a pivotal moment in Grinnell Glacier history, and in maybe the history of climate change, happens when Vice President Al Gore visits the glacier.

Diane: That was a pretty big deal to have the vice president to have the vice president come to Grinnell Glacier on a day trip from Washington, D.C. was not your typical day in Glacier National Park.

Daniel: Okay.

Diane: And I first became aware of it because suddenly we had all of these men in khaki fishing vests and earpieces wandering around the Many Glacier Valley. And it it turned out they were the advance-team for the Secret Service.

Daniel: And they're trying to blend in.

Diane: They so did not blend in.

[Laughing]

Daniel: Okay. So then what ended up being your job, your role, for the Vice President's visit?

Diane: Yeah. So in 1997, I was in the middle of my teaching career in in Kalispell. And then it turned out the Vice President was coming and we needed to have all sorts of extra personnel. And so I was asked if I if I was available to help that day. And I wasn't available because I was a teacher. And that was the day I was supposed to be in the classroom. But I called my principal and I pleaded, I have this chance to be involved in this event with the Vice President. "Could I please use one of my personal days for the school year?"

Diane: So that's what I did. And it turned out that my job was to deal with the media that was going to go up the trail ahead of the vice president.

Daniel: Okay.

Diane: So the Secret Service had been telling us that Al Gore was in very good shape and he was a good hiker and that he was going to have no problem hiking up that trail. And the people who were handling all the logistics understood that the media wouldn't necessarily be in as good shape as the Vice President.

Diane: So the media pool was a combination of local Montana media and then all sorts of national folks. And I remember them telling me that they'd they'd boarded a plane in Washington, D.C. (They had boarded Air Force Two in Washington, D.C.) at something like 3:00 in the morning Eastern Time. And they they flew out to Malmstrom Air Force Base in Great Falls. And then at that point, they got on three Chinook helicopters—

Daniel: Wow!

Diane: —that flew them to what we used to endearingly call "Babb International Airport," which is a pasture in Babb that used to have an air sock on it. And I remember that they had to go down and get the cows out of it.

Daniel: Shoot them out of the way.

Diane: So they'd brought in the special armored vehicles from from elsewhere and a motorcade that picked them up and drove the entourage up to Many Glacier Hotel. And at that point, the Park Service had built a big stage at the end of the hotel where there was a view of Salamander Glacier and the Grinnell Basin behind.

Diane: And he gave a speech about climate change. The whole purpose of this trip, as he was Vice President, he had a passion for trying to raise public awareness to the issues of climate change.

Diane: And so he gave his speech there—I missed the speech because as soon as the the the entourage arrived at the Glacier Hotel, the, quote pre-positioned press and I jumped on a boat and then eventually got up to the head of the valley. And we started hiking at their pace so that we could get up there ahead of the vice president.

Daniel: Okay. So Al Gore is giving his speech about global warming. And you didn't get to see that part because you were taking the reporters and the press up, up the trail to meet everyone else at the glacier.

Diane: Right. One one of the humorous things about that day was when we had had the Secret Service running around the entire week before. The Secret Service knows bad guys. They know security, but they were in a panic about bears.

Daniel: Oh, of course.

Diane: Just like many visitors to Glacier National Park that have no idea about bears. They were under the impression that there was a bear lurking behind every corner that was going to be an incredible threat to to the Vice President. And, of course, the the risk of anything happening in Bear country is incredibly low.

Daniel: Of course.

Diane: And but but it's understandable. So I can remember as we were hiking up the trail, I look up the hillside and periodically stationed up above the trail throughout the hike, I could look up and I would see a secret serviceman accompanied by a glacier National Park ranger to protect the Secret serviceman from bears.

Daniel: Of course.

Diane: The trail was completely open for hikers that day. There were there were regular hikers just hiking on the trail and running into the Vice President.

Daniel: So there was like—what was the the mood? Do you remember? And what did Al Gore think of it?

Diane: He actually hiked with Dan Fagre, who was our our local expert on what was happening with climate change and with the with Grinnell Glacier. And so he hiked with Dan Fagre and with Dave Castiel, who was our our senior ranger interpreter in the valley at that time.

Diane: So as part of that effort that Al Gore had as vice president tied in with that, you may remember he came up with a national speaking tour is the way I remember it, that that then turned into a book called, "An Inconvenient Truth." And from my perspective, it was really that era of him coming out with "An Inconvenient Truth" that really got the general public talking about climate change. And and certainly having the same kinds of varied viewpoints and opinions.

Diane: And it's unfortunate, in my opinion. Well, here I go with opinions, but it's it's unfortunate that that something that really is scientific has has become so polarizing. But I feel like that was the first that I became aware of that polarizing aspect of it as well.

Daniel: His visit really brings a lot of attention to the concepts of global warming and climate change. So that just starts to become a more talked about subject in America. But it also makes that connection between global warming and Glacier National Park, like, forever cemented together.

Diane: So it's no surprise that when we're in a place called Glacier National Park, it's an easy concept, rather iconic for national and even international media to pick up on Glacier National Park and its disappearing glaciers. And so that is something that from that Al Gore time on, it seems like the public is very aware of that, no matter where they're from.

Daniel: Yeah. Did you note did you see that play out in front of your eyes then? You know, in the summers after the vice president's visit, you're leading people on hikes up to Grinnell Glacier. And I'm guessing that people's questions and how people felt about seeing the glacier started to shift around then.

Diane: Yes. In my first year leading hikes to Grinnell Glacier, we weren't talking about and people weren't asking about current changes up there because there wasn't anything that noticeable in front of our eyes right then. But certainly since then, it's something that people are very aware of and their frequent frequently asking about.

Diane: And I've always felt like my goal as an interpreter in Glacier National Park isn't so much to educate them as to the minutia of the science, but simply to to show them what we're seeing on the landscape.

Diane: One of the incredible tools we have are those repeat photography examples that were there—there was actually a guy with a big old camera on that George Bird Grinnell trip to Grinnell Glacier in 1887. So we have a photographic record of what has been going on in that valley since 1887.

Daniel: Wow. And so that really helps you show and illustrate that change to people who are hiking up to Grinnell for the first time ever. You just show them a picture what it used to look like.

Daniel: Grinnell Glacier has gone through periods of very, you know, somewhat stable periods. It's gone through periods of rapid retreat, which we're seeing more and more of in recent years. And there's been kind of a, as that glacier retreats, a changing in how much water it's impounding and the we call the lake, "Upper Grinnell Lake." And that's changed size over time because of the way the ice is or isn't blocking that water from draining down the valley.

Diane: Right. And in my early years leading the hike up to Grinnell Glacier, the glacier itself impounded Upper Grinnell Lake. And then we knew that there was a channel that the water from Upper Grinnell Lake was following underneath the ice and then popping out in that dramatic rush and the outlet where where I'd walk along the the steep wall of ice and see the water coming out. Today, the glacier is not impounding the lake at all. There's there's still a significant meltwater lake up there, but it is flowing, flowing freely past the glacier, to the outlet.

Daniel: Right.

[Music fades in and then concludes.]

Daniel: One of the cool things about the National Park Service is—and about this park—is that we are getting to see this what is usually a very long geologic process. We are seeing it play out in on a human timescale, a human lifetime. We're seeing ice retreat and then plants and trees and things grow back into place. Like that's pretty wild.

Diane: And I feel like that's one of the things that makes the hike to Grinnell Glacier such an incredible opportunity for people today. I see people have all sorts of emotional responses to that area. It's beautiful. It's it's gorgeous. It's it's stark. And to be up in the Grinnell base and close to the lake, to the upper lake and close to the ice itself is really unlike any place else people experience in Glacier National Park. And today, people understand that that ice is disappearing and it's not going to be with us forever. And people express a lot of sadness about that. And I certainly feel that that sadness, that sense of loss as well. But at the same time, I try to focus on the incredible opportunity we have that, this is in a national park. It's a place that we do have the opportunity to actually be connected to what's happening. It's not just something that we're reading about in the news. It's not just some lingo about climate change, but because of these resources protected by the National Park Service, people are able to experience that up close and see it for themselves and and have that much emotional response, which perhaps is what people need to have in order to take climate change seriously.

Daniel: To understand it. So do you encounter a lot of people feeling sad or grieving or saying goodbye to the glaciers when they come on your hikes?

Diane: I do find a lot of people who are who are sad and almost distraught in some cases, and I've been amazed in recent years how many visitors I have met throughout the park who verbalized that they came to Glacier National Park because they want to see this place before the glaciers are gone.

Daniel: Wow. So when when you encounter those visitors that are distraught, what's what's your approach? What do you try and tell them?

Diane: Well, I certainly don't tell them how to feel. I give them the information that that I can share about what has happened at Grinnell Glacier in the past, what seems to be happening. Right now. We it's it's very unlikely that anything could change that eventuality right now.

Daniel: Hmm.

Diane: But I try to focus on the fact that there are things that humans do still have control over with climate change. Certainly the rate of change, you know, how extreme it's going to become or are things that are still within our control and the human species is pretty incredible.

Daniel: Right.

Diane: We we have incredible abilities with technology and problem solving. None of it's going to be easy. And I think that's in my opinion, that's where we are right now, is that as a society, perhaps we're wrestling with how much we're willing to commit to to solve a problem that is not simple.

Daniel: It makes me think of how special of a place this park is in Grinnell Glacier especially. And the you know, as a ranger, you going up there and using the place to help people figure out how they can be a part of that change, how they can, what they can do.

Diane: And that's one of the amazing gifts of a national park, is that it's a place that each person can experience individually. And and if they have some of those sad feelings up there. Perhaps that's okay. Perhaps. Perhaps that's a good thing. I try to not leave people in despair. I try to to point out some of the positives that can come about simply because of that awareness and and some of the positives. You know that there are endless possibilities. But at the same time, I'm not the one to tell every body that things are going to be okay.

Daniel: Yeah. So, Diane, when you hike up to Grinnell Glacier these days, how does it feel for you?

Diane: In a way, I guess it feels profound. It feels... It feels like a gift for me personally that I have been able to experience this valley over enough years to actually see the changes myself. It's it's not something that I have to read about and and wonder, you know, "What is this climate change thing? What's really happening?"

Diane: Whether we had words for it or not. I have experienced and seen incredible changes up there. And I think it's natural that with changes, I think for many of us, there's a sadness. There's there's a longing for the way things used to be.

Diane: It's not just the glacier. This park has a visitation today that's double what it was when I started working here. And so there there are changes in the glacier. There are changes in the visitor experience. And of course, there is a sadness. And yet I do I do feel excitement that at least we have places like Glacier National Park where I'm able to to see and experience these raw, real realities.

Daniel: Yeah... When you think about all the people, you know, driving and flying out for vacation at Glacier and or when you think about the Vice President flying and all these helicopters and airplanes to get there, there is a kind of contradiction, you know, in the amount of fossil fuels being burned for us to go see and say goodbye to this glacier that's melting because of the burning of fossil fuels.

Diane: Life is not simple. The world is not simple, and the world is not black and white. I lead a life that's dependent on on a lot of fossil fuels. And here in Glacier National Park, as the Park Service, we really do care about these issues. And yet one of the most iconic experiences in Glacier National Park is driving going to the Sun Road. Our park is known worldwide as being the park with the iconic road, the first National Park Service road, where actually driving the road was the experience as opposed to simply getting from one point to another. So it's all wrapped up and it's all complicated. And I think I think it's a slippery slope when people expect there to be easy black and white answers.

Diane: To a certain extent, I feel like we look at the Grinnell Glacier base and we understand Grinnell Glacier is receding and for a moment we just need to be with that reality. And then the next step is that maybe we'll be able to start doing something about it.

Daniel: Hmm. That's really well-put. How have you changed since your first visit to Grinnell?

Diane: My hair got gray. That happened ridiculously early, though. I think one way I have changed is that I have accepted that reality. That things aren't simple and they're not black and white. I think when I was younger, I wanted to jump to answers and I wanted to know it all. And I wanted to think that I had all the answers. And now I'm not so sure that there are easy answers for most of the things that I wrestle with. But I believe we need to keep wrestling and and we'll find our way to an answer at some point.

Daniel: And being okay with living in that complicated, contradictory gray area.

Diane: And accepting the fact that a place like Glacier gives us that opportunity to feel more connected to the world, at least at least for me, I can't I can't speak for other people. But protected places such as Glacier allow me the time and the space to ponder and problem solve and process some of those issues.

Daniel: I think you're, of course, connected to the Many Glacier area, to Grinnell Glacier. But do you feel like you're kind of part of it?

Diane: I think it would be presumptive of me to to be part of it, but it's part of me. Many Glacier is a huge part of me, and for that I am very thankful.

Daniel: Well, thanks for coming and talking to us, Diane.

Diane: Thank you, Daniel.

[Ending music fades in and plays under credits.]

Peri: Headwaters is funded by donations to the Glacier National Park Conservancy. As an organization dedicated to supporting the park the Conservancy funds a lot of sustainability initiatives, from solar panels on park buildings, to storytelling projects like this one, the Conservancy is doing critical work to prevent the worst impacts of climate change. You can learn more about what they do and about how to get involved at Glacier.org.

Peri: This show is created by Daniel Lombardi. Michael Faist. Gaby Eseverri, and me, Peri Sasnett. We get critical support from Lacie Kowalski, Melissa Sladek, Kristen Friesen, and so many good people with Glacier's natural and cultural resource teams.

Peri: Our music was made by the brilliant Frank Waln, and the show's cover art is by our sweet friend Stella Nall. Check out Frank and Stella's work at the links in the show notes. Besides sharing this episode with a friend who might appreciate it, you can help us out by leaving a rating and review in your podcast app. Thanks for listening.

The twin stories of bats facing white-nose syndrome in Glacier, and a volunteer who dedicated so much of his life to studying them. With disease and decline on the horizon for bats, what does the future look like?

This episode is in memory of Lewis Young.

Headwaters is created by Daniel Lombardi, Michael Faist, Gaby Eseverri, and Peri Sasnett

Glacier Conservancy: https://glacier.org/headwaters Frank Waln music: https://www.instagram.com/frankwaln/ Stella Nall art: https://www.instagram.com/stella.nall

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TRANSCRIPT:

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Lacy Kowalski: Headwaters is brought to you by the Glacier National Park Conservancy.

Gaby Eseverri: This spring and summer, park biologists were out all night trying to catch bats.

Lisa Bate: Tonight, we're trapping at roost. Our goal is 25. Yes. So what we're going to do is really we're going to catch 30 and then we're just anything after that, we're just going to we can look real quick and see if you see anything odd, if you do we'll collect it.

Lisa: We don't have Lewis with us. You guys are filling the shoes of Lewis.

Kaile Kimball: Nearly impossible shoes to fill.

Lisa: Big shoes to fill.

Gaby: They're catching these bats to do a swab test for white nose syndrome. A deadly disease that thus far hasn't been found in Glacier. But it's not too far away.

Gabby Eaton: Trapping went so well, I think that everyone worked together really hard and we had a good time.

Megan Potter: We're unbelievably efficient. We process a lot of bats. We saw no signs of white. We kept our bats very warm and very happy, very cozy.

Kaile: And how how were the bats? What you think?

Megan: Oh, they were amazing. Yeah, they were just the sweetest little things ever.

Gaby: And while I couldn't join them for the survey, I did catch up with them a few weeks later, when they texted me to run over to their office because the results of the tests were in.

Gaby [field]: I'm feeling nervous. I can't imagine how they're feeling.

Gaby: Lisa just texted us today that she just got the email, the email telling us if the bats here in Glacier National Park, if they have white nose or not.

[Footsteps and door creaking open.]

Mixed Voices: Okay. Hi. You actually been waiting? We haven't opened email yet. I want to be here for this. Please. Do you think he is? Really?

Gaby: Hey, Lisa.

Lisa: Hi. Did you guys hear? I got the results for white nose swabbing? Bat swabbing? Oh okay.

Gaby: When did you get the email?

Lisa: I've been in the field all week. And yesterday, when I got back, I noticed that it was in my inbox.

Lisa: Oh, I guess I'd better find it. I don't know... You can see how my emails reproduce in the inbox. Oh, it's from Emily. Maybe Emily. Yeah. Let's try this. There it is. It's from Emily. Oh, good. So I also took over Lewis Young, who passed away this year, and their house. They came back negative for PD. Hmm. Would you? They asked me to convey this information to Linda. And so I'll do that. Oh, maybe it's just that one, you guys. This is just at his house. Oh, sorry. False alarm guys.

Mixed Voices: Oh, okay. That's really good. Okay. So, yeah.

Gaby: False alarm. The results for the bats tested in Glacier aren't back yet. But it's still great news from another site in northwest Montana, the home of Lewis Young.

Gaby: Welcome to Headwaters, a show about how Glacier National Park is connected to everything else. I'm Gaby.

[Theme music fades in.]

Gaby: This episode is about bats. Disease and decline are on the horizon for Glacier's bats and their future seems uncertain. Lisa says it's not a matter of if, but when. This story is also about one man who loved bats, who dedicated so much of his life to conserving them.

[Theme music plays in full.]

Madeline Vinh: Act One: Dusk.

Gaby: Glacier's wildlife team hosts an event called "Going Batty" every summer. The public comes and gets to see bats up close. As the sun sets they welcome the attendees and give us all a short introduction. Their enthusiasm spreads throughout the entire crowd.

Lisa: The main focus is just to give people a chance to see bats up close and learn about the amazing role they play in our ecosystems and some of the risks and threats they face and what people can do to help bats. And there's an old saying that you kill what you fear and you fear what you don't understand. So we take this as an opportunity to help people understand bats.

Gaby: That's Lisa Bate. She's a wildlife biologist with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of energy. She's in perpetual motion, and her staff, who are half her age, have trouble keeping up with her. She studies the park's birds, and if those 250 plus species weren't enough to keep track of, she added ten species of bats to that list as well.

Lisa: So far we have documented ten species and that's why we started the bat inventory and monitoring program. I came to the park in 2009 and I've always loved bats. I was the nerdy little kid in the meadow putting rocks in socks and throwing them up in the air and watching the bats come after them. I never really understood why I thought they like them because they were white socks. But, you know, I didn't know about echolocation back then.

Gaby: I feel like bats get a bad rap. I think it comes from their associations with Halloween and vampires and like the general nighttime, but they're really remarkable. There are more than 1400 species of bats in the world. Bats are the only mammals that fly. They're expert echo locators and they pollinate over 500 plant species. So the next time you eat mangoes, avocados or bananas, you should thank a bat. And if you need another reason to love them, they eat millions of insects, every night.

Lisa: I mean, I'm amazed at what scientists have learned about bats just in the years that I've been studying them. You know, we didn't know a lot, but there was just been this race against time to learn as much as we can before we lose species or, you know, massive amounts of populations of bats. But when I got to the park, I started hearing about this disease called white nose syndrome. Have you guys...

Gaby: And white nose syndrome is terrifying. It's a non-native fungal infection that is killing bats as it spreads all across North America.

Lisa: It was discovered in a cave in New York in 2006. And it just some cavers went into a cave and saw these bats just hanging there. And they had this white powdery fungus growing on their nose. So they alerted biologists to it. Biologists started going in the caves and saying, oh, yeah, something's really wrong here.

[Somber synth music fades in.]

Gaby: This fungus loves cold, dark and damp places. So it infects bats while they're hibernating over the winter, often in caves when they're all together. Lisa likes to say that a big brown bat, for example, needs the equivalent amount of fat of one pat of butter to make it through to spring. But when that fungus infects a bat, it makes them restless and active, burning that fat that it needs to survive the winter. This can mean starvation.

Lisa: And any time about arouses from hibernation, they are using critical calories to get them through the winter. Think of that little pat of butter. I mean, how long would a pat of butter last us? Not very long.

Gaby: But the White Nose syndrome response team has a map that shows how the fungus has spread since 2006. In 2010, it reached Missouri. In 2017, it reached Texas. And in 2020 it reached Montana. And where white nose has spread, their populations have been decimated. At some sites, it's killed between 90 and 100% of the population. And even though it's not in the park yet, we know it's coming.

[Somber synth music fades out.]

Lisa: We really knew nothing. No formal surveys had ever been conducted. We had like visuals of four species and acoustic recordings of two others. And of those four visuals, one bat, the big brown bat was roadkill. So that was our database. And I was like, Oh my gosh. So I started collaborating with the biologists in Waterton, and then in stepped the Glacier National Park Conservancy, and they funded the first bat inventories here in the park, and that was in 2011.

Gaby: But Lisa couldn't do all of this on her own. The Conservancy support was critical, and so were the contributions of other scientists, including Lewis Young.

[Light synth music fades in.]

Lisa: I took over the program and then with volunteers, mainly Lewis Young. He's a retired Forest Service biologist, and he has been such an integral part of Glacier's bat inventory monitoring program. And I'd really like to honor him tonight. We lost him in April very unexpectedly, but without him there behalf of the bat program here at the park. And then Leah Breidinger, she stepped in and started helping, Lewis taught you a lot, I know, too. And, Gabby, you learned from Lewis. So a lot of us have really grown under the teachings of Lewis. So, you know, we're all just trying to fill his shoes, which are huge shoes to fill.

Gaby: Lewis loved bats. He worked with a lot of animals in a long career as a wildlife biologist. But he called bats the underdog of mammals, and he always rooted for the underdog. I remember meeting him last year at Going Batty that year, and every time he trapped bats, actually, he wore a certain accessory.

Lisa: Usually when we were here, he would do the fun fact part and wear his big bad hat.

Gabby: He had like these hats that are fuzzy black bats with wings out the sides and then little eyeballs. It's like he was a giant bat. Yeah. Yeah.

Gaby: It's like he wanted the bats to feel at home in his presence, and he welcomed them into his yard as well, which he basically turned into a bat sanctuary.

Gabby: So, Lewis, he was the bat house expert here in Montana.

Gaby: When I was a student at the University of Florida, I would often bike by a section of campus where the air was particularly pungent. There are three bat houses each, a little bit bigger than the size of a dorm room mounted on poles 20 feet above the ground. Together, they house almost half a million bats. These are way bigger than a backyard bat house, but they all provide bats with safe places to live. With their natural habitats in decline, setting up a secure and consistent home for them is an act of kindness, of love.

Lisa: I love going to his house. He had what I called a bad house garden. It's funny, one of my techs said that to and she went looking for flowers. I'm like, "No," he just had three massive bad houses up on post, 20 feet up.

Gaby: Decades ago, he and his wife Linda, built a small bat house in their backyard, but they quickly realized it wasn't enough. So soon after, they added a medium sized one, then a double. Then the condo went up. Lewis suspected that there were about 1200 bats living in their yard, and Linda joked that her neighbors, blissfully unaware of these extra residents, never had a mosquito problem. How many ways do you show those you love that you care about them? Lewis showed up for bats in every facet of his life. Volunteering countless hours, collecting data and training other scientists, helping raise public awareness and providing a refuge for them at his own home.

[Somber synth music fades in.]

Madeline Vinh: Act Two: Dark.

Gaby: It's dark now and people are starting to reach for their jackets. There are bugs everywhere, which is kind of annoying for me, but really good news for bats and for the scientists trying to catch them. They'll assess each bat and gather data on the population before releasing them back into the night. As my eyes adjust to the dark, I start seeing blurry figures rapidly flying above me. I'm torn between wonder and worry for their fate.

Gaby [field]: What's a good spot? What defines a good spot?

Gabby: Oh, a place that bats would be flying to forage on insects or to get a drink of water.

Gaby: That's Gabby Eaton. She works with Lisa on the wildlife team. They use something called a mist net to catch bats because the nets are so fine that they're basically impossible to see, especially in the dark.

Gabby: So sometimes we look for places in the trees where there's openings, and then on water, we just kind of think of where they might be flying out from the woods to forage over the water here.

Gaby [field]: So this net is set up under a bridge. Has it been successful in the past?

Gabby: Yeah, I think that's why we did it. Yeah.

[Distant train horn and bird song.]

Gaby: They're hung in strategic places where bats might be flying. So in the forest or under the bridge where the smooth water of McDonald Creek slips by.

Lisa: We just saw our first bat of the night here at the bridge this year, and they've been seeing bats up there in the forest longer.

Gaby: So now I am walking over with Lisa over to their truck and they have all of these tools and equipment ready because it's time to process the bats.

Lisa: ... we try to process them as soon as possible...

Gaby: Okay. The wildlife team keeps the bats in little cloth bags where they really seem content. If it's a cold night, Lisa will tuck the baggies inside the top of her waders to keep the bats warm. In processing them. The team will measure their wings, calculate their weight, determine their sex, and so much more. All of this information helps clue them in to what species it is.

Leah Breidinger: So the first thing we do is weight, right, Lisa?

Lisa: Yeah.

Leah: Well, put it on the scale in the bag and zero it. Then we'll take the bat out. There's our little bat.

Mixed Voices: Oh it's so cute, little buddy!

Gaby: This is my favorite part of the night, and I suspect it's everyone else's too. Lisa dims her headlamp and inspects each bat carefully. They're adorable, in an ugly-cute kind-of-way. They have shiny, soft looking brown fur with leathery wings and little wrinkly noses like a pug. Someone on the internet called them sky puppies.

Lisa: Do you hear that sounds. Thanks for letting us know.

[High pitched bat chittering sounds.]

Gabby: Okay. 7.8 grams.

Lisa: 7.8?

Gabby: Yeah.

[High pitched bat chittering sounds.]

Lisa: What happened? Oh, they're swarming. Oh, because it's emitting distress calls. Oh, yeah. Sorry, little guy.

[Synth music fades.]

Gaby: Watching them feels like opening a doorway into a world I so rarely see. Everything that goes on while I sleep each night. To have up close what is normally a shadow flitting by is to see a sliver of darkness in light. This little creature has such a different experience on this earth than my own. Hunting by echolocation and thriving in the pitch dark. Where I am helpless.

[High pitched bat chittering sounds.]

Lisa: I'm sure it's a female... looks like a female.

Mixed Voices: [Sounds of handling a bat.].

Mixed Voices: Female? Female.

[High pitched bat chittering sounds.]

Lisa: Then we're going to check for reproductive status, see if she's pregnant. I doubt she's pregnant. She would have pups by now. We palpate the abdomen.

Leah: So I kind of just feel like that and I don't feel anything. You usually can feel something pretty hard in the stomach if they are pregnant. So. No, not pregnant, is what I would say.

Gaby: At Going Batty last year I watched as Lewis processed one of the bats. He gently but quickly assessed the bat, but something seemed different. They released it and he kept reviewing the measurements he'd taken. A few days later, I got an all employee email with great news. Lewis had identified a new species in the park, a western, small-footed myotis. Even knowing the inevitable future of these bats, he was still working so hard to study and protect them.

Lisa: And then look at the nipples, then we can tell--and this is one of the hardest things on earth to do, find a nipple on a bat. We can tell if you can see the nipple, we know she has given birth at least once. A young female that has never given birth, you really can't even find the nipple. And then you look for the hair around the nipple and you can and you can even squeeze the nipple to see if they're still lactating.

Gaby: There are tears throughout the night as memories of Lewis come up. The team quietly honors him in practicing the techniques he taught them. His expertise and enthusiasm are missed, and so is his kindness.

Gaby: When did you meet him?

Gabby: I first met Lewis when I was the conservation intern through the Conservancy. I was a freshman, so I was like 19. He's a retired wildlife biologist who just volunteered with Lisa and loves bats more than any other person that I've ever met.

Gaby: Really?

Gabby: Yeah.

Gaby: His wife, Linda, told me that he didn't start working with bats until a ways into his career, after a moment in 1980 when he came home as excited as she'd ever seen him. He'd found a bat trapped in a fence and managed to successfully release it. Something about that moment started a 40 year devotion and many sleepless nights.

Gabby: He just was incredibly passionate about helping bats, and that's really all he cared about. I mean, he cared. He cared about other things, too. But yeah, it was like his main focus. And he was just a wonderful person to be around. Mm hmm.

Gaby: Does this year feel different?

Gabby: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, he would do the the bat facts with his bat hat on, and he was really soft spoken. So I think people had a hard time hearing him. But he had, like, all of the facts memorized by heart. And it was just so cool that he knew all of that.

Gaby: Because he just lived and breathed bats.

Gabby: We had a training for a white nose swabbing this spring, and he had such an impact that at the beginning of the training they said, we just want to let everyone know, Lewis passed away. And we were all so, so... were grieving him because he was such an amazing part of the whole, like, Montana's bat community. So, yeah. Far reaching. Yeah. Yeah. His wife donated all of his bat tracking gear to us, and so I had to go through all of that. And Lisa didn't want to go through it because it was like too hard for her to kind of look at it. But he had all these little trinkets and stuff in little notes inside his trapping gear that were just like, It was really sweet to see all that.

Gaby: One thing that Gabby found were holding bags for the bats. Linda made a bunch of them by hand years ago, using fabrics with all kinds of patterns and colors. The team's favorite is the Mickey Mouse one. Lewis had his own set of nets as well. And the team tells me they've used his, all summer.

Gabby: He's an inspiration, and I hope to be as amazing as he was and his legacy is. Yeah...

[Music fades in.]

Gaby: Linda was kind enough to tell me more about who Lewis was when he wasn't wearing the bat hat. He grew up in the Ozarks and was always passionate about animals. They met in grade school, she says sixth, and he says fifth. But she always knew she loved him. He was the cutest boy in school. They started dating in high school and married after graduating. She put him through college while he studied wildlife biology, and she would have been totally shocked if he had picked anything else. Throughout their lives, they observed the natural world, always together.

[Music plays and concludes.]

Lisa: Mites? Insects? Parasites?

Leah: I did see one mite, I'm not I'm not finding the nipples, Lisa.

Lisa: Well, she's old.

Leah: Well.

Lisa: Can I look at her?

Leah: Yeah!

Lisa: She's not obviously pregnant. I mean so often it just stands right out. But, you know, it was... Oh, there is a nipple right there. Now squeeze it a little. Did you see milk come out? No.

Leah: No.

Lisa: No. Okay. So she has...

Gaby: The tiniest thing.

Lisa: Well, was really hard to find, but she obviously hasn't given birth this year.

Gaby: They don't seem to love being handled and they make chirping sounds and try to nibble Lisa's gloved hands. But it doesn't take long to process each bat, and they do one final test before letting them go. It's unusual to detect white nose during the summer months. That's why they swab for it in the spring. But they look for it just in case.

Leah: So you can check for white nose syndrome by using the UV light and it'll fluoresce orange. But we've got to turn off our headlamps to do that.

Lisa: In this light, you don't want in anybody's eyes. And this is when we do our swabbing. This is our last step. Oh, that looks really clean.

Leah: So we'd be seeing orange flecks if it had white nose.

Lisa: Let's look at the other wing. I don't see any scarring either, but it did have nubby ears, right?

Leah: Yes, it did.

Lisa: And we record all that. Okay.

Leah: It's always great when you don't find it.

Gaby: For a few moments. It's quiet and everyone holds their breath while they wait to find out. This bat doesn't seem to have it yet. But I try not to think about what could happen this winter or to the 1200 bats that live in Lewis's backyard. Well, those houses be empty someday. Are they safe?

[Footsteps walking on gravel.]

Lisa: Okay, Now you want to release her? Yeah.

Gaby: Lisa and I turn off our headlamps and walk to the edge of the forest to release the bat. There's no light, no chirping, no noise. Everything is quiet. She pauses for a moment, as though she's saying goodbye, and then sets it free. I wonder where it will go.

[Synth music fades in and out.]

Madeline Vinh: Act Three: Dawn.

Gaby: I knew this day was coming. And it's here. It's a cool, clear morning and I soak in the warm sunlight peeking over the ridge as I walk over to meet the wildlife team. We're about to find out the news we've been waiting for.

[Footsteps walking on gravel.]

Gaby: So I'm walking over to Lisa's office because she messaged me that she finally got the real email.

Gaby: Are you feeling nervous now that...

Lisa: You're here? Yeah, I always get nervous. This is from the National Wildlife Health Center. And this is where we sent our swab test to go. And these are our results to find out--

Gaby: --so this was from the swabs that you collected in earlier this spring.

Lisa: Yeah, on the east side.

Gaby: And so right before, what do you think is waiting for you inside of this email?

Lisa: I think it's going to be negative. And the reason why is because I have not received any phone calls.

Gaby: I see Lewis his legacy everywhere as I look around at the team. Their courage and dedication in the face of everything that is to come. Their hope for the future and their love and commitment to these sky puppies. Lewis His passion was contagious. Linda tells me that he loved working with Lisa and mentoring the young wildlife technicians, but that was the best part.

Lisa: Oh look, great news: "Thanks for all you do for bats!" Yay!

Gaby: Aww! Oh wow!

Lisa: That's really good. Yeah...

Gaby: Lisa's teary eyed, and so am I. I think of Lewis, and I'm comforted that this news would have brought him joy.

Lisa: Yeah. This is great news for Glacier.

Gaby: So why is this good news if it sort of feels inevitable?

Lisa: Our hope is that our North American bats build natural immunity against white nose syndrome. So the more time we have here in Glacier without the disease here, maybe some of those bats are developing immunity.

[Theme music fades in.]

Gaby: Even in some of the areas that were hit the hardest by white nose. Scientists are now finding that bat populations are slowly, ever so slowly, starting to come back.

Lisa: So we're just watching and waiting, and hoping for the best for these guys...

Gaby: Linda tells me that she still loves watching the bats emerge from the houses in her backyard. I like to think they remind her of Lewis.

[Ending theme music builds under credits.]

Peri Sasnett: This episode is in memory of Lewis Young.

Peri: Special thanks to Lynda Young for generously sharing her memories and stories with us. Headwaters is a production of Glacier National Park and is supported by the Glacier National Park Conservancy. We could not make the show without them. You can learn more about what they do at Glacier.org. Headwaters is made possible with help from Lacey Kowalski, Melissa Sladek, and so many people throughout the Glacier community, especially the natural and cultural resource teams. We're grateful for all of you.

Peri: Our music this season is by the brilliant Frank Waln. The show's cover art is by our sweet friend Stella Nall. Check out Frank and Stella's work at the links in our shownotes.

Peri: Lisa Bate, Kaile Kimbal, Gabby Eaton, Megan Potter and the whole wildlife team were instrumental, and many thanks to the very batty Sarah Gaulke for answering all of our bat questions and for encouraging us to tell this story. And an extra shout out to Madeline Vinh for coming through in the clutch.

Peri: Besides sharing this episode with a friend who might appreciate it, you can help us out by leaving us a rating and review in your podcast app. Thanks for listening.

Kaile: It's definitely worth staying up late for, yeah. Oh, my goodness. This is amazing. This is the best moment of my life. I'm in love. I'm going to cry.

What do animals do when we’re not around? One way to answer that is by using remote cameras. By focusing on two camera studies in Glacier, we learn more about two animals in the park, and those of us who visit it.

Headwaters is created by Daniel Lombardi, Michael Faist, Gaby Eseverri, and Peri Sasnett.

Glacier Conservancy: https://glacier.org/headwaters Frank Waln music: https://www.instagram.com/frankwaln/ Stella Nall art: https://www.instagram.com/stella.nall/

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TRANSCRIPT:

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Lacy Kowalski: Headwaters is supported by the Glacier National Park Conservancy.

Michael Faist: My parents met working at a camera store, so we always had a lot of camera gear around the house. But when I was 13, my parents gave me my very first DSLR with a big chunky frame and a zoom lens. I had a tiny point-and-shoot camera before that, but I was convinced something that could fit in my pocket would not be enough camera for our family vacation to Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado.

Michael: The Rockies were unlike anything I'd ever seen growing up in the Midwest. And armed with my new camera, I took pictures of everything. The view from every scenic pull out, every wildflower. Photogenic cloud or notably large pinecone. But one picture from that trip that stands out in my memory is a photo I took of a moose. The first moose I'd ever seen. Neck deep in a lake holding its massive antlers above the water as it swam from one side to the other.

Michael: It was gone within a few minutes, and the photo, looking back on it, wasn't all that impressive. But I think about that moose often as one of the first experiences I had with a wild animal. At least one bigger than a squirrel. It kickstarted a fascination I still have with the natural world and an appreciation of the power the photography has to capture moments like this. Wild animals in the wild.

Michael: It's no wonder that cameras are one of the most common accessories you see around Glacier today. They are the lens, pun intended, through which many of us see and remember national parks. But cameras are also increasingly being used by scientists to study the same animals us visitors feel lucky to see especially remote cameras which trigger when they sense movement. These "camera traps," as they're called, can reveal glimpses into a side of Glacier that we can never see, how wildlife behave when there are no people around.

[Car sounds]

Michael: We are in the car.

Peri Sasnett: Where are we going?

Michael: We're driving up the road out of East Glacier that heads towards Two Medicine, looking for a camera.

Peri: And what's the camera looking for?

Michael: The camera is looking for moose. Largest member of the deer family. Very charismatic. Big noses.

Peri: I feel like charismatic is debatable.

Michael: I love moose.

Peri: I think a lot of people love moose and a lot of people think moose are one of the uglier creatures.

Michael: What? How could you think Moose are ugly?

Peri: I'm not saying I think that, but I've heard people say that.

Michael: Gangly? Yes. Ugly? No!

Peri: Weird little dewlap thing dangling.

Michael: [Laughs] It's charming!

[Theme music fades in.]

Peri: Some say charming.

Michael: You're listening to Headwaters, a show about how Glacier National Park is connected to everything else. I'm Michael.

Michael: In this episode, we're zooming in on two different animals one big and one small, one you may have seen and one you may have never heard of. They'll help us understand the increasing use of cameras in the field of wildlife biology and reveal that even if you leave no trace, you have a bigger impact on the natural world than you might think.

[Car sounds]

Michael: We're turning just before the road to the Two Med entrance. Going off the pavement.

Michael: Peri and I went out for a day to check on a wildlife camera with Landon McGee.

Landon Magee: Ah, yeah, so my name's Landon Magee. I'm a Master's student at the University of Montana in the Wildlife Biology program. I'm an enrolled member of the Blackfeet Tribe.

Michael: We were joined by one of Landon's technicians, Ethan Rowe. The two of them are working for Blackfeet Nation Fish and Wildlife, leading a moose study on the Blackfeet reservation and the eastern portion of Glacier National Park.

Landon: You know, they love kind of where areas people call them "swamp donkeys" just because they kind of similar by and they like to hang out in the swamps and wade through the ponds and eat kind of some aquatic vegetation can find them long stream bottoms, creek bottoms, river bottoms...

Michael: And Landon, who has been placing cameras all over the place this year, was nice enough to take me and Peri to the easiest-to-reach camera in his whole study.

Landon: Yeah, so we're just going to head about 50 yards into this big aspen stand here.

Michael: [to Landon] Great, we'll follow your lead.

Peri: Sweet! I mean, this looks like moose habitat.

Landon: Yeah.

Michael: Now I find moose to be really interesting and not even slightly ugly. As the second largest mammals in North America, they're really strong. Bull Moose's iconic antlers can grow up to five feet across, and they use those antlers to fight over female moose.

[Grunting moose sounds and clattering antlers.]

Michael: Which is a great excuse to remind folks to stay 25 yards away from moose and other non-predator wildlife in the park.

Landon: Like any other animal. Give them their distance, you know, just let them do what they need to. You know, it's, you know, the added stress of people trying to get up close just puts more stress on them that they don't really need.

Michael: But at the same time, moose are seen as gentle giants. We see them as being so friendly that they usually have Canadian accents in movies like the Disney movie, "Brother Bear.".

[Clip from movie begins playing.]

Brother Bear Film Clip: "Oh, look, I am sorry. If I was driving this never would have happened, eh. You never let me drive you never let me do nothing. Oh, trample off, eh! I said I was sorry. Let it go. I can't believe you totaled a mammoth."

[Clip from movie fades out.]

Michael: And maybe this blend of strength and friendliness can help explain why Moose are so popular. We ran a People's Choice Awards contest on Glacier's Instagram a few years ago, and moose were voted the most popular animal in the park, beating mountain goats and grizzly bears.

Michael: But despite all their charisma and their massive size, we don't actually know much of anything about how they're doing as a species around Glacier.

Landon: You know, we really didn't know what their status of the moose population was on the Reservation. And then the park hasn't done like any kind of moose study in I think somewhere close to 60 years. So they really didn't know anything about their moose population currently either. And so Blackfeet had listed it kind of as a "species of interest." And yeah, just that just I guess, snowballed into this project.

Michael: I checked. There haven't been any moose studies in the park in 60 years, but Landon's changing that. His study is measuring the moose population on the Blackfeet reservation and much of the east side of Glacier. And to do that, he placed cameras like the one we're at today throughout his study area. And all of the cameras were placed at random.

Landon: Sitting down and trying to pick, you know, 100 camera locations of where, you know, would be good spots would be very time consuming and hard to do. And of course, it introduces a lot of bias. And so having this truly random sampling allows you to get into places you thought you'd never go your whole life. I know there's, there's been a few that I've been to both summers so far.

Michael: And so we're visiting this easy to reach camera to make sure it's still working. Landon's technician, Ethan, walked us through the check up.

Ethan Rowe: When we're arming the camera, we like to put it waist-high, so it would just sit, like, somewhere right here.

Peri: That's like knee-high on a moose!

[All laugh]

Ethan: Yeah. So right now we're doing a revisit, so we're just checking up on the camera, just if the camera was still functional. We changed the memory card at all... and if we did, the I.D. Of it.

Michael: The downside of randomly distributing your cameras, though, is that while some are 50 yards off the road and easy to hike to while holding a microphone, others require miles of bushwhacking through areas with no trails. Honestly, it sounds a little heinous, but that hasn't deterred Ethan.

Ethan: And hikes are a big plus of it, you know.

Peri: Are you sure?

Ethan: I really enjoy the hike sometimes, even though I like to complain along the way. I think when I'm done with it, I really tell Landon, "I really appreciate it out here."

Michael: With these randomly placed cameras set far enough apart to avoid double counting the same moose during a certain time frame. Landon can run all the data through a computer model to estimate how many moose live here. And the data isn't just a bunch of ones and zeroes. It's pictures, which for Landon, has been fun to look through, but a lot of work.

Michael: [to Landon] With, you know, dozens of cameras out at a time, like, how many pictures do you capture over the course of a summer?

Landon: Last year, we did 100 cameras. And I think with all of those, we had over, just a little over 2 million photos.

Michael: [to Landon] 2 million!?

Landon: Yeah. Thinking about that: these cameras are set to both motion detection, (so anything that walks by, grass blowing, anything will set it off), but it also takes a picture every 15 minutes. Part of a time lapse function on the camera. So it has both of those modes going the entire summer.

Michael: [to Landon] So 2 million, how do you go through that?

Landon: A lot of time bent over at a computer.

[All laugh and drum beat music fades in.]

Michael: Blowing grass... waving branch.. blowing grass... Moose?

[Drumbeat music stops.].

Michael: He had some research assistants to help sort through these images. And some companies are even marketing A.I. tools that promise to speed up the process. But despite manually sifting through 2 million photos, Landon was excited about the results.

Landon: You know, I guess looking through the cameras last year, there was a lot more sightings than I had anticipated. We were a little worried that we weren't going to get a whole lot of moose detections just because of how, you know, just having these cameras in the middle of nowhere. And what are the chances of a moose, you know, walking by my camera in such a large area?

Michael: Landon emphasized that one of the things he loves about these photos is you get to see how Moose behave when there's no one around to watch.

Landon: One of the cooler photos or videos we had on the video cameras we had out last year was a moose calf nursing. And you could hear like the sucking noise of the calf just going to town.

Peri: Wow, that's amazing!

Landon: Yeah, it was cool. It's probably the best video I have.

Michael: This is the audio from that clip.

[Nature sounds and sucking sounds fade in.]

Michael: To paint the picture, the calf is mostly hidden by thimbleberry bushes as it reaches up to its mom. An adult female moose can easily be six feet tall and weigh 1,000 pounds, while a newborn calf weighs as much as a small dog like a corgi.

Landon: And this getting that firsthand view into, you know, what their life looks like when nobody is out here. You know, they've there's probably been some areas where they've never seen a human or a big gray box strapped to a tree. And so seeing what they do and how they interact with that, it's been pretty cool.

Michael: [to Landon] I guess, just as a baseline, like why why use cameras as a tool in the first place instead of like going out in the field and sitting around all day?

Landon: Well, I think I mean, a lot of the stuff that I'm trying to do can be accomplished with more invasive techniques like collaring, capturing, chemical immobilization, helicopter, all that, just really invasive kind of stresses animal out a lot and also costs a lot of money.

Michael: As with so many things, the biggest factor is cost. There are a lot of species deserving of study and relatively little money to go around. So you have to have a good reason to get a wildlife study funded for Landon's. It's the fact that moose hunting funds a lot of conservation work on the Blackfeet Reservation. Blackfeet Nation Fish and Game, along with Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, issue a small amount of moose tags every year, permits to hunt a moose on Tribal, state or federal land. But to be clear, not in Glacier National Park.

Landon: Say, do an auction system until they bid on the tag. And I think the starting bid for moose is like $14,000. And we usually get it up to like $30, $35,000 for a moose tag. Yeah. So, I mean, that's a huge source of revenue for the department. I mean.

Michael: By better understanding the number of moose on the Blackfeet Reservation. Fish and Game can issue an appropriate number of tags without fear of harming moose populations as a whole. And on top of that, we'll also get insight into the moose in Glacier, which speaks to one of the appealing traits of camera traps. They're pretty cheap. High quality cameras are getting less expensive every year, and the only expense beyond that is the time it takes to install and remove them. Landon, Ethan and their small team can realistically study a huge area.

Landon: You know, Moose don't know political boundaries, so, you know, you're going to have moves that are going back and forth and whether you're going to get them on the reservation during your time, sampling is going to be difficult to predict. And so having cameras in the park kind of allows you to understand that transboundary movement.

Michael: Landon's work stands to help Glacier and the Blackfeet Nation manage Moose, but his study is still underway, so there's no population estimate for him to report just yet.

Landon: People always tell me that, you know, "How many moose out there?"

Peri: Let me get back to you in a couple years.

Landon: Give me two years. I'll let you know. [everyone laughs]

[Music fades in]

Michael: We'll have to stay tuned to see what Landon learns down the road. But you don't have to wait to see the results of a camera study. You just have to look to another animal.

[Music concludes]

Alissa Anderson: So they have these very specialized adaptations for living in the deep, deep powdery snow environment. I don't know. I mean, they're cats. You know, cats are kind of weird.

Michael: This is Alissa Anderson. Starting in 2019 as a grad student at the University of Montana, Alissa led a camera trap study of a mammal in Glacier that is far more elusive than moose, the Canada Lynx.

Michael: [to Alissa] Have you ever seen the lynx in person?

Alissa: I have only seen a lynx associated with a live trap for research, so I consider that to be cheating. I did work for one winter trapping for research. I walked up to the trap there just like I had one lynx that literally I think it was singing death metal to me.

[Clip of a lynx yowling]

Michael: It's rare to see any wildcat in Glacier this summer. After ten years of working and living here, I finally saw my first mountain lion. And they're four times bigger than lynx are.

Alissa: It's funny. And then you get all these tourists who go to Glacier for one day and send you these videos, and they're like, Hey, is this a lynx? I'm like, "Oh my God, I'm hike that trail 10 million times. You have no idea how lucky you are!"

Michael: But while I'd guess few park visitors have even heard of Canada Lynx, they're a really fascinating animal and they're perfectly suited to live in Glacier.

Alissa: They are a specialized cat species that has evolved to live in what we call the Boreal Forest. So, you know, mostly across Canada, Alaska. And then that Boreal Forest does reach down a little bit into the lower 48. Part of their specialization is that they specialize in eating snowshoe hare. It's the vast majority of their diet.

Michael: Lynx and their favorite food, the snowshoe hare, both have huge feet relative to their body weight, which allows them to run on top of deep snow. I found a great example of this in a 1976 documentary called "Day of the Lynx." In the clip, filmed in the winter, you see a coyote sneaking up on a snowshoe hare.

[Clip from "Day of the Lynx plays.]

Day of the Lynx narrator: "A coyote has been diligently following the trail of a snowshoe hare. It flushes, running in the direction of the big lynx."

Michael: Then you see the lynx, tall tufts of black hair on their pointed ears, comically large feet, poised and waiting.

Day of the Lynx narrator: "It can run atop the snow, unlike the coyote who breaks through the crust and travel slower. The coyote stays doggedly on the trail, but he's too late. The Lynx has made the kill.".

[Clip from "Day of the Lynx concludes and synth music plays briefly.]

Michael: Glacier has seen less and less snow over the years since the park was established. The park gets 30 fewer days each year of freezing temperatures compared to 1980, the equivalent of a month that used to be freezing cold. The now isn't. So for lynx, this cold adapted animal, climate change is a huge concern. Big enough that they were listed under the Endangered Species Act. Their threatened status encourages groups like our very own Glacier National Park Conservancy, to fund Lynx research like Alissa's.

Alissa: The main facet was what we call an occupancy survey. So where are we detecting them? What kind of areas are occupied by Lynx?

Michael: Landon is studying moose by counting them, since he's doing a population estimate. In contrast, Alissa's study wasn't designed to count lynx, but to figure out where they live, and where they don't. And she focused her cameras on park trails.

Alissa: Like a lot of carnivores have been found to use human trails You know, you have a higher probability of detecting by putting cameras on trails.

Michael: [to Alissa] They can get anywhere much faster on trail.

Alissa: Yeah. And so having cameras on trail means that you can put cameras out without using any kind of bait or lure and still have, you know, a decent probability of detecting carnivore species or these, like, more rare, elusive species.

Michael: Landon's randomly placed cameras make sense for his population estimate and works well in part because Moose are six feet tall. Lynx, on the other hand, are just two feet tall and would disappear in a lot of Glacier's brush. Focusing on trails is a great way to spot lynx. It works great for Eliza's occupancy study and helps her avoid most of the bushwhacking that Landon has to do. But she still used a lot of cameras.

Alissa: So we used 300 and, I want to say, 305 cameras for the Lynx occupancy study, four cameras per cell across the whole park, basically.

Michael: And searching through these images it wasn't just lynx she got pictures of.

Alissa: I think my favorite was porcupine. I think we got, I want to say, 13 porcupine. Which is the same number we got bobcat. We got hardly any bobcat. More porcupine than I expected.

Michael: Porcupines are another poorly understood animal in Glacier. Ever since the eighties, they've been an increasingly rare sight, and nobody's really sure why. Data from Alissa's lynx-focused work could contribute to separate research on porcupines or other species in the park.

Alissa: So we also have this big trove of data on every other species of wildlife that happens to use trails in Glacier, which is a really cool and powerful part of cameras, I think.

Michael: But of course, she also saw a lot of lynx. In total, they captured 404 images of lynx and the cats showed up on 25% of the cameras she put out throughout the park. Many images were simply lynx walking by, but others were more unique.

Alissa: We did get one set of photos of a lynx walking by with three little kittens running around in front of her with their tail sticking up and just looking cute. So that was cool. We got one photo of a, well, looks like to be a juvenile snowshoe hare of the year running in front of the camera, being chased by a lynx, which was super crazy.

Michael: [to Alissa] Oh, and I'm sure they run out of frame so you never know what happened.

Alissa: I don't know. But they were very close, like within to think of each other. So I have a feeling that, yeah, young one did not--

Michael: [to Alissa] Didn't make it.

Michael: And this study in Glacier adds to a larger body of research in northwest Montana. The audio of a Lynx vocalizing that we shared earlier--

[Clip of lynx yowling plays.]

Michael: came from a monitoring project looking for rare carnivores in the Swan Valley, south of Glacier. It was shared with us by the Southwest Crown Collaborative and Swan Valley Connections. Knowing where lynx live now allows us to notice when and how they're impacted by climate change and other stressors, and that'll help the park manage for their success. These photos have also been exciting for park visitors and employees because they're a window into the hidden lives of our wildlife.

[Music fades in.]

Alissa: We got a handful of wolverine, I think maybe 12 or something, and that's always fun. You never see so many of these animals, or very rarely. And it's just a really cool way to just, you know, see what all is around you and using the same trails that you're using. It's sort of funny; there were a couple of times when you just going through the photos, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and organizing, it'd be like a grizzly bear or even once, I think a lynx, you know, within minutes of a human-

Michael: [to Alissa] Really?!

Alissa: -like, in the exact same spot, you're like, Wow, I wonder how that worked out?! Yeah.

[electronic music fades in sampling the "Day of the Lynx" narrator saying, "During what we call, The Day of the Lynx!" then music fades out.]

Michael: But Alissa's research also revealed another, more surprising, conclusion.

Alissa: Yeah. So basically more or less half of the park, the east side of the park, stayed closed to the public in 2020.

Michael: Because of the timing of a lesser study, 2019 through 2021, her work overlapped with the arrival of COVID-19. And because of the pandemic in the summer of 2020, half of Alissa's study area was closed to the public as a precaution to limit the spread of COVID. The Blackfeet reservation shut down. And the park, who shares a boundary with the reservation, closed its eastern entrances to support that precaution. Areas west of the continental divide remained open, but eastern entrances like St. Mary, Many Glacier, and Two Medicine, were closed. This posed a roadblock for Alissa's research, but there was an agreement that allowed for limited administrative use so long as nobody stopped on the reservation, even for gas. And Alissa's research made the cut.

Alissa: So we were very fortunate and grateful to be able to continue our work on the east side during the summer of 2020. And it did provide a really unique opportunity, sort of more of an experimental design.

Michael: It was a perfect setup for an experiment she never could have arranged otherwise. One year of data with wildlife and people, and one year with wildlife and no people.

Alissa: We had cameras out in the same exact location during the same time period, different years. But like, you know, June 15th till August 15th or whatever in 2020. And also in a year when the park was open to the public and there were thousands of people and like hundreds of people every single day walking in front of those locations. So we were able to compare wildlife activity and presence and detection and those two different scenarios.

Michael: Right away, comparing the open and closed years revealed a pattern.

Alissa: For the most part, most of the findings were that when there's fewer people around, you know, the animals were being detected more frequently or at more different places. You know, I think some of the ones that were strongest were elk and coyote.

Michael: Coyotes were seeing way more often when there weren't people around.

Alissa: Coyote kind of surprised me, honestly, because, you know, they're kind of a generalist species and they can, you know, get used to stuff.

Michael: And I mean, you see pictures in some communities where they're like riding the subway! So you'd think they'd be more kind of comfortable.

Alissa: Yeah, that kind of surprised me that they had such a strong reaction, negative reaction to increased human use.

Michael: That same trend was observed in a lot of animals, including lynx, moose, bighorn sheep and black bears, although it wasn't true of every species. Foxes were the opposite. The probability of detecting a red fox was higher in the summer with people on trail.

Alissa: So, you know, one theory could be we found more foxes because we were finding fewer coyotes, and coyotes are dominant over foxes. And so that's, you know, an explanation. That's just, I think that's super interesting.

Michael: This is something I feel like I and a lot of folks have anecdotal understanding of. It feels like deer like to be around people, whereas you're encouraged to make noise on trails so you won't run into a bear, as bears generally don't want to be around us.

Michael: But when that personal experience becomes a statistically significant research conclusion, it made me reconsider the impact I have on this place.

Michael: It's tempting for me to imagine if you're following all the principles of leave no trace, you know, hiking up to Avalanche Lake like you're not disturbing anything. The park is kind of behaving as it would be if you weren't there. And your paper seems to imply that that's not true.

Alissa: Even if you don't hit an animal with your car or you're not hunting an animal or you're not throwing rocks, an animal or your dogs not chasing an animal simply by existing on the landscape and walking on trails, I mean, we do have an influence on wildlife activity patterns and space use, simply just by being there.

Michael: This hits at the core of the Park Service's mission, to preserve and protect the natural world here, while also providing for the enjoyment of visitors. Two goals that seem to be in tension with one another. A dual mandate at odds with itself.

Alissa: So it's a really interesting conundrum. I think you were saying, sort of the dual mandate of the park, right? I'm certainly not going to advocate for closing the park forever to people. I think that's insane. I think it is kind of interesting to imply that that's necessarily bad. I don't want to say that that's necessarily bad like humans have existed on this landscape with all of these animals, you know, forever. It's just it's interesting and it's something that I think, you know, now we certainly need to think about and consider a little bit more carefully because we have thousands, millions of people, you know, hiking down some of these trails, you know, over the course of just a three month period.

Michael: I've talked for years with visitors and colleagues about this tension in the NPS mission, but I'd always pictured it applying to large scale management decisions like wanting to build a new parking lot. It felt like something I could avoid on a personal level by doing the right thing, which in hindsight feels a little naive. I like working here because I felt like my work can have a positive impact. But Alissa's study left me wondering if the best thing I could do for lynx and moose, is leave.

Michael: But at the same time, the reason I care about wildlife is because of experiences I've had, in nature. Experiences in national parks, like that mediocre photo I took of the first moose I'd ever seen. And it's unlikely so many people from around the world would care about this remote corner of northwest Montana if they'd never been here, if they'd never had the chance to connect with it on a personal level, to go hiking in the mountains, to see wildlife in the wild, forming memories that last a lifetime. Finally, the only way for Glacier to responsibly manage animals like moose and lynx, is to understand them, which takes research, sending passionate, curious people out into the park to learn more.

Ethan: Yeah, you know, that was my first camera did by myself. You know, I guess it's just the bird leaving the nest.

Michael: People like Ethan, the wildlife tech working with, Landon on the moose study. After two summers with Landon, Ethan is pursuing a degree in wildlife biology this fall at the University of Montana.

Ethan: You know, I always wanted to be out here doing this type of work, and I think that's a big motivation for me, is that, you know, not a lot of people are out here and that, you know, as me and him just trying to make a new step into history.

Peri: Moose pioneers!

Alissa: I mean, I guess it's the idea of do we only care about species for the viewing enjoyment of the public or do we care about them for their intrinsic value on the landscape and also for their important ecological roles? And if you care about that and you care about every species.

[Closing theme music fades in.]

Peri: Alissa's research suggests that even treading lightly, we will have an impact on the natural world here--it's unavoidable. But if we can accept that, it encourages us to think about the kind of impact we would like to have.

[Closing theme music plays fully under Peri reading the credits.]

Peri: Headwaters is a production of Glacier National Park and is supported by the Glacier National Park Conservancy. We could not make the show without them. You can learn more about what they do at Glacier.org. Headwaters is made possible with help from Lacy Kowalski, Melissa Sladek and so many people throughout the Glacier community, especially the natural and cultural resource teams. We're grateful for all of you.

Peri: Our music this season is by the brilliant Frank Waln. The show's cover art is by our sweet friend Stella Nall. Check out Frank and Stella's work at the links in our show notes.

Peri: Special thanks this episode to Landon Magee, Ethan Rowe, Alissa Anderson, Mark Biel, John Waller, and Swan Valley Connections and the Southwest Crown Collaborative for sharing their amazing lynx growls. Besides sharing this episode with a friend who might appreciate it, you can help us out by leaving us a rating and review in your podcast app. Thanks for listening.

Chasing one of Glacier’s most elusive species, and getting comfortable in the dark. This is the story of Black Swifts in Glacier.

Headwaters is created by Daniel Lombardi, Michael Faist, Gaby Eseverri, and Peri Sasnett.

Glacier Conservancy: https://glacier.org/headwaters Frank Waln music: https://www.instagram.com/frankwaln/ Stella Nall art: https://www.instagram.com/stella.nall/

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TRANSCRIPT:

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Lacy Kowalski: Headwaters is supported by the Glacier National Park Conservancy.

Peri Sasnett: How many animals have you walked by and never noticed? How many species live around you that you've never even heard of?

Amy Seaman: Most people are kind of excited that they had no idea another thing existed and I think that is-it's like yet one more mystery.

Peri: One of these unknown species is a rarely seen creature that most people here have never heard of. They live behind waterfalls and can travel up to 90 miles an hour.

Amy: Yeah, it's fun because they're really dark and you just think it's a bat or something, so we started calling them black lightning.

Peri: To have a chance at seeing them. Most of the time you'll need to leave the trail, bushwhack for hours with alders swatting you in the face and mosquitoes trying to bite you as sweat drips down your face. Then those same alders lend a hand. As the terrain turns steep and you use them to pull yourself up precipitous slopes. Then the shrubs fade away and you're clambering up a steep field of loose rock, feeling them shifting as you step and hoping they stay put. Oh, and by the way, it's 4:00 in the morning, so it's pitch black. [theme music fades in; starting with a mandolin] Finally, you reach the base of a waterfall where the rocks are slick underfoot and it's loud from the pounding water and cold and damp from the ever-present mist. And this is where you find them. Black swifts.

[theme continues; a drumbeat, a flute line, and other instruments come in, before the music finishes]

Peri: I'm Peri, and you're listening to Headwaters, a show about how Glacier National Park is connected to everything else. I love birds, seeing them, hearing them, and also counting them. This year so far, I found 242 species and counting, but I've never seen a black swift. For a lot of birders, seeing a brand-new species can be a highlight of your month or even of your year. It's called a life bird. I've looked for black swifts every summer I've lived here, but I strike out every time. They're basically big black cigars that fly thousands of feet in the air, and they're incredibly hard to see. But today, I'm going out with Amy Seaman from Montana Audubon and her team to survey for these elusive birds. And hopefully I'll be in luck. But this isn't just a story about me going birdwatching. It's a story about learning to feel comfortable in the dark and how to cherish the mysteries we may never solve.

[birds singing]

Amy: Once it shoots out, your eye might not pick it up until like out here, where it's out further from the waterfall and I think part of that is just the speed they come out.

Peri: [in the field] Which is how fast?

Amy: So fast.

[laughter] [voices slowly fade under the narration]

Peri: That’s Amy. She's an all-around bird expert, but has spent a lot of the last ten summers looking for black swifts in a collaborative effort between Montana Audubon and the Park with support from the Glacier Conservancy. With her help, I thought it'd be a lot easier to find them, but it is definitely not easy.

Peri: [in the field] So birds are basically too fast to see in your binoculars.

Amy: They really are.

Peri: And if you want a glimpse of them, you're going to have to do an alpine start.

Peri: [in the field] I rolled out of bed at 3:05, got dressed and brushed my teeth and tumbled down the stairs and had just enough time to zoom out the door into the car to then drive an hour to get here.

Peri: So I'm tired. There's rain in the forecast and it's also fully dark outside. Black swifts are early risers, much earlier than me. They're not quite nocturnal, but they aren't just active during the day either. Amy and other researchers have had the most luck looking for them around their nests at dawn or dusk.

Peri: [in the field] We’re on the side of the Going to the Sun Road, where a creek flows below the road through a culvert, and we're starting to hear the first birdsong. And we're staring at a waterfall, [birds singing] trying to see these little black specks moving at 90 miles an hour.

Peri: Black swifts are aerial insectivores, meaning they catch and eat bugs as they fly, especially flying ants. One study found swifts regularly flying at altitudes over 13,000 feet, and they're almost always flying. When they're not nesting, they spend 99% of their time in the air day and night. That's something like eight months of flying. [pensive synth music fades in] How do you study a bird that basically never stops? [birds singing] [sound of rushing water fades in]

Peri: [in the field] So how long have you been doing swifts surveys?

Amy: This is actually year ten, the beginning of the 10th year.

Peri: [in the field] Oh, wow.

Amy: Yeah. Which is so fun to think, but it's fun. We have just as many questions, but we have learned a lot more. [music fades out]

Peri: [in the field] So when you started, you didn't know how many birds there were, didn't know how to look for them, didn't know what their nest sites really looked like.

Amy: Exactly.

Peri: But despite the things that Amy and others have been able to learn, there's plenty of mystery left. And Amy loves it.

Amy: [to Peri, in the studio] I've always wanted to know what's around me. That was a lifetime goal of like when I'm a kid and I want to grow up, I want to say, hey, I'm on a hike, and what is this thing that I'm walking near or pretty flower that I'm looking at? Then you're like, wait, there is stuff we don't know. So it was this whole circle of like-

Peri: You're a black swift explorer.

Amy: I can't believe there's a bird that we found the sixth nest of in the state.

Peri: That's incredible.

Amy: It's a wild sentence, and it's so fun, and you're like, we didn't know where they wintered until 2012.

Peri: [narration] Scientists have learned about many birds migrations through banding programs that started in the early 1900s. But it wasn't until 2012 that we started to learn where swifts migrate. Using tiny geo locators, researchers in Colorado discovered that they were wintering in the lowland forests of Brazil. But where exactly our swifts from Montana go, is still a question, but we do know that they're declining. A 2016 report compiled by Partners in Flight estimated dramatic declines since 1970. Climate change, pesticides and habitat disturbance are all pressuring these birds. So much about them, especially Glacier’s population, is unknown.

Amy: And I'll never forget my first year at Sperry Chalet meeting a person who had hiked here for decades and had never heard of this bird. And he could name every plant on the side of the trail. So he's like, well, what are you guys here for? And we’re like, oh, actually, these birds right up in this waterfall that he's-you mean you can look out from the chalet and you've seen for years, and then he was just floored.

Peri: And Amy's been working to study swifts and spread the word about them for the last ten years.

Amy: There's enough sites now to start monitoring to a number of birds because, of course, at some point, you know, funders want to know. Conservationists want to know like, well, what's the number? Are we running out? Are they declining? Are they not? [pensive synth music fades in]

Peri: Personally, I'll just be happy if I get a little glimpse of just one.

[birds singing] [rushing water sound fades in]

Peri: [in the field] Okay. Have I missed anything?

Amy: Not yet. Just staring.

[Peri chuckles]

Peri: I'm standing with Amy and her team, [music slowly fades out] all of us staring intently at the waterfall, coming out from under Going to the Sun Road. I'm bundled up, but the cold, damp air is still somehow seeping in.

Peri: [in the field] It's 5:25 now. I still see no swifts, although it's seeming less absurd that I might be able to see them now that it's a little lighter. But it hasn't happened yet.

Amy: We do call them the swifting hour. There's like a certain light that starts to settle in in the morning or night, and you're like, oh okay, this is I can feel the activity now…

[Amy’s voice fades under narration]

Peri: Maybe Amy could feel it, but I was not at her level.

[birds singing] [rushing water sound fades in]

Peri: [in the field] So I'm just looking at the waterfall in my binoculars and we talked for like two hours yesterday about how you can find the nest and what to look for and this kind of nook or crevice or the whitewash from their pops out of the nest. And they made it all seem very straightforward. And I am befuddled.

[rushing water sound fades out]

Peri: Needless to say, seeing a swift, even with Amy's help, was not going to be as simple as I'd hoped. But compared to most of their sites, which involve not just a drive but hiking miles off trail to get to… this is a breeze.

[rushing water sound fades in]

Peri: [in the field] So is this like the cruisiest survey spot you guys have?

Amy: Yes. [Peri chuckles] I would say I've never rolled up and I was like, I'm going to wear Crocs just because I can this morning. [Peri chuckles]

Peri: It was enough of a challenge for me to get up at three in the morning and grateful we did not have to backpack here or bushwhack for hours up a mountain.

Amy: So like swifting is not for the faint of heart.

[Chuckling]

Peri: You would be right.

Amy: Also, because you get so excited sometimes like, oh, I'm going to have a heart attack because of my excitement level. [Peri chuckles]

Peri: I can't say that I was at heart attack levels of excitement, but some booms of thunder did start to get my heart going. [thunder and rain fade in]

Peri: [in the field] Okay. Status update. It's 5:59 a.m. It's thundering quite a bit, seeing some lightning off to the north. I still have seen no swifts. I don't know if this is looking promising.

[thunder and rain get louder]

Amy: Shoot. I might just put my rain jacket on. If it's pouring, we won't survey, but we have done some like half rainy ones.

Peri: It's honestly hard to tell if it's passed on yet because the storm clouds have made it so dark. We take refuge in the car and the storm lets loose. [car door opens and closes] [thunder and rain intensifies] Rain is coming down in sheets and pouring off the cliffs above the road. In a way, the wet weather is appropriate. Black swifts nest behind waterfalls peeking out through the mist with their big dark eyes. As the clouds empty around me and my nose fogs the car window, I suppose I'm getting a glimpse of what their habitat might feel like. [rain and thunder fades out] One question I had was why did they so often nest behind or around waterfalls in the first place? There isn't conclusive evidence, but experts think it serves a few purposes. The first is to avoid predators, and another possibility is climate control.

Amy: But then, apparently the water is good for the temperature to be cool because they're not fluctuating.

Amy: Like they're not getting so hot either-

Peri: [in the field] It’s just steady.

Amy: Yeah I think it stays basically like 45 degrees all the time.

Peri: Glacier has plenty of waterfalls in the spring, fed by melting winter snow. But by late summer, most of them run dry. Black swifts are smart enough to only pick waterfalls that will protect and cool their chicks all the way until the end of summer. And those can only be fed by glaciers and persistent snowfields, which this park has a lot of.

Amy: [in the studio with Peri] We have realized that this-they love Glacier National Park. There are more nests here than in the rest of the state combined, that we know of.

Peri: But as temperatures warm with climate change, the sources of these waterfalls, those glaciers and snowfields are declining.

Peri: [in the studio with Amy] Because I guess you could see the swifts as a bit of a canary in the coal mine. And as you say, like the waterfalls or where they are, they can't move up in elevation, but also they feed on insects. And so as insects decline, like, that's even more invisible.

Amy: Yeah. And I think you're totally nailed it because part of the interest in studying black swifts isn't just that they do have a unique place that we just didn't know about them, but they totally share a decline with other aerial insectivores and the jury's kind of out on exactly what issues are happening…[Amy fades out under narration]

Peri: This is one of the biggest motivations for their studies in Glacier, trying to figure out what the population is like and how worried they need to be.

Amy: And it also helps us know like, oh, maybe we don't need to hit the panic button either right away. There is a lot of great habitat in Montana, and it could be that we have a lot more of these birds than we thought.

Peri: But all of Amy's work can still only go so far.

Amy: We can also learn only what we can learn in Montana. We don't know anything that these birds are encountering on their migration or on their wintering grounds.

Peri: And even with ten years of data from Glacier and efforts in Colorado and Idaho, we still know remarkably little about these birds compared with almost every other species I might see on a morning walk. It makes me wonder what else I'm missing.

Amy: If a tree falls in the forest and you don't hear it right, like what happens? [pensive synth music fades in] And then so it's like if a black swift disappears from a waterfall, but we never know they were ever at the waterfall. To me, there's something really interesting that's lost in that.

[mellow synth music gets louder]

Peri: Still hiding out from the rain, talking with Amy in the car, I've pretty much lost all hope of seeing a swift today. Maybe of ever seeing one. I feel like the thunderstorm is an embodiment of climate change and all the threats these little birds are facing looming over all of us. As the park's glaciers retreat and disappear, people notice and they care. But does it matter if a bird that I might never see disappears? Can you love something you've never seen?

[music continues]

Peri: [in the field] All right. It's 6:38 now. The storm has abated. [car drives by] [birds singing] There are a lot more cars now. I'm still seeing no swifts, but... so you would normally survey until 7:15. [car drives by] We have another like half hour. So do you think you see any swifts?

Daniel Lombardi: I mean, there is like a smudge back there that could be something, but it's not moving and…

Peri: Right. I see a smudge, but I don't see…

Technician: I’ll put on the data sheet, smudge on nest. [group chuckles]

Daniel: Yeah.

Amy: I'm pretty sure this is a bird. It's a bird. There's a bird.

Peri: There's a bird. But I'll take a look on the scope and see if I can see anything of what I just thought was a blob.

Daniel: Was it a smudge or a blob?

Peri: A “smob”?

[Daniel and Peri chuckle]

Peri: It’s tucked away back in this little nook. And I can see a white blob above the smudge. See, I thought I saw it move, but now I'm second guessing myself. [cars drive by] Maybe I'm just moving. Oh. Oh, I see the, yeah, I see the tail. Oh, my God. It's huge. Okay. I thought it was going to be a tiny little bird, but it's huge.

Amy: It's big.

Peri: Oh! [Daniel laughs]

Amy: Kind of crazy because you're like, this doesn’t-

Peri: I was looking for, like, a tiny little swallow sized bird.

Peri: Oh! it moved its head. It's very exciting.

Peri: [narration] Thousands of people drive on the road past this nest site every day and would never know these birds are living their lives here. I've driven past this site dozens and dozens of times. But now I'll look for them every time I drive past.

Peri: [in the field] You can see it so well now. You see its eyeball and see its little wings cross over its tail. It's looking at me.

Daniel: It's in a really small space. [cars drive by]

Peri: Yeah. It's like it's wrapped up in its little sleeping bag of moss and rock.

Peri: [narration] That black swift perched underneath a waterfall, peering back at me from its damp ledge felt like a glimpse into a whole part of Glacier that usually hides out of sight.

Peri: [in the field] It has black, shiny wings and black feathers, and I can see a little tiny bit of white on the front of its face and a big black eyeball kind of looking at me. So it's like a little bit of light, but mostly dark, which was also our experience in this survey. They do a whole lot of things in the dark, and mostly we can't really see them during the day and most of their lives are in the dark. But we're learning a little bit more each year and each survey.

Peri: [in the studio with Amy] In all these years, what do you think you've learned from black swifts?

Amy: I think the biggest personal change that I've seen has been sort of a minor one, but I've realized that it actually does run quite deeply into life, and it's that I really am more comfortable at night being a nocturnal person, walking around in the dark. Even in my own house or in the creepy basement [Peri laughs] or in other people's creepy basements. I think it's really impacted my comfort level with, you know, trusting yourself and all your intuitions and when fear is real and when it's not real. And I think people really do have so much more than we let on to stuff because I've gone to things like in the night and then gone back to the place and like noticed that I'm walking right by the same exact rock or something. And I'm like, I mean, I tried to go the same direction, but my body has some kind of memory, like from like, how did myself take myself to this exact place? Honestly, just operating more comfortably with less light has been a very liberating feeling. I don't know if we learn it as fear is from movies or what it is when you're little and you do have that fear of the dark thing.

Peri: It's very primal. I mean, we spend so much time trying to light up the darkness, whether it's our car headlights or our, you know, turning the lights on in our houses or even leaving our porch lights on all night.

Amy: It's just oddly satisfying. You know, like this just makes life easier when you take off a layer of worrying.

Peri: I like that, though. It's not like you go out there and try to make the dark more light. You can just become more comfortable in the dark.

Amy: Yeah, absolutely.

Peri: One thing you said earlier was like, these birds love Glacier so much. And I don't know, I kind of got me thinking like, does Glacier love these birds back? And there's like, I think that there's so much effort going into studying them. It kind of makes me maybe say yes now. [Peri chuckles]

Amy: I think so. I think Glacier and the Conservancy has supported the effort seriously over the years, and to me that's just really cool because that is I mean, these birds are impacting a greater landscape, but they need Glacier to nest and survive and reproduce to, you know, keep having black swifts. And then I think the community of people love that because when people are here, they're totally enjoying nature and then hopefully passing that down. I mean, as Montana Audubon too, we are advocates for conservation and it really does take knowing and caring about something to advocate for, especially if it's a policy decision that will impact climate change or something like that. You do have to know the birds.

Peri: [narration] I guess I'm still not sure if you can truly love something you don't know. [haunting violin fades in] But now I've seen a black swift and I think we bonded. And I know I don't want to lose them.

Peri: [in the field] How does it feel?

Amy: They’re still there and that really makes me happy. Actually, to your question of how does it make you feel, when you see them again after ten years, I don't know why, but I still get so excited and I do love them.

Amy: [in the studio with Peri] When we were lucky enough to see that nest today, you get that small little bit of just ultra excitement that they're still there and just knowing that they're there, even though you don't see them all the time, it's just like, gosh, this whole life's happening and we have no idea and that made me brought a lot of joy here.

Peri: We've learned a lot about these birds, but can we ever know very much or will-will they always kind of be a mystery to us?

Amy: That type of thing is so interesting to me. And I think just because we can't exist in their habitat comfortably for much longer than a few hours, I think there is definitely going to always be the part that is just too dark for us to see.

[music builds, then fades to play softly under the credits]

Peri: Headwaters is a production of Glacier National Park and is supported by the Glacier National Park Conservancy. We could not make the show without them. You can learn more about what they do at Glacier.org. Headwaters is made possible with help from Lacy Kowalski, Melissa Sladek and so many people throughout the Glacier community, especially the natural and cultural resource teams. We're grateful for all of you. Our music this season is by the brilliant Frank Waln. The show's cover art is by our sweet friend Stella Nall. Check out Frank and Stella's work at the links and our show notes. Special thanks this episode to Amy Seamen and the whole black swift team. Montana Audubon, Lisa Bate and Kaile Kimbell for all the pickles. Besides sharing this episode with a friend who might appreciate it, you can help us out by leaving us a rating and review in your podcast app. Thanks for listening.

The cutest animal in Glacier may be at risk of disappearing, but it's hard to study an animal that lives under rocks, high in the mountains. How can we understand the hidden parts of the world around us?

Headwaters is created by Daniel Lombardi, Michael Faist, Gaby Eseverri, and Peri Sasnett.

Glacier Conservancy: https://glacier.org/headwaters Frank Waln music: https://www.instagram.com/frankwaln/ Stella Nall art: https://www.instagram.com/stella.nall/

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TRANSCRIPT:

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Lacy Kowalski: Headwaters is supported by the Glacier National Park Conservancy.

Michael Faist: [to Lucas and Alyssa] Do either of you have a particularly good pika impression?

Alyssa Quinn: Lucas does.

Lucas Moyer-Horner: I do. I can give it a try. "Eep! Eep!" Eh. Kind of like that. The thing is, there's different "eep" dialects.

Michael: [to Lucas] How interesting.

Lucas: Even within the park, sometimes you'll hear one that sounds like it has a hoarse voice and or one that you sort of assume must be a really young one, because it has a really kind of a meek and high pitched eep. And then others are pretty strong eeps. But but they're all eeps. They're not whistles like the rodents do.

Michael: Pikas are the cutest animals in Glacier National Park. No contest.

Lucas: Pikas are lagamorphs. So the order group of mammals that they belong to called lagamorphs includes rabbits and hares. Pikas are about the size of a Idaho potato, classically, is how folks like to describe them, and it fits well.

Michael: They're like little fuzzy Idaho potatoes. I mean, even their poops are cute.

Lucas: Pikas’ poop is the only one that is almost a perfect little sphere and pretty much the size of a peppercorn. So if you see tiny little peppercorns, that's for sure going to be like poop.

Michael: [to Lucas] I've heard people joking about using old pepper grinders as they're like a collection container.

Lucas: Seems dangerous. [both laughing]

Michael: This is Lucas.

Lucas: My name is Lucas Moyer-Horner. I'm an instructor with the University of Utah, and I'm also a pika researcher.

Michael: And Alyssa Quinn.

Alyssa: You can call me Alyssa. I am a writer of primarily fiction, and I am currently an assistant professor of creative writing at Kenyon College.

Michael: The two of them have spent a lot of time in the mountains looking for pika this summer, and they're also a couple.

Lucas: The very first time we met was me giving a bear safety talk, and Alyssa was in the audience.

Alyssa: Yeah, and I thought he gave a very good bear talk, like the best bear talk I had heard. So I was like, I need to get to know this guy.

Michael: [to Alyssa] Bear talks can be convincing. Life-saving advice.

Alyssa: He gives a very calm bear talk, which was reassuring. [both laughing]

Michael: Lucas and Alyssa came here this summer because of a mystery. Pika might be in big trouble. If you search for them online, you'll see headlines like this: "pikas disappearing from parts of the West;" "the world's cutest mammal on the brink;" and "the American fur ball being threatened by a warming climate." But if you search for pikas in the mountains here, I'm not quite sure what you'll find. That's why Lucas and Alyssa are here, to help us learn more about what's happening to pika in Glacier. [theme music begins to play] But I wanted to talk to them because they argue science alone isn't enough to understand pika or the threats they face. And so, if not science, what else could help us? [Headwaters theme music plays, with flutes and drums, as pika "eep" sounds play]

Michael: You're listening to Headwaters, a show about Glacier National Park and how it connects to everything else. I'm Michael. In this episode, we're exploring how science and storytelling can shed light on the American pika. And my guides are Lucas and Alyssa.

Lucas: I think that one hike we did where we walked through some talus was the only time I tried to find a hay pile. And I was lucky enough to find one.

Alyssa: Yeah, we saw two... We saw two pikas together, which was a very rare occurrence. Yeah, that was exciting. So, yeah, they just flock to you now.

Michael: As you'll hear, Lucas and Alyssa come to a love of Pika from different spheres of the brain. Lucas's lens is science, while Alyssa brings the mind of a writer. For a few months this summer before work pulled Alyssa elsewhere, she helped Lucas conduct pika surveys. [to Alyssa] Was this your first time surveying pikas this summer with Lucas?

Alyssa: Yes, it was.

Michael: [to Alyssa] How'd you like it?

Alyssa: It's very fun. It's very hard work. It's.... Yeah, I definitely was a blob, I slowly de-blobbed over the course of the summer, but now I'm back to blob-ifying again until next summer. The... It's exhausting because you hike these sometimes very massive peaks, and that's fun. You get to the top. It's gorgeous. You're excited, you've hit the peak, you're kind of ready to turn around and head for home, but instead you have to spend multiple hours up there doing the survey. And that can be really strenuous, too, because you're clambering over these giant boulders up and down, up and down, and trying to keep track of where you've been.

Michael: Our story starts back in 2007, when Lucas, then a PhD student, led the first large scale pika study in Glacier.

Lucas: Our extent of our research is the entire park. So the 1 million acre Glacier National Park is where the surveys take place, and we try to cover as many different patches as we possibly can.

Michael: That word "talus" describes a hillside of loose rocks and boulders, and are the only places that pika live.

Lucas: Basically, they can only be found where there are piles of big rocks. They use the spaces between those rocks as a refuge from extreme temperatures, whether it's too hot, too cold. And they also can use those areas to escape from potential predators.

Michael: So the first step is to identify where this talus or pika habitat is even found.

Lucas: Yeah, I think I've probably covered around two thirds-ish of the park. That's been one of the ongoing efforts was to get up high on ridges and peaks to try to look and see where talus occurs in the park.

Michael: Once they know where the talus is, they'll visit each patch and look for pika.

Lucas: And we're looking for any signs of a pika. So that could be seeing a pika, hearing a pika finding a pika's hay pile, or finding pika scat.

Alyssa: We sometimes go by the Pika Poop Patrol because we are also collecting pika poop.

Michael: Pika poop is currently being used by other researchers studying pika genetics to see how different pika populations are connected to one another. It's not Lucas's project, but he and Alyssa are helping out.

Alyssa: Yeah. How many Ziploc gallons of books are full of poop now? In the cabin?

Lucas: In the cabin? I think we're up to four.

Michael: That's four gallon sized bags of peppercorn sized poops.

Lucas: Conveniently pikas, they're active during the day, so we can survey for them during the day and be more likely to see them and hear them. And they also are solitary and defend their territory from other pikas. So that means if you find if you see a pika, you know that there's not going to be another pika within about a ten meter radius of that pika.

Michael: This summer, 15 years later, he's surveying the same spots all over again to monitor how they're doing and see how pika populations have changed over time.

Lucas: So we'll go to the GPS location where this survey started 15 years ago, and then we'll attempt to survey the same part of the patch that they did. Hopefully the entire patch.

Michael: Alyssa has experienced this work firsthand in the field, and she's also created some of her own written work based off of Lucas's research. Like a poem titled Ochotonidae, the Latin name of pika.

Alyssa: So the poem is a cut up poem, which is a poem that takes an existing text, in this case, I took Lucas's paper "Predictors of current and long term patterns of abundance of American pikas across a leading edge protected area." Catchy title.

Lucas: Thank you. [laughing]

Alyssa: You're welcome. I took that article and I cut out a bunch of pieces of language from it and then rearranged those pieces to form a new poem. And I allowed myself to change capitalization and punctuation. But no, no language.

Michael: The poem spans several pages, many of which look like Alyssa took white out to most of Lucas's paper. The few scattered words left behind tell their own story.

Alyssa: His is longer. [all laugh] Mine has a lot of whitespace. There's small phrases, words and phrases sort of pasted across the page, separated by large gaps.

Michael: We asked if she'd read an excerpt for us.

Alyssa: Here we go. [subtle synth music plays] "We acknowledge that scale and size are efforts to avoid division by zero, to minimize the error of man made structures, julian date, observer bias, train tracks. And finally, we acknowledge that our ability to identify patterns has been extremely null, especially in centuries made of days."

Michael: This isn't the only piece Alyssa has written about pika, and she'll read a short story for us later in the episode.

Michael: [to Lucas] Lucas, are you much of a writer?

Lucas: No. As you can tell from the title of the paper that they used. [all laughing]

Michael: The two of them approach this topic from such different vantage points, but each helps the other see their own work in a new light.

Alyssa: It's the absolute best thing in the world to have him around and to have his very different perspective sort of constantly there. There are times when he'll sort of drop a piece of knowledge that he has that I'm like, "You knew this thing all along and you haven't told this to me yet?!" Like this amazing sort of biological factoid that you have just been sitting on for years.

Lucas: It's exciting. It's like new perspectives on life and interactions and networks, and it can kind of sort of reinvigorate my interest in my own investigations and science that I'm doing, think about things in new ways, and I think that can help your science be better science. As a scientist who part of my work is looking at the effects of climate change, and it can sometimes seem like, you know, you're writing your notes in your diary as the Titanic is going down. About, you know, just how big the hole is and what caused it and all these things. Art has opportunity to be much more impactful.

Michael: Alyssa and Lucas are both driven by a concern for pika, as these little potato shaped animals grapple with climate change. And each of them approach their work with scale in mind, knowing that their results, whether in research or creative writing, are driven by the scope of their project.

Lucas: And so, you know, it really depends on how much you're zooming in or out, what it is you're observing, and what types of questions you're asking.

Michael: Alyssa mentioned this specifically with her cut up poem.

Alyssa: One reason I wanted to try this was to think about what it might-- since I'm interested in scales of space and time, so what happens when you zoom really far out or really far in? And so I wanted to try doing that to a paper. What would a zoomed out version of this paper look like?

Michael: So to understand the threat climate change poses to pika, I wanted to start with the big picture. We know what pika are, but what are their lives look like? [to Lucas] On a social level, Why do you think pika are so endearing to people?

Lucas: Why are pikas so cute? You know, humans seem to really like baby animals, and I feel like pikas, when they're fully grown adults, still seem like they're little babies. So that's [laughing] that's my analysis. And they're mammals, so they're fluffy.

Alyssa: I think people also like this image that they are hard working. They work all summer to collect this hay and to store it. Um, and that seems industrious to us. It seems like they they really, you know, deserve to survive the winter if they work that hard. I think it's easy to kind of attach that-- that meaning onto them as well.

Michael: That industriousness Alyssa mentioned? They have to do so much work gathering hay all summer because they don't hibernate over the winter, like so many other mammals here.

Lucas: They are going to stay awake and survive in other ways during the winter, unlike rodents who love to just sleep, you know, two thirds of their lives, which is a pretty cool approach too. Pikas, since they can't hibernate, have to collect food to make it through the winter. And so that's what a haypile -- that's the primary purpose of a haypile is they'll collect vegetation, store it, usually under a sort of a big airy rock where it can dry out, and then presumably just hang out underneath the snow, which is really good insulation, and eat their haypile during the winter.

Michael: [to Lucas] Yeah. One way I've heard it described as an analogy to try to communicate how much food pika are setting aside is that if they were as big as we were, they would be collecting the equivalent of several school buses worth of food every year.

Lucas: Right.

Michael: If you see pika frolicking through rocky hillsides, it's usually because they're collecting plants to eat or trying to pillage their neighbors hay piles, despite the fact that they're related to most of their neighbors. If you hear them make their telltale "eep," it's a predator response.

Lucas: So I mentioned, you know, the kindly pika neighbor that warns they're cousins and mom and dad and other relatives that live nearby by eeping. But the problem with eeping is that that alerts the predator to your individual presence. So you're really endangering yourself by warning your neighbors. So a pretty altruistic move. But there's been studies where people have introduced like images and stuffed predators to see how pikas respond. And most often the one predator that they did not eep in the presence of was the weasel.

Michael: [to Lucas] Hmm.

Lucas: And so the thought there is that weasels are such good predators on pikas that it's not worth eeping, because it's going to get you. [bpth laugh]

Michael: But besides being cute, busy, and altruistic pika are known for being extremely sensitive to heat.

Lucas: Yeah, pikas just can't handle getting warmed up very well. The thought then is well, pikas will avoid being active above the rocks when it's hot outside because it'll cause them to overheat. And if that is the case for much of the summer, then they might not be able to collect enough vegetation to survive the winter under the talus for their haypile.

Michael: Around the time of Lucas's first study, researchers observed pika elsewhere in the U.S. were disappearing at lower, warmer elevations.

Lucas: And so that was one of the initial kind of alarm bells saying, hey, perhaps there's some impacts here of temperature on pikas.

Michael: [to Lucas] So pika have a really limited ability to thermoregulate like we can sweat when we're hot, dogs can pant, but pikas have to live in an environment that can keep them cool. So higher elevations or staying under the rocks when it's hot outside. And changes to the temperature outside could affect where they're actually able to live, right?

Lucas: Yes.

Alyssa: I would add that they are considered ecosystem sentinels, meaning that they can sort of indicate the status of an ecosystem affected by climate change. Temperatures get above a certain level, I think, lucas It might be 68 degrees?

Lucas: Yeah.

Alyssa: A pika is going to begin to experience physiological stress. And also if it gets too cold in the winter due to, for instance, a decreased snowpack in the mountains caused by climate change, then the pikas don't have enough insulation when they're under the rocks. And so they can also die of cold. And so thinking of pikas as ecosystem sentinels, it's been interesting for me because that means that they're not only an animal to study, they are like a metric, like mercury in a thermometer. And so they're a way of reading an environment as well.

Michael: I've always thought of science as a tool of illumination. Lucas's research is like turning the light on in a dark room by taking a census of pikas in Glacier. He'll reveal how they're doing, shining a light on the big picture. But when you zoom in and look closely, there are still places that light doesn't reach. [synth beat begins to play]

Alyssa: It's pretty easy to begin to forget what your object of study is. I mean, you're engaged in these sort of daily routines of surveying and, you know, looking for these signs and following these procedures. And at least I found myself, like, forgetting that there is an actual sort of living being somewhere on the end of of this data.

Michael: From a professional academic distance, the consequences of pika decline can feel abstract. Reading scientific papers that quantify their demise, my first thought is that one day I might not be able to see them anymore. Not the difficult reality of what happens to a pika who can't take the heat.

Alyssa: And so, yeah, I do hope that that is something that art can bring to the table. [synth beat finishes playing]

Michael: Alyssa channeled these thoughts into a short story called Detection Probability, which I asked her to read for us.

Alyssa: All right. Detection Probability. The day before they declare their love, he takes her up a mountain. They are looking for Ochotona princeps, the American pika, which he conducted research on years ago, before his grant ran out and his postdoc ended and he took the job here, teaching section after section of freshman biology. She wants to see a pika very badly, because she is in that stage of the relationship where she is hungry to lay claim on all that happened to him before she entered his life, desperate to be able to imagine his life in all its distant invisible weaving, right up until the point it crisscrossed her own. She is twenty-nine and he is thirty-three and she thinks of the many years they existed on this earth simultaneously but without each other, traveling their untouching paths. It is difficult to give reality to his life before her, difficult to infuse it with solidity. The other night, in bed, she flipped through an entire photo album while he poured her bourbon and fed her spoonfuls of chocolate ice cream and she said, Who is this? Where is this? What year is this? Now, on the mountain, he says: “Look in the shady spaces under rocks. And keep an eye out for hay piles.” They climb over talus in the sun. They are at an elevation of 8,000 feet, on a south-facing slope in the American west. Near them but out of sight are several ground squirrels, one hoary marmot, a black rosy finch, two Clark’s nutcrackers, 300,000 worker ants, fifty-seven miller moths, thirteen checkerspot butterflies, and one wary wolverine. Also nearby but out of sight are several hundred pieces of colored microplastic, a floppy hat lost long ago, an oxidized Coca Cola can, and a rotting map of the region, its pages waterlogged and warped so the contour lines ripple up in waves, rising like topography, like some ragged paper range. “I can’t see anything,” she says. Tonight, after coming down the mountain and driving through the summer dark back to town, they will lie next to each other in his bed and each will want to say the words—I love you—but they won’t. Each will want to say it but instead they’ll lie in silence trying to imagine what the other one is thinking. They’ll steal glances at each other, struck suddenly by the other’s opacity. Who is this person lying naked next to them? Who is this stranger? Is there a mouth behind those lips, are there eyes behind those lids, are there organs below the skin of this stomach? And they will feel suddenly that the months they’ve known each other are nothing, nothing at all, that this person still remains dark and impenetrable as the interior of a mountain. And they will fall asleep this way and dream strange dreams which in the morning they will pretend they have forgotten. All of this will happen but not yet. “I can’t see anything,” she says. “I’ve seen them here before,” he says. The pika they are looking for is in fact on the far side of the mountain, three thousand feet higher up. The sun is hot, hot, hot these days and the alpine air is thin and ragged with the heat. The pikas are migrating higher and higher to survive. He knows this is the case elsewhere but for some reason he doesn’t think about it happening here. They continue looking under the same rocks. Three thousand feet above them, a pika carries a mouthful of vegetation back to its hay pile, which lies drying in the sun. A stockpile for winter. When temperatures drop, the pika will burrow underground to be insulated by snow, emerging only to retrieve its secret hay. But this year the winter will be warm. There will be very little snow, and the paradox of this is that there will not be enough insulation to protect the pika. Huddled underground it will grow still, then even stiller, then turn to a corpse from the cold. The hay will go soggy in the warm and early spring, will begin its years of slow decay. All of this will happen but not yet. “We might be too low down,” he admits. He’s explained to her about pikas’ sensitivity to climate, their migration to higher elevations. The problem, he said, is that mountains are cone shaped. The higher up you go, the less space you have. She imagined all the plants and animals of the alpine ecosystem being drawn upward as if by a magnet, growing increasingly condensed, until they reached the peak and ran out of room. She imagined them clustered there at the top, tangled up in each other, fur and leaf and blossom and wing, and then she imagined them lifting off the mountain, rising up off the earth, streaming into the air and away. A kite string of flora and fauna, floating higher and higher, piercing the atmosphere, scattering into space. “I’m sorry we didn’t see any,” she says as they climb back into the car and head for home. “Next time,” he says. The sun is sinking in an orange flare. “Tell me again about your summer of research,” she says. He tells her. She tries to imagine it. The sun sets and now it is night. Alyssa: This is fiction, just so everyone knows.

Michael: [to Alyssa] Okay. [all laughing]

Alyssa: This is clearly not us at all. [synth beat plays to mark a transition]

Michael: We often turn to art to see the world from a new perspective. And Alyssa's story challenges common thinking that the best way to comprehend something is from a bird's eye view -- at an almost impersonal distance. But by blending the fates of pika and the people studying them, Alyssa closes that gap.

Alyssa: The real shared thread is the limits of knowledge. Whether we're trying to know another person, or trying to know a nonhuman species who hides beneath rocks. We are always limited in our ability to know the other, and we have to rely on imagination to know anyone or anything. And so the characters in this piece, they are unable to access the pika because climate change is messing things up. And so it's not that the world doesn't quite work the way that they've learned it works, and they are also, to an extent, unable to access each other even as they are falling in love. There is this perpetual distance that they are aware of and trying to crack open, and that that sort of dark center that lies at the core of of all things essentially is the connection between the two.

Michael: Science tells me often and in painful detail about waves of heat crashing around the pikas' shrinking mountain islands. Despite that, the pikas' suffering is invisible to me. I hear them eep as I hike up the mountain. And maybe someday I won't anymore. Alyssa's story lingers on moments that research often seems to ignore. Describing the suffering felt by pika that's implied by these studies, but that's easier to look away from -- applying what we've learned through research to a story that's personal, intimate, even. In the end, Lucas and Alyssa suggest that truly understanding what's in store for Glacier's pika, or reckoning with the impact of climate change on any living thing, demands searching for the story beyond your experience -- asking how the big picture is felt on a small scale, and using science and creativity in tandem.

Alyssa: It's been said by many people that the climate crisis is in part a crisis of the imagination. We lack the capacity to think long term. We lack the capacity even to think to next week, let alone decades from now. So again, these questions of scale that we are not particularly good at conceptualizing. And so I think that literature and hopefully, you know, innovative literature, literature that's trying new things, can help us to strengthen those imaginative capacities. I don't want to put too much on the back of literature. [chuckles] That's a lot to do to save the world. I think there's other smaller things that it does, too, such as just articulating the griefs that a lot of us are feeling right now. [somber synth music begins to play] Navigating a world where we see so many things we love falling away and just giving voice to that experience, I think is also a valuable task that that fiction can accomplish. [synth beat continues to play]

Peri Sasnett: Headwaters is a production of Glacier National Park and is supported by the Glacier National Park Conservancy. We could not make the show without them. You can learn more about what they do at Glacier.org. Headwaters is made possible with help from Lacy Kowalski, Melissa Sladek and so many people throughout the Glacier community, especially the natural and cultural resource teams. We're grateful for all of you. Our music this season is by the brilliant Frank Waln. The show's cover art is by our sweet friend Stella Nall. Check out Frank and Stella's work at the links in our show notes. Special thanks this episode to Lucas Moyer-Horner and Alyssa Quinn, along with Kylie Caesar and the Crown of the Continent Research Learning Center, for introducing us to their work. Besides sharing this episode with a friend who might appreciate it, you can help us out by leaving us a rating and review in your podcast app. Thanks for listening.

Morgan Bell spent 10 seasons working on Glacier’s trail crews—one of the toughest and most demanding jobs in the park. Until a single day—a single step—changed everything.

Headwaters is created by Daniel Lombardi, Michael Faist, Gaby Eseverri, and Peri Sasnett.

Glacier Conservancy: https://glacier.org/headwaters Frank Waln music: https://www.instagram.com/frankwaln/ Stella Nall art: https://www.instagram.com/stella.nall/

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TRANSCRIPT:

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Lacy Kowalski: Headwaters is supported by the Glacier National Park Conservancy.

Gaby Eseverri: Note: this episode deals with an intense accident in Glacier. Please take care while you're listening.

Morgan: I remember this distinct feeling of getting off that hitch, and having that weekend to myself, and just being completely content with life. I remember that moment of just like, Oh, I'm so happy and I feel so good with where I am and who I am right now.

Gaby: So what happened on the walk back?

Morgan: I was on an incline, and when you walk on an incline and snow, you kind of like lean in: kick, kick, kick, dig, kick, kick, kick, dig. So I had kicked into the snow, that there was enough where I had kicked in and exposed it that I actually kicked in to ice. And I stepped on it, and it just took me out immediately.

Gaby: You fell.

Morgan: I did.

Gaby: You fell off the Highline.

Morgan: I began to slide. Yes, I fell off the Highline.

Gaby: Every community—a high school, a workplace, a national park— has its set of stories: local legends, colorful rumors and cautionary tales told in hushed whispers. They come and go, as people do, but I think some of these stories are etched into the fabric of these places. When I moved to Glacier last year, I started to learn the stories and characters of my new community from the stories we've told on Headwaters, to the old locally-famous characters I see referenced everywhere. Like Joe Cosley, the notorious park ranger and poacher. Or Josephine Doody, the moonshine mogul. One of these stories is that a trail crew employee once fell from the highline trail onto Going to the Sun Road and lived. It's almost beyond belief. And it felt a little taboo to know this about one of my neighbors. To know what happened, but not know them.

Music: [somber flute music starting]

Gaby: To know what felt like their secret, but not their telling of it. This year, I became friends with that person. And I quickly realized that they don't see it as a secret. This story that I saw as a dark piece of their past was something that they brought light to. And in doing so, brought light to so much more. You're listening to Headwaters, I'm Gaby. This is a show about how Glacier National Park is connected to everything else. In this episode, we talk about how one event can change a life. This is a story of Morgan Bell's relationship with Glacier: a career on trail crew, and how a single day, a single step, changed everything.

Gaby: Do you get the sense that you'll go down in park history? Park lore?

Morgan: I think, with such a substantial experience and story of survival, yes. I think my name will be associated with this place for a very long time. My name is Morgan Bell. I am a concession management specialist here at Glacier National Park, and I have been employed here for 22 years.

Gaby: What brought you to Glacier then? What brought you to Montana?

Morgan: I had received a letter from Glacier National Park in the mail advertising positions for trail maintenance.

Gaby: Had you ever been to Glacier?

Morgan: I had never been to Glacier. In all honesty, I had never even heard of Glacier National Park.

Gaby: [laughing] Okay, cool. So when you came out here at 22 to work trails, this place sort of represented adventure.

Morgan: Yeah, it really set a stage for me to be my own person. It was my first time on my own.

Gaby: 22. Yeah. So what was working trails like here when you started?

Morgan: It was super intense. It was exposing, not only to the elements, but emotionally, you know, like personal level exposing—of being embodied in the woods with strangers for six months.

Gaby: And you're physically doing a lot of work because you're clearing trails?

Morgan: Yeah.

Gaby: Yeah. What does that actually mean? And what are you actually doing?

Morgan: It consists of typically a season that runs from April to October. And you, primarily in the spring, are focusing on clearing downed trees that would have fallen through winter storms.

Gaby: Okay. So to get them ready for visitors.

Morgan: Yeah, yeah, for hiking. So we'd go out and clear trails with chainsaws, sometimes crosscuts. Clean all of the drains so that water can move off of the trail. We build structures so all of the bridges that you cross across creeks and rivers.

Gaby: So it's taking a lot of you physically to be able to do all of that.

Morgan: Physically and then mentally. I mean, you're put into the wilderness and working hard and building relationships. But it really laid the foundation and gave me a glimpse into my, like my ability of self, what I could and couldn't do. It was a really strengthening period for me.

Gaby: So tell me about this culture of trails.

Morgan: There's a lot of pride in it. There's a lot of ownership and there's a lot of longevity.

Gaby: If you're a newbie, it's like, Are you going to stick around?

Morgan: Are you going to stick around?

Gaby: Yeah. Are you going to be a, what do you trail people call themselves, trail dogs?

Morgan: Trail dogs.

Gaby: Okay. [laughing]

Morgan: Yeah. Yeah, trail dogs. It's a right to become a trail dog. You have to work for it. It's a sense of pride to become one. Yeah. To become part of the pack. There was an authenticity to the relationships that you could build with individuals in such extreme environments. It was a community that provided instantaneous support. It was a wave of, like, experiences with each other.

Gaby: Hmm.

Morgan: We have ten days where it just pours rain on us.

Gaby: Everyone's unhappy. Everyone's miserable.

Morgan: Everyone's unhappy. Yeah. Yeah. But that somehow connected us, and we still got the job done. We still had fun. We still made our meals together. Yeah.

Gaby: So you moved here when you're 22, you started trails.

Morgan: Mm hmm.

Gaby: At some point, you became crew lead.

Morgan: Yeah. So typically, each crew, depending on the district, is made up of anywhere from 4 to 6 individuals. My crew that year was myself (the crew lead), and then I had a maintenance worker, and I had two laborers. I had a lot of, I was very excited and had a lot of pride to be a trail lead.

Gaby: How old were you when that happened?

Morgan: 32. I really started to see how Glacier had shaped me into the individual that I was becoming. I can hike a trail, like I can in my mind, I can envision a trail without being on it because I've been on it so many times.

Gaby: That makes me think of knowing our homes in such an intimate way.

Morgan: Mm hmm.

Gaby: And so these trails are sort of. Yeah, like a home.

Morgan: It is home. It is home. You know, I have a favorite tree. I have a favorite rock.

Gaby: Aww.

Both: [laughing]

Morgan: And I have memories built in certain areas right? There's like, those keynote moments that are kind of ingrained in my being. I became very integrated with Glacier. I identified with it. There's an intimacy of how I connected with Glacier. My literal blood, sweat and tears were put into the ground.

Gaby: From working trails.

Morgan: From working trails. Trails exposed me to the deepest parts of myself. It built a level of strength and identity within me to understand myself. That was like a level of intimacy. Who would I be as an individual if I wasn't shaped.

Gaby: By trails.

By trails. It solidified that this was where I was supposed to be. I'm all about universal signs. [laughs] And there was a moment before I came to work here. I was working in a physical therapy office at the front desk. And there was a calendar that I had, and one of the photographs I really admired. And so once the month had passed, I tore that page out and stuck it on my wall and would just look at it. Fast forward, and I'm standing at the top of Logan Pass, and I look around and I was like, [gasp], this is that picture. And so that was a pivotal moment for me where I was just like, This is where I'm supposed to be.

Gaby: Logan Pass is the highest place you can drive to in Glacier, home to the highline trail. The highline is cut steeply into the mountainside, and parallels Going to the Sun road for several miles. When I hiked the trail, I was surrounded by beargrass and other colorful wildflowers in bloom, and I was sweating as the warm summer breeze hugged me. When Morgan and her crew were there on that day in 2012, it was still spring: gloomy and snowy, and her cheeks were pink from the cold mountain air. She was there to get the trail open, clearing it of snow and debris to get it ready for the thousands of eager boots that hike the highline every summer. This is no easy task on any trail. But now imagine one with drop offs so steep that it feels like every butterfly in the world made its way to your stomach. As if that weren't enough. Out of snow and ice to the mix.

Morgan: The morning had started, July 3rd, 2012, but it was raining and it was like a low cloud cover. Definitely still spring-summer in the high country. Historically, trail crew is responsible for blasting snowfields on trails of high use. So we walked out, got to our destination—the last snow field we needed to assess—and then we geared up and begun our walk back to the trailhead. One of my trail members was in front of me. I was second in line in the group of five, and him and I were just chatting up a storm. We were just like having a really good conversation. And we had crossed a number of snow fields by this point and we had approached our last one that we needed to cross. I got pretty far across it, and I could see there's seasonal water. This part, section of the trail, seasonal water flows. What had happened is that water had froze, and created like an ice layer. I was on an incline and when you walk on an incline in snow, you kind of like lean in, kick it, kick, dig, kick, kick, kick, dig. So I had kicked into the snow. But there was enough where I had kicked in and exposed it that I actually kicked in to ice. And I stepped on it, and it just took me out immediately. It was fast. Like, it wasn't like a "whoopsie" slip, it was like a slip. Hit the ground. Start sliding.

Gaby: You're still on snow and ice.

Morgan: I'm traveling, still on snow and ice. Yes. And I was crossing, the snow had kind of collected in a couloir of sorts, or like a you know, a natural chute that had been created through this water feature.

Gaby: Okay.

Morgan: So snow ran from the trail all the way to the road. It's not fluffy, It's not soft. It's not playful. It's icy, hard-packed, compacted snow. Very.

Gaby: Rough.

Morgan: Rough and hard.

Gaby: And if anything, it's only making you slide faster.

Morgan: Faster. Yeah. And the slope of which I was sliding was also steep. I hit the snow immediately, and began to slide. And I recall when I first fell, I was on my back and I was going headfirst, downhill. I attempted to self arrest with the hand tool I had, which was a shovel. So it's a method of putting it across your body and trying to dig it in and use it as a break. I didn't have crampons or an ice axe. That wasn't something that we typically carried with us. I was able to like, spin myself around with my shovel, and then I was feet first going down, trying to break.

Gaby: So now you're seeing.

Morgan: Now I'm seeing.

Gaby: The ground.

Morgan: The ground and where I'm going. But I'm like laying on my back still and trying to use my shovel. At some point, my shovel was ripped out of my hand. And I lost it. And I remember in that pivotal moment, it was so fast, but everything was like so slow in that moment. And I remember just being very aware of what was happening, but extremely like, methodical in my actions. So once I lost my shovel. I flip myself back onto my stomach. And so now I'm traveling. Feet first on my belly. And my only attempt to slow myself down was to expand. So I put my arms out, starfish, essentially. Put my arms out really far. Began to dig in with my hands and my nails. My feet started to, like, kind of really push my toes into the snow. I remember, like the sensation of my face dragging on the snow, and the sound of it, the speed of it.

Music: [low, dramatic bass music starts in the background]

Morgan: And like the snow that I was gripping and moving across, like flying around me. And like, screaming, it was incredibly loud. Really, really intense, primal fear, like loss of control and completely terrified. What my crew members experienced as well is that they heard me yell, I can't stop.

Gaby: So they're hearing you while they're still standing on the highline?

Morgan: Yes. And they're watching me. They can see me sliding down. At a certain point, they lost sight of me and didn't know what the outcome was, but knew that I had made it to the road because from the highline they could see the road itself, but they could see vehicles going around.

Gaby: Something.

Morgan: Something.

Gaby: On a slippery patch of hard snow and ice. Morgan slid 350 feet from the highline. That's more than the entire height of the Statue of Liberty. Then she free fell another 12 feet onto unforgiving pavement. Onto Going to the sun Road.

Morgan: I remember a majority of the slide and at some point I lost consciousness, on the snow field. And I came to on the road. I don't know the duration after I fell, like if it was seconds, minutes. I remember like being on all fours, you know, on my belly and just kind of like lifting my head and seeing blood everywhere, like pooled up on the on the road and all over my face. I was like, Oh, my gosh, okay, I'm on the road. And at that very moment, it was like these little black shoes came running up and came within my view. And I was almost like in Child's Pose, hunkered down, and this individual was saying to me, like, are you okay? Where did you come from? I don't know how clear I was in communicating, but I recall saying I fell from the highline. I'm trail crew. I was on the highline. I slid. I recall laying down instantly, feeling a lot of pressure in my head. Intense pressure in my head, in my face. Just holding my head.

Music: [music fades, shifting to background flute music]

Morgan: And I recall people coming in. So visitor service assistants from Logan Pass came down to assist. They started performing an assessment on me of my injuries and stabilizing me, you know, my C spine and everything like that. The individual who had come upon me on the road was actually a registered nurse from Billings. From what I understand, Rangers got on site and Alert—which is an emergency helicopter—was called, and took off immediately to come LifeFlight me to the hospital. And so I was put on a board and put in the back of the shuttle bus and transported to Big Bend. And once Alert was on site, they put me in an induced coma and got me in the plane or in the helicopter, and we took off.

Music: [dramatic flute concludes]

Morgan: I would never be who I was again. Even with complete healing, I would always be different. It would never be the same. That trails would never be the same, that my life and my activities and my existence as I knew it would never be the same.

Gaby: Do you remember waking up in the hospital?

Morgan: Mmhmm.

Gaby: Was it where you confused or.

Morgan: No, I was incredibly ashamed. I remember my supervisor, who I have great admiration for. He was there in the room. They got the call that I had woken up. I was in the ICU, and the first thing I said was I'm sorry. [laugh] I remember him just being like, will you stop it? You know? Like, why are you apologizing to me? Like, no apology is necessary. I felt embarrassed. I felt ashamed. I felt that I had let the team down through my actions. Because I understood the consequences of what had happened not only to me but to the program as well.

Gaby: In the days following the park, halted all trail crew operations while they investigated the accident. For the next season, there were new safety guidelines in place for snow travel. And every year since, trail crew does mandatory snow and ice safety training where they practice using ice axes and crampons, and setting up fall protection. Morgan's accident changed the trails program and the culture of snow safety throughout the entire park. Heads up. Morgan is about to describe her injuries. If you're not interested in listening to the details, you can skip ahead 2 minutes.

Gaby: So when you woke up at the hospital, what were the physical injuries?

Morgan: Starting from the top, traumatic brain injury.

Music: [low base music starts playing in the background]

Morgan: So I had had a swelling of the brain. So to stop that, what they had done is shaved my hair, just the top portion of my scalp, front portion, and created a laceration from my right ear to the apex of my head.

Gaby: Like, they cut that open.

Morgan: They cut that open well and essentially peeled back down and drilled three holes into my skull, which alleviated the pressure of the fluid building up inside of there. While they did that, I had also sustained multiple fractures to my face. And one of the more sustainable fractures that I had was completely shattering my forehead. So they went in and pieced it together with metal pieces that ironically are called Dog Bones. I broke my nose. I lost my front tooth, chipped it. I had multiple lacerations on my face, the most extreme being my upper lip, which had been torn off and my cervical area and neck. I had,uh, bilateral dissected carotid arteries, which essentially is the bands around my carotid arteries had exploded. I then had a right dislocated shoulder and a lacerated liver. So majority of the injuries were head and neck. Every single one of them was life threatening.

Gaby: Did you feel like you looked different? Like it was a different person that you were looking at after the accident?

Morgan: Yeah. And that was really hard to look at myself. Really hard to look at myself after the accident. [emotionally] A lot of like, sadness for what I had done. It was just hard. It was hard to like, I don't feel myself as vain, but it's hard to look at yourself with, in a different context, when something on your face changes or on your body change. Essentially a stranger. The shell of me had changed. I had identified with myself for so long as someone in the mirror meant to be looking and seeing the holes in my head and the scar on my forehead.

Music: [flute music comes in in the background]

Morgan: And the abnormal angle of my nose and the shift of my eyes and all of it. The missing tooth, the shaved head.

Gaby: So there is this reckoning that you're going through with identity.

Morgan: There was a reckoning of the identity not only like physically, but a reckoning of the loss of my identity of self and who I presented myself as. What I did.

Gaby: Yeah.

Morgan: Who I was. It was wiped clean in one fall.

Music: [flute music concludes]

Morgan: This loss of self and identity, and my former relationship with Glacier, for a very long time challenged me and put me in very dark places. You know, depression came naturally with it. I get covered by the darkness, and there's times that I can let it put me on the ground and be at the depths of it. Ultimately. There's an essence of my being that shines brighter.

Gaby: Did the fall at any point feel like it defined Glacier for you? Like you were sort of avoidant of this place because it was too intense, to go to Logan Pass, or too intense to go through the entrance station?

Morgan: Never.

Gaby: Never.

Morgan: No. I'd be remiss to say that it wasn't. Moments of anxiety driving up the road and approaching the shoot.

Music: [background synth music begins]

I know that none of this occurred out of vengeance, that I did something wrong to deserve this. I was eager to come back and connect, such an integral part of my being. It was a loss. I was grieving. I was grieving Glacier. I was grieving that I wasn't able to immerse myself in it. And that I had to be home. There was nothing I wanted more than to be here. This place means a lot to me, and I care immensely for every square inch of it. And so, I have apologized to Glacier. We've come to an understanding together that that wasn't intentional. I have a direct line of sight of the garden wall from the foot of Lake McDonald. And while you can't see the exact location that I fell, it's still the general area. And I have allowed the wind to carry my words up valley. And I have allowed the wall's words to carry down to me. I honor it. Dubbed the chute, like, "Oh, shoot." [laughs]

Gaby: Oh, chute.

Morgan: Yeah, "Oh chute!"

Gaby: That's what you call it when you go by it?

Morgan: Yeah. You know, I. Yesterday I drove the road and I said hi to it as I passed it. I spotted it I was like, Oh, there it is.

Gaby: Oh, chute.

Morgan: The Oh, chute. And I don't pass it and associate it with the memories of falling. It's just like, wow, there is that pivotal point. The memories of the fall [sniffle] aren't associated with it anymore.

Gaby: I don't think anyone would have blamed Morgan if she decided to leave this place after experiencing what she did. For all its beauty, Glacier has seen some truly horrible things: Morgan's accident, and so many others. This place has stories that I will never really know, or for that matter, understand. Maybe all places and communities do. But I think Morgan is right that to really know a place, a community, means honoring that darkness.

Music: [music fades out]

Morgan: There's not a conversation where it's like, me without Glacier. It has been such an integral part of my life for two decades on so many levels. It's where I have worked. It's where I've experienced loss. It's where I fell in love. It's where I raised my daughters. It's where I have some of my closest relationships and life memories embodied. It is here.

Music: [swelling string music begins]

Morgan: The epitome of a trail dog is like strength and tenacity. You know, and I was exemplifying that like tenfold by surviving. It was just the circumstances,.

Gaby: Right.It was ice.

Morgan: It was ice. It was an accident.

Gaby: It was an accident.

Morgan: Yeah. I sometimes ponder with the idea of like, was it intentional? Did it have to be me and did I get to survive? For the purpose of what I am now. It was supposed to be me. So it's it's really curious. Like, where would I be?

Gaby: Yeah.

Morgan: Where would I be without this experience? Where would I be without this place? So I appreciate you guys. Thank you very much for letting me share my story.

Gaby: Well, we love you.

Morgan: I love you guys, too. Thank you so much.

Music: [Dramatic music swells, and plays out under the credits]

Peri Sasnett: Headwaters has a production of Glacier National Park and is supported by the Glacier National Park Conservancy. We could not make the show without them. You can learn more about what they do at Glacier.org. Headwaters is made possible with help from Lacy Kowalski, Melissa Sladek, and so many people throughout the Glacier community, especially the natural and cultural resource teams. We're grateful for all of you. Our music this season is by the brilliant Frank Waln. The show's cover art is by our sweet friend Stella Nall. Check out Frank and Stella's work at the links in our shownotes. Special thanks this episode to Morgan Bell for sharing her story so candidly and gracefully. We also appreciate Duncan Lennon and Cameron Aveson for all of their insight into the trails program. Besides sharing this episode with a friend who might appreciate it, you can help us out by leaving us a rating and review in your podcast app. Thanks for listening.

We sit down with Chuck Cameron, a lifelong Glacier Ranger, to learn about his incredible and unusual career.

Headwaters is created by Daniel Lombardi, Michael Faist, Gaby Eseverri, and Peri Sasnett.

Glacier Conservancy: https://glacier.org/headwaters Frank Waln music: https://www.instagram.com/frankwaln/ Stella Nall art: https://www.instagram.com/stella.nall/

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TRANSCRIPT:

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Lacy Kowalski: Headwaters is supported by the Glacier National Park Conservancy.

Michael Faist: Have you ever met somebody for the first time, introduced yourself and had a nice conversation only to walk away and immediately forget their name? I have. It feels like one of the great shared human experiences to have that guilty conversation with yourself. Was it John? Jim? Shoot. Which makes it all the more surprising when you meet someone who seems to be immune to that phenomenon. Someone like Chuck Cameron.

Chuck Cameron: My name is Chuck Cameron. [squirrel chirping loudly] There's a squirrel.

Gaby Eseverri: [laughing] There's a little squirrel.

Michael: [in the field] All right. One more time without the squirrel [laughing].

Chuck: Yeah, without the squirrel. [clearing throat] My name is Chuck Cameron, and I'm a wilderness ranger here in Glacier.

Michael: Chuck has been a ranger in Glacier longer than I've been alive, and he's a bit of a local legend. Even so, after meeting me once for 30 seconds at a party during my first season here, he remembered my name months later, shook my hand and was happy to see me. Which felt nice because I'd heard Chuck's name a lot. He's the sort of person that everyone you meet knows and loves, and the incredible stories you hear about them don't seem to line up with the calm and mild-mannered person you've met. But while Chuck has led a long and storied career here in Glacier, the most surprising part of that career is that the park terminates him, every fall. Well, kind of. A common question we get from visitors is what does it take to be a park ranger? And while there is no one answer to that question, as there's no one type of park ranger, a good answer is you've got to be willing to move every six months. Ninety five percent of Glaciers visitors come between May and October. So it makes sense that the park doesn't really need most of its staff in the wintertime. So to find a career in the NPS, a lot of people move across the country every six months, bouncing between summer and winter jobs. My friend just told me last week he's moved 48 times. And for most, the ultimate goal is to land one of the few competitive permanent positions in the Park Service. I've always seen that as the path to an NPS career. But it wasn't Chuck's.

Michael: [in the field] And how long have you worked here in Glacier?

Chuck: This is my 42nd season.

Gaby: 42nd?

Chuck: Yeah.

Gaby: Woah! That's a lot of seasons. I'm on-I'm on season two [laughing].

Chuck: You-You only have 40 to go, and we'll be the same [Chuck, Michael and Gaby laughing].

Michael: Chuck's been a seasonal his whole career. One of the few people I've met in Glacier who can say that. [theme music fades in] I wanted to sit down with him because I think his unusual path says a lot about the unusual job that is working for the National Park Service. Equal parts, delightful and stressful, noble, yet often bizarre. But I also think that few people could have had the career that Chuck has. And I want to know how he did it. [theme music plays, with the strumming of a string instrument, a flute, and drumbeats].

Michael: You're listening to Headwaters, a show about how Glacier National Park connects with everything else. I'm Michael. [music fades] And today I invited lifelong Glacier Ranger Chuck Cameron over for dinner.

Michael: [in the field] [laughter] Yeah, let's go to the porch.

Michael: Chuck's a laid back guy, very tall, the warm smile, and he's easy to get along with. You can tell just by looking at him. He showed up to dinner wearing an aloha shirt cooler in hand,.

Michael: [in the field] [someone cracks open a canned beverage] Serve yourself, we've got pulled pork and coleslaw sandwiches.

Michael: The plan my fellow producer, Gaby, and I came up with was to sit around the campfire with Chuck and share stories. But unfortunately, a much larger fire had just started a—wildfire seven miles away, so we were under a strict burn ban. No campfires. So instead, I made pulled pork sandwiches and we settled down on a porch with a view.

Chuck: Thank you. That was delicious.

Michael: [in the field] You're Wilderness Ranger now. What was the first job you had here in the park?

Chuck: I worked on the trail crew as a Laborer in Many Glacier in 1982.

Michael: Was that the first time you ever came to the park?

Chuck: The first time I'd ever been to Montana.

Michael: Woah.

Gaby: Really? From where?

Chuck: Well, I worked actually at Rocky Mountain National Park in 1980 and 81, right out of college. But I was looking at the map, and I saw Glacier National Park, and I like the sound of the name. It just sounded cool. And it was in Montana, and I'd never been here. So I threw in an application and they called me up and offered me a trail crew job.

Michael: There are 745.9 miles of trail in Glacier, and each year the park hires 50 to 60 people across 12 different crews to maintain all that mileage. They clear dead and downed trees, brush the trails to minimize how much thimble berry and thistle you have to walk through, dig drains to move water off and make steps. Honestly, they do a lot of work that often goes unnoticed.

Chuck: I liked being out for ten days at a time with the same people, and you build this sort of bond with this crew you’re on because you're working, cooking, eating, sleeping in all kinds of weather for ten straight days and you learn to rely on each other a bunch. It's just a really unique work situation, I think. You know, I never really thought like everybody working at JC Penney, like hung out after work and cook-went home and cook dinner together.

Gaby: Shared the same room.

Chuck: Share the same room, or slept the same tent or…

Gaby: Yeah.

Michael: During his time on trail crew, Chuck worked on a lot of trails, but he highlighted one especially odd project.

Chuck: Uh, I think the most craziest season I had on trail crew, we cut the International Boundary Swath in 1987 and [someone in the background says “wow] I was a crew leader on the east side and it hadn't been dealt with in 20 years.

Michael: Glacier’s northern boundary is the U.S.–Canada border, and since the 1860s there has been a swath, a gap through the trees to mark where it is.

Chuck: It marks the international boundary and it's has monuments, steel obelisk monuments spaced out the entire 5,000 mile international boundary.

Michael: To keep trees and brush from filling in the swath, it's needed periodic maintenance in 150 years it's been here.

Chuck: And it's a 20-foot-wide swath cleared of all vegetation, so you can see from monument to monument, basically. Yeah, we spent 80 days, ten-day hitches at a time doing nothing but clearing the boundary.

Michael: [in the field] Jeez.

Gaby: Wow.

Michael: So Chuck and his crew were cutting it out by hand in the late eighties. But I'd heard a rumor that in the sixties, someone decided to use Agent Orange to clear the swath. The infamous ingredient used in napalm.

Michael: [in the field] …said at one point, they used Agent Orange to clear the boundary swath.

Chuck: They did, that's what they had done the time before we cut it by hand. They defoliated it from the air, which wasn't very accurate. And so the boundary swath was this like snaking thing through the. And so our job was to straighten it out and so we surveyed it as we went from monument to monument.

Michael: You're redrawing the line.

Chuck: Redrawing the line, yeah.

Peri Sasnett: That’s a lot of responsibility.

Chuck: Well, it was and it was kind of nutty because sometimes the swath was just going through the forest. There was no like, cut. It was just point A to point B. [someone laughs in background] We just up the side of one mound and down the side of the, you know, [someone in background days “wow] and we went around beaver ponds. We handed tools up cliff bands, you know, five-gallon cans of gas up through these cliffs, you know, [someone chuckles and someone says “wow” in background] to get to the next bench and keep going.

Michael: Because normally trail crews working on trails requires a lot more thought and care into where the trail is placed than many people realize, and so the boundary swath is kind of atypical. It's like, yeah, straight ahead-

Gaby: Straight across.

Chuck: Yeah, our-our slogan, and we made a T-shirt, was, uh, “total destruction is the only solution,” [lots of laughter] [bass line fades in] which is it's a line from a Bob Marley song about nuclear war, and that's kind of how we felt about it.

[bass line continues and fades]

Michael: But like all seasonal jobs, Chuck's season on trail crew came to an end. Every fall, you've got to find something else to do. This is when a lot of folks crisscross the country to work in warmer southern parks. But those jobs are few and far between and pretty competitive. It's not really a sustainable solution for most people.

Michael: [in the field] But, uh, what did you-what do you spend your winters doing? How did you string together the other six months of the year?

Chuck: That worked out. I was really lucky in that regard because I got a job on Big Mountain, and I worked on the ski patrol there for 26 years.

Michael: Big Mountain is home to Whitefish Ski Resort, less than an hour from Glacier.

Chuck: Ski season and this season fit together extremely well, and about the time I'd get sick [clears throat] of ski patrol and in April they'd lay me off and I'd get to come here and do something completely different. And then about, you know, late September, I get sick of working here, [laughter] and they'd lay me off here and I'd have a couple of months off in the fall to go do whatever, and then I'd go back skiing again.

Michael: Ski patrol in the winter, trail crew in the summer. And Chuck’s season cutting the border swath highlights that a lot of work in Glacier is extremely physical.

Gaby: So was this your-was this year hardest hitch?

Chuck: Yeah, that was my-I felt invincible at the end of that summer.

Gaby: I bet.

Chuck: I thought, if I can do this, I can do anything.

Gaby: Yeah.

Chuck: So then I quit trails and got a Ranger job. [everyone laughing] Basically.

Gaby: That’s-I mean that's cool a way to go out from trail crew.

Chuck: Yeah.

Gaby: Yeah.

Michael: After his summer on the border swath, Chuck got a job as a Law Enforcement Ranger. He went to Law Enforcement Academy with one of his trail crew friends. And after that, got a job in the Belly River, a remote part of the northeast corner of Glacier.

Chuck: And I worked for a guy named Dave Shea, who was an incredible wealth of knowledge, a scientist just, you know, knows everything about everything. And, yeah, a great guy to work for. My first year in there, so that was awesome. He started here in ‘67, I think, or something.

Michael: [in the field] Was that intimidating? Like to have your first Ranger job kind of… with him?

Chuck: No, it was great. He's so humble and just so knowledgeable and not afraid to share knowledge. You know, like, he would just take me out and show me all these things. And Belly River, the old wagon roads, the old cabin sites, the tracking and birds and just... Yeah, he-he's amazing. And he just took me under his wing, and I spent the whole summer with him.

Michael: This is the sort of job I feel like most people picture when they imagine being a park ranger.

Chuck: You know, we patrolled every day because that's why you're there. You know, we were up one valley or the other… into the campgrounds, talking to all the visitors, checking permits, um, digging out fire rings, cleaning pit toilets, just making sure everything's still working.

Michael: [Chuck’s voice fades out in the background] If you want to learn more about life as the Belly River Ranger, we interviewed Lora Funk, who has that job now, in our last episode. We'll have a link in the show notes. Lora learned from Chuck, and Chuck picked up the tools of the trade from his mentor that first summer.

Chuck: It was great. And then unfortunately, at the end of that summer in 1988, we're sitting around in the behind the ranger station having dinner, and he said, “I just want to tell everybody this is ViVi’s and my’s last summer here.” And I'm just like, what? I just got here, you-you can't leave. You know, this is my first year. I want to keep working. You know, I was going to plan on working with him for a long time. It was good for me. I got the Lead Ranger job in there, you know, and spent the next nine years in there. But it was hard for me to adjust from being trail crew, you know, the kind of the renegades of the Park Service, right? You're kind of out there, out of uniform, doing whatever, digging in the dirt and, you know, and then to a Law Enforcement Ranger.

Michael [in the field]: Yeah.

Chuck: Wearing a uniform.

Michael: In the uniform, in the campgrounds.

Chuck: You know, people come to the Ranger Station when they're in trouble or need something, and so the typical day can be very atypical very quickly if somebody shows up at 8:00 at night.

Michael: And to hear Chuck tell it, there was a bit of a learning curve to becoming this new type of ranger.

Chuck: I was hiking back down from Helen Lake, I think, and I got to the foot of Elizabeth and there was a beargrass flower in the trail, the whole stalk and the flower. And I thought, mmm, that's kind of weird. And I just walked by it. And then there was another one. And then another one and another one, and I'm like, this is not natural. So I started picking them up and I had this huge bouquet of bear grass flower stalks in my arms. I don't know that I could have carried 150, but I had 100 on my bed in my arms. [laughter]

Michael: Following the trail of beargrass flowers, Chuck found a Boy Scout troop at the nearby campground.

Gaby: You've had the entire trail time to just get angrier and stew...

Chuck: Every one I picked up.

[laughter]

Michael: A lot of work on trail crew is physical, but working with the public, keeping people in the park safe, can require a lot of empathy and patience. Chuck's known for his people skills today, but all skills take practice.

Chuck: So I walked in there and I'm holding these things and I didn't handle it very well because I was taking it personally, which is a huge mistake when you're a law enforcement ranger. You cannot-I learned that this was a good lesson for me then. Don't take it personally. It's not about you. It's about, you know, education, and, you know, I've learned that. But then I'm like, does anybody know what these are? And this kid looks at me, he goes, yeah, that's bear grass. I said, yeah, and it used to be alive till all you guys killed it all. And I look over [someone says “uh-oh”] and this kid is got his jackknife out and he's carving his initials in the bench he was sitting on in the campground, and I'm like, can you knock it off? [laughter] Can you quit doing that? And he looks at his buddy and he goes, I don't think he likes us. [group erupts in laughter] Very astute.

Michael: For ripping up 150 beargrass flowers, the troop leader got a $50 fine. Chuck's the first to say that he took that incident personally because he cares about the park and the Belly River. He was essentially its caretaker after all.

Chuck: We saw some great northern lights over the years…the stars, the full moon. You know, it's just, it's magical sometimes. It really is. Yeah. Never got tired of it.

Gaby: It feels like kind of like romantic. Do you remember it that way? Did it feel that way or was it sort of tougher and rougher than-than what we imagine?

Chuck: I think the anticipation was always really great. It's just like, wow, you know, first trip up to Elizabeth Lake or up to Helen or wherever you were going and knowing nobody'd been in there maybe since October. You know, stuff like that just made it really adventurous.

Gaby: Yeah

Chuck: What I liked about it, you know.

Michael: But despite all the things that kept Chuck there for nine summers, he couldn't stay in the Belly forever.

Michael: [in the field] All this to say what pulled you out of the Belly?

Chuck: [chuckles] Life. [bird sings] So I was in there-I left there in ‘96, but I got married in ‘94. I had bought land in-in ’89, and by that time in the mid-nineties, I was starting to try to build a house and my wife got pregnant. And so I was in Belly River with a pregnant wife trying to build a house outside of Whitefish, and it just wasn't working out that well. [bird continues to chirp]

Michael: For context, the Belly River Ranger Station is a three-hour drive and six-mile hike from Whitefish.

Chuck: It was too hard to do that, and so, um, I decided to leave after the summer of ‘96 and work on the house, and our son was born in January of ’97 [bass line fades in], but my wife and I climbed Mount Merritt while she was pregnant with our son.

Gaby: Wow.

Chuck: So that was pretty cool. [laughs]

Michael: That's unbelievable.

Chuck: Yeah, I have a really good picture of us sitting on the summit of Mount Merritt.

Michael: Now that he was closer to home, Chuck moved on to another position: bear crew. [baseline fades out]

Gaby: What was the bear team?

Chuck: Our job was to default to wildlife calls in the McDonald district.

Michael: And there are no shortage of these types of calls. Each year, there are hundreds, some years, nearly a thousand bear related incidents in the park. That's everything from bears causing traffic jams on roads to more serious incidents, like getting into improperly stored food.

Chuck: You know, the bears get all the press, but we did all kinds of wildlife stuff. Goats and sheep and marmots and skunks and bats and, you know, anything that anybody was having an issue with wildlife, the bear team would get to go deal with it.

Michael: [in the field] Do you have any memorable, like specific wildlife encounters from that time?

Chuck: Uh, yeah, lots. Well, one of the funniest ones, if you want to hear a funny one, was the auto shop called one day and said, we have a marmot in our auto shop over here.

Michael: If you don't know marmots are big squirrels. Montana's version of the groundhog.

Chuck: And this marmot had crawled up into the engine well of one of the road crew trucks and ridden all the way down from Logan Pass and ended up in the auto shop. And like, okay, I'm on the bear team. We'll go get this marmot. So it was in their breakroom over there, and they had it trapped in the break room and it was behind the refrigerator. Well, so I had a live trap and I thought, okay, we'll pull the fridge out and put the trap down and the marmot will step in it like they should, and it'll all be done. Well, the marmot had no interest in leaving the back of the refrigerator, [laughter] so we pulled the refrigerator and I was kind of leaned up on top of it, sort of poking down there with a stick, trying to get this marmot out of there. But he had gone in under the compressor of the refrigerator like there was no back on it down by the floor and he'd gone way up in there. He or she. Gave the trap to this guy, and I put on leather gloves and I reached in there and I grabbed this marmot by the hind legs [shocked laughter] and I started to pull him out from under the refrigerator, but this marmot grabbed the refrigerator with his front feet and he would not let go. [group erupting in laughter] And he's squealing like crazy, making some god awful noise, and so I'm yanking this marmot. Finally he lets go and I just stuffed him in this life traps and slammed the door and oh my god…

Michael: Did you drive it back to Logan?

Chuck: We let him go at Packers Roost. I'm not going all the way up there. You're just going to climb in another engine. [group erupts in laughter] Unbelievable. Marmots are strong. I don't know if you know that, but marmots are really strong.

Michael: So far, Chuck's career has focused on, among other things, physical work and people skills. Bear crew required getting to know the park's wildlife up close and personal.

Michael: [in the field] So did you-was it in college or in Law Enforcement Academy when you learned how to wrestle a skunk or leg talk down an aggressive bear? How did you learn how to do this?

Chuck: Trial and error. [laughter] Never gonna do that again. Um, I don't know. You just, you get thrust into it and you just sort of do it, you know, figure it out. I wasn't afraid to ask questions. You know, if we had something like that, I needed to talk to the biologist about, I would certainly go talk to the biologist about what you think we should be doing here. But I didn't go to school for wildlife biology or anything. I have a liberal arts degree, so I wasn't college training by any means. It was on the job training basically my entire career.

Michael: Finally, I wanted to ask Chuck about climbing. He has a shout out in the “Climbers Guide to Glacier National Park,” which is essentially the local mountaineering Bible.

Michael: [in the field] When did you-when did you climb everything? Because it seems like you climbed a lot. [laughter]

Chuck: I tried to climb every peak in the Belly and I didn't quite get there, but yeah, well, when you're in there nine years, you have a lot of time to climb, right? [laughter] Uh, actually my boss in there told me that if you don't climb up Mount Cleveland this summer, you're fired.

Michael: Mount Cleveland is the tallest peak in Glacier, and it's been the site of some infamous accidents.

Chuck: Uh, he said that visitors are climbing these mountains. They're going to get hurt or disappear. You need to know the routes. You need to know where they're going. So you need to get out there and start climbing all these peaks. I said, great, I'll do that.

Michael: Chuck has a lot of funny stories from his time in the park, but there were a lot of serious days too. Thanks to his knowledge of climbing routes and the park landscape. Chuck started helping with search and rescues, and he was good at it. Good enough that the park asked him to get certified as a helicopter manager, and he's been helping with search and rescues on the ground and in the air ever since.

Gaby: Had you had interest in going into search and rescue or was it sort of just like a function of being Law Enforcement in a national park?

Chuck: No, I like it. It's uh, it's a really interesting part of my job. I really-I enjoy it. So, no, it was more than willing… [audio fades under Michael]

Michael: Unfortunately, search and rescues happen every year here in Glacier. In the last three years, there have been over 200. And they're not just climbing accidents. Folks get lost on trail, and are reported missing by friends and family. Others wind up in trouble from exposure to heat or the cold.

Gaby: When you worked search and rescue, what were the outcomes that you expected, especially when there is like those low percentages of…finding…?

Chuck: It's based on time. Time, right? How long is this person been out there and what was their plan? If we even knew what their plan was.

Michael: Searches often include huge teams of people covering all the places that person might have been.

Chuck: People can survive for pretty extended periods of time, and based on the weather, what kind of shape they’re in, they have any food with them. But if they fall 500 feet off a cliff, they're not going to survive. And so if you can search an area really thoroughly, day one, you know, everybody's like, we're going to get this person. Day two, we're going to get this person. Day three, they're still viable. You know, we know this person can still be alive. Once you get six, seven, eight, ten, nine, 15 days down the road and it's like, this person's probably not alive anymore. You never want to feel that way. You know, you always want to know that they're still alive, you can find them. Drives you crazy when you can't, you know, It's like, where are they? They still could be alive. Now, where are they?

Michael: [in the field] I came across an incident that the guy, he was trying to get to Longbow Lake in the North Fork.

Chuck: Oh, yeah.

Michael: Oh, you knew who he was?

Chuck: I found him. [laughs] He was a baker at the Polebridge Mercantile, and he went on a hike to Longbow Lake and never came back. And so we started looking for him, and we had ground teams, and uh, Longbow is above Akokala, off trail. We had a helicopter in the air.

Michael: Chuck was actually assigned to a ground team with the subject's nephew.

Chuck: And they sent us up on the ground up this creek drainage. Oh my God, it was a horrendous bushwhacking. And we were just beating the bush, going up this creek and yelling this guy's name. And we're out there yelling, yelling, yelling, thinking, you know, he's not out here. This is stupid. And then we hear all of a sudden, we hear a voice up in the woods. And I’m like, did you-I looked at this guy. Can't remember the kid's name. Did you hear that? He goes, yeah. So we start yelling. He goes, Dan, Dan. And we hear this voice. Yeah. Holy crap. [laughter] And so we bushwhack our way up to where we heard this voice and there he is. And he has this huge gash in his head. He'd been out 48 hours maybe at that point, um, had no recollection of what happened to him. Um, It appeared to me he fell off a cliff or something from his head trauma. Once we found him, I think everything that was keeping him going left. He was just like, I'm rescued now. I'm just like, done. And anyway, we're in the middle of this lodgepole thicket, basically, an alder thicket. And I was like, okay, now what are we going to do?

Michael: The trees were so dense they couldn't lower a litter for the guy down through the trees, let alone land. So instead, Chuck asked for chainsaws.

Chuck: So anyway, they flew us in a couple of chainsaws, and we spent like 2 hours cutting a landing zone out of the woods right in the middle, wherever. 40-, 50-foot diameter hole out of the woods, maybe in a couple of hours and we brushed it all down.

Michael: This allowed the helicopter to land and take the guy to the nearest hospital.

Chuck: And he went he ended up in the hospital for like 11 days. He had a brain bleed. Yeah, he had a major issue going on. He wasn't going to make it, maybe another day, but…

Michael: [in the field] But he made it.

Chuck: He made it. He’s alive and well.

Michael: Chuck's colleagues are quick to say that he's the kind of person you want involved in a search and rescue because he cares so much, even if the result is ultimately to give a family closure. And thanks to folks like Chuck, most search and rescues in Glacier end like this. Maybe someone's a little banged up, but they're alive. Out of the over 200 that have happened here in the last three years, 96% of the people have survived.

Michael: That must’ve felt pretty good.

Chuck: It felt great. Found one alive. Saved him. Yeah, it was awesome. But I did miss the Willie Willie Nelson concert on Big Mountain that night, though, [group laughs] which I had tickets to.

Gaby: You saved a life but you also missed Willie Nelson.

Chuck: Missed Willie Nelson on Big Mountain.

Michael: Through all of the search and rescues, the bear jams and stubborn marmots, Chuck stayed seasonal.

Chuck: Made it easy for me. I didn't have to move. I built a house. I had a family going, but I didn't have to find a job. I didn't have to think about what I was going to do at the end of the season, which is really stressful. And I live that life for a while on trail crew, and it gets old, you know, you got to pack, you got to go find a place to live, you got to find a job. And it's stressful and it drives people out of being seasonal in the Park Service, I think. But for me it was easy because I never had to move. I just drive east in the summer and north in the winter, you know, from my house, and it was no big deal.

Michael: And while he dodged the difficulty of moving every six months by settling down in Whitefish, moving isn't the only hard part about these jobs. Seasonal positions usually don't provide full benefits. They don't come with a retirement plan. Each year you come back, more of your friends move on, off to another park. And there's a limit to how high you can climb the career ladder as a seasonal.

Gaby: We talk about seasonal turnover and like how hard seasonal life can actually be. And so why-why stay through it all?

Chuck: Uh, I don't know. You know, I've never really been a… I'm content a lot. I'm not necessarily the grass is greener over there kind of person. I've never even applied to another park, ever since I started working here.

Michael: It's worth noting Chuck has support and stability at home. His wife has a year-round job in fire communication, but at work Chuck points out that as you move up the ladder, you can lose a lot of the duties that drew you to the job in the first place.

Chuck: Yeah, I like being in the field. You get a permanent job here and not all of them, but in the ranger division, if you go permanent, you're going to be pushing paper a lot more than you are when you're not permanent.

Michael: Of the rangers I've known who are long time seasonals, all of them had a permanent career on the side. Teachers and professors who have the summer off, or even a lawyer who can choose their own caseload. All of them found some way to squeeze in being a seasonal ranger. All of them except Chuck.

Chuck: I tell people I made a career out of not having a career. [group laughs] Basically. I wouldn't trade it for anything, though. No regrets. You know, there are some great permanent jobs here, don't get me wrong, but there's just the way overloaded people working here and it's just-you see it, you know? And I just never wanted to try that.

Michael: [in the field] Yeah.

Michael: But I'd say if Chuck has a secret to how he stayed seasonal so long, it's how much he loves this place. And all of it too. The scenery, the wildlife, the plants and the people.

Chuck: I just like it here. I just like the whole persona of what Glacier is. Always have, from the minute I got here. And don't get me wrong, I've had some bad days here. You know, there's been some days where I'm just like, oh, man, I got to get out of here. You know, but that just doesn't last long, you know? Yeah. We owe it to the park to take good care of it and do the best we can. I really firmly believe that. And so whether it's small world stuff or big world stuff, and there's big world stuff going on like climate change and all that. My world is very small world. You know, I pull weeds. You know, I clean out fire rings. I pick up trash. I educate visitors, that's a huge part of it, super important part. Building advocates for the Park Service. If I can get somebody to, like, buy into the idea of the Park Service and advocating for it, you know, success.

Michael: [in the field] I think that is a nice segway into the rumors I've been hearing about this maybe being your last season. Is that true?

Chuck: It is true. It's not a rumor. I'm wrapping it up.

Michael: It's not called retiring when you're seasonal. What is it called?

Chuck: Quitting. [group erupts into laughter] They’re going to try and hire me back and I get to say no.

Michael: Chuck loves Glacier, and it's clear Glacier loves him right back. He invited us to his retirement party, which happened a couple of months after our interview, and we arrived to find every parking spot full. Cars lining the road to the venue and people from every stage of his career who'd shown up to celebrate. Here are just a few of the nice things they had to say about him. He's humble. He hates leading. But everybody looks up to him. He's trusted. [haunting violin music fades in] He spends more nights out camping in the park than his colleagues half his age. He's a mentor, a moral compass, and he never forgets a name. And over and over again. We're going to miss him. Chuck's career captures what it's like to work for the Park Service, and he's been a role model for a lot of the people who work here today. Our last question for him, what comes next?

Chuck: You know, I've been stuck in the Glacier rut for so long, I've never even been to the Cabinet Mountains. You know, um, there are all kinds of little mountain ranges around Montana, we got like 54 state parks. I've only been to, like three of them. I just want to do go look around and see what else is out there, you know, and maybe just have the time to do it and feel like doing it.

Gaby: I guess on the still-on the same question of reflection, was your career everything that you expected or...

Chuck: I don't know that I had any expectations. I think it was just this new adventure to Montana. [laughter] You know, you just go check it out, see what happens. Yeah.

[music builds, then fades to play softly under the credits]

Peri: Headwaters is a production of Glacier National Park and is supported by the Glacier National Park Conservancy. We could not make the show without them. You can learn more about what they do at Glacier.org. Headwaters is made possible with help from Lacy Kowalski, Melissa Sladek, and so many people throughout the Glacier community, especially the natural and cultural resource teams. We're grateful for all of you. Our music this season is by the brilliant Frank Waln. The show's cover art is by our sweet friend Stella Nall. Check out Frank and Stella's work at the links in our show notes. Special thanks to Chuck Cameron and everyone who shared memories or stories of Chuck at his very fun retirement party. Besides sharing this episode with a friend who might appreciate it, you can help us out by leaving us a rating and review in your podcast app. Thanks for listening.

We meet a ranger who lives in one of the wildest corners of Glacier—a place where age-old tools and skills are still practiced daily. But do traditional skills, or this way of life, still have a place in a rapidly-evolving world?

Headwaters is created by Daniel Lombardi, Michael Faist, Gaby Eseverri, and Peri Sasnett.

Glacier Conservancy: https://glacier.org/headwaters Frank Waln music: https://www.instagram.com/frankwaln/ Stella Nall art: https://www.instagram.com/stella.nall/

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TRANSCRIPT:

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Lacy Kowalski: Headwaters is brought to you by the Glacier National Park Conservancy.

Peri Sasnett: Picture a National Park Service Ranger station. What does it look like? Maybe a big log cabin with a mossy pitched roof and a creaky screen door? Glacier does have plenty of those, but my office is in park headquarters, which has some strong mid-century middle school energy. And working here, I'm always happening upon obsolete relics of bygone eras. Handwritten memos, ink stamps, a fax machine... I haven't found a typewriter yet, but I wouldn't be surprised to find one lurking in a drawer. Only a few decades ago, people in this building used those things all the time. But like a lot of people, many rangers' jobs have changed pretty dramatically in the last 40 years. Mine definitely has. But in this episode, we're spending a day with a ranger whose office equipment and duties haven't changed much at all in 40—or even 100—years.

Lora Funk: Can you drag this dead goat out of the waterfall? That's a weird one. The marmot's living in the toilet again!

Peri: Meet Wilderness Ranger Lora Funk. She has long, sandy blonde braids and bright blue eyes. She wears the park uniform with a little mud on her boots, and she loves to laugh at the absurdities of life in the backcountry. I immediately want to be her friend.

Lora: My laundry is a bucket with a metal plunger that people call an Alaska Maytag, and I think it gets the clothes cleaner... But I don't think people necessarily think my clothes are clean. [laughs]

Peri: Alongside her colleagues, General and Tank—both horses—and Ellen the mule, Lora helps steward and patrol the Belly River Valley of the park.

Lora: Yeah if someone were to say, like, picture a historic ranger station and a iconic valley... It's Belly River.

Peri: One of her favorite things about the Belly is that there are no roads. So unlike the rest of Glacier's Ranger Stations, you can't drive here.

Lora: The Belly River Ranger Station is located six miles into Glacier's wilderness. [sounds of horse footsteps in the background] You either have to hike in or ride a pony.

Peri: I interviewed Lora in the ranger station, but also while she lugged gear around and rode a horse, who occasionally took an interest in my microphone.

Lora: Would you like to be interviewed, General? Hello. Hello. [loud snuffling and sniffing sounds] He went for it! [another loud sniff] Is he going to eat it?

Michael Faist: Just sniffin.

Lora: We have two rangers, myself and Alison, the commission ranger. There's a trail crew which varies in size 2 to 4, and we have three had a stock, and that makes up our entire staff.

Peri: The Belly River Ranger station is a brown log cabin—a Park Service specialty—with white window frames and a flagpole out front. It sits between a creek and a wide open meadow where the horses graze and its covered porch faces west towards steep sided, rocky peaks. It's a very traditional scene, and so is life out here.

Lora: So I live off grid. I live in a one room cabin there with a propane stove. And we do get running water for a few months of the season. Otherwise, we have to haul our water from the creek. I do not have a bathroom connected to my house. I have to walk through the outhouse. Yeah I mean, you start to lose track of time and age and everything out here. Some of that kind of stuff fades away because then you're like, is it 2020 or is it 1920? There's elk running around and there's a fence that looks just about the same... I'm reading books and hauling my water from the creek.

Peri: When I tell my friends I work for the Park Service, I think this might be what they picture. But in a lot of ways, the agency is looking to the future—trying to modernize our infrastructure, lower our carbon emissions. And tell our stories differently. Parks have podcast now, for example. It seems like a vestige of the past to come to the Belly and see Lora still riding horses, packing gear on mules and living in the backcountry. And honestly, I wonder how long this way of life this type of ranger can last. But I know I want to experience it before it's too late.

Music: [Headwaters theme begins playing; starting with mandolin, then a drumbeat, a flute line, and other instruments layer in before the music finishes]

Peri: I'm Peri, and you're listening to Headwaters, a show about how Glacier National Park is connected to everything else. And today, I'm tagging along for a day in the life with the person who might have the coolest job in the park.

Lora: All right. Today, we've got the horses, the mule, saddled, and we're going to head out. Take care of ranger business.

Peri: Today's "ranger business" is going up toward Helen Lake to pick up and pack out some leftover supplies. Michael and I walk in front of the stock while Lora rides, since apparently they prefer to follow us.

Lora: Come on, keep up with the humans. Keep up with the humans.

Peri: Apparently, horses have abandonment issues. So even though we didn't really need both Tank and General, everyone came along for the ride. [drumbeat of music plays]

Lora: [talking to the stock] All right. How does everyone feel today? [clinking of tack and gear] Okay. Good. Good. Yep.

Peri: For most park staff, our ranger business is pretty specific: giving a campfire program, studying plants, managing the park's budget, making a podcast. But for Lora, almost anything could be her ranger business on a given day.

Lora: I am, like, I'm a wilderness ranger and I am specially trained on the Wilderness Act and wilderness values and character. But in the end, my day to day is a lot of general ranger duties, whether it's bear management, EMS maintenance, pulling weeds.

Peri: There are specialists for each of these things: bear biologists, search and rescue, trail crew, invasive plant crew. But Lora and other rangers like her pitch in to keep things going day to day.

Lora: Well, it takes a whole team to manage Glacier. That's why we have the experts. And so I'll call them in if we have something major. I can fix a toilet, but if the whole outhouse goes down, I gotta call trail crew. [drumbeat playing] A lot of people talk about the quote, "Jack of all trades, master of none." But the full quote is "Jack of all trades, master of none. Better something than nothing done." And that's kind of what I live by out here.

Peri: And this is much the same as the ranger business that rangers have been doing in the Belly River for decades. Take this entry from an old log book in 1994.

Chuck Cameron: September 14th, 1994. Patrol with Bob on stock to Elizabeth Lake head to deliver additional gear and supplies to the trail crew. Dug out the firepit and replaced the campground map with an updated version. Also pulled another handful of hawkweed. Chuck Cameron.

Peri: Every day when Lora gets back from the field, she writes down the day's activities and events In a big green government issued logbook. She and her predecessors have been doing this since the earliest days of the ranger station here. From Chuck 30 years ago to some of the earliest Belly River Rangers back to 1929.

Joe Heims: June 5th, 1929. Station to Red Gab Pass and return. Distance 16 miles, mounted. Object: cleaning trail and looking over trail conditions. Game seen: one mountain goat, two deer, one elk. Weather clear. Temperature 41 degrees at 7 a.m. Joe Heims.

Peri: But these days, this type of work is becoming more and more rare. Even this ranger station used to be staffed in the winter, but hasn't been for a long time.

Lora: Spots like mine that are remote are, I think there's less and less these days.

Peri: Glacier has only a handful of wilderness rangers, and just a single backcountry ranger station. And throughout the Park Service, these kinds of places, and the people with the skills to staff them, are disappearing. [drumbeat plays]

Peri: In addition to all the odd jobs Lora does, a huge part of her job is talking to park visitors, most of whom are on multiday backpacking trips. As we hiked up the trail past Dawn Mist Falls, a scenic and loud waterfall, we ran into our first hiker of the day.

Lora: [waterfall sound in the background] Hi there, how's it going?

Backpacker: Good, how are you?

Lora: Good. Where you coming from today?

Backpacker: Lake Helen.

Lora: How is it?

Backpacker: Beautiful.

Lora: Good!

Backpacker: I think it's quite the best view out there.

Lora: Yeah, a lot of people say that.

Peri: She asks where they've been and where they're going.

Lora: Cool. Do you have a permit I could take a look at.

Backpacker: Oh, yeah.

Lora: Helen, Glenns, Goat Haunt. Cool! What a great trip.

Peri: And she'll chat about their trip, making sure they have what they need.

Lora: Any questions about anything they covered in the permit office?

Backpacker: No, I think I'm good. Hopefully this uh, the food gets lighter.

Lora: Yeah. I mean, every pass will be easier.

Backpacker: Yes. Yes. Yes.

Lora: Yeah. Have fun on your trip! Belly River is my favorite place, but Goat Haunt's second, and you're going to both. So.

Peri: And sometimes they have something more unusual to report.

Lora: You know, maybe they saw a bear or a wolf or something really interesting that I can then report to the biologists or, you know, like I was saying, they often will report whether the food hang pole's damaged or the marmots living in the toilet again. [laughs] [drumbeat plays briefly]

Peri: Most days, though, she patrols, checks the campgrounds, gives the pit toilet a once over, makes sure food is stored properly, and gives a helping hand where it's needed.

Lora: So every once in a while I come across a food hang and it's not high enough.

Peri: Most backcountry campgrounds have a food hang pole where you toss a rope over and then pull your food up, securing it ten feet off the ground, just high enough to keep it away from curious bears.

Lora: [to camper] Oh, hi there! How's it going? Yeah, I just lifted your hang cause it wan't the ten feet.

Camper Yeah. Sorry about that. That was my first bear hang, so.

Lora: Oh, okay! Well...

Camper Not the prettiest.

Lora: It's okay! Just make sure, like, if you notice, I had it all the way to the top.

Camper Do you actually mind showing me what knots you did.

Lora: Yeah, I'll show you!

Peri: Today, Lora uses her educational ranger charm to teach a camper the best knots for the job.

Lora: So I use a form of a trucker hat. And so then what I do is I come through... [drumbeat plays]

Peri: It's about six miles from the ranger station where the gear was stashed for us to pack out. So we had plenty of time to chat as we walked through the forest and along the choppy turquoise waters of Elizabeth Lake, with colorful Seward Peak and the sheer Ptarmigan Wall beyond.

Lora: I'd never been to Montana before I got this job. I'd worked at Olympic as a wilderness ranger intern in college, and I always thought I was going to go back there. But then I got this job and I was like, "Oh, I guess Glacier's my place."

Peri: [to Lora] So did you always think about being a backcountry ranger or working for the Park Service? Was that always something you were interested in?

Lora: Definitely not. [laughs] I went to a liberal arts college and my major was American Studies, and I had a thesis that focused on public land history. But I took that summer internship at Olympic and realized, Wow, this is what I need to be doing. This is where I'm happy.

Peri: And it makes perfect sense that someone who loves history but wants to work outside would end up working here and living in a log cabin.

Lora: So if you're talking to me about Glacier or Belly River, I often go into the history part versus anything else.

Peri: [to Lora] Is that part of what drew you to go to the Belly River?

Lora: Definitely. The history and the legacy of Belly River. Um, having a mentor, Chuck Cameron, that worked here in the eighties and nineties. He got to share a lot of his experiences out here and the experiences of his mentor. So continuing on that legacy and preserving the Ranger Station, the institutional knowledge, passing that on... Is something that really drew me to Belly River.

Peri: Chuck is one of the voices you've heard reading logbook entries from his time in the Belly River in the 1990s, along with one from Joe Heims in the 1920s. Both were rangers in Glacier for over 40 years. A long line of rangers connected by the tools they use, the horses and mules, and the way of life that makes up this job.

Lora: It's definitely a connection to the past. We're using similar Decker saddles on the stock. That technology hasn't changed much. Yeah, we're using the same tools. I mean, literally some of the same tools that have been around for a long, long time. And yeah, we're patrolling the same trails. It's a different experience day to day, but they were doing patrol reports, we're still writing in the logbook every day what we got up to. [drumbeat plays]

Chuck: September 22nd, 1992. Patrol to Stoney Indian bench today to pull the three plank bridges for the season. Went up there with a wrench and came back with a wrench, a Pulaski, old wire, a huge tarp, an empty Southern comfort bottle, an old 10 pound syrup can, and a fishing net. Quite a haul for one patrol. South winds, 67 degrees, at 1930 hours. Chuck Cameron.

Peri: [in the field] And so, yeah, what are we packing out today?

Lora: So today we are packing out old parts of an inverted U food hang.

Peri: It's not a difficult hike to retrieve the old food hang pole. But all the same, I'm glad I'm not being asked to add a 25 pound chunk of metal to my pack.

Lora: So the reason we're having the ponies do it is because this would be more awkward for a human, and we might take multiple humans to do what Ellen can do by herself.

Peri: Glacier has a staff of packers who supply trail crews in the backcountry for eight day hitches or carry gear in for bat biologists or the fish crew. But for a few sections of metal pipe, Lora and Ellen can manage.

Lora: So there's definitely a technique to mantying loads, and with practice people can become really quick and really neat with theirs.

Michael: Like you?

Lora: I would not say mine is the prettiest. [laughs] I've seen some very lovely loads come through.

Peri: Packing loads on a mule is quite an art. Ever since horses and mules were domesticated thousands of years ago, people have been packing things on them. And Lora is quick to say she's no expert.

Lora: I'm not a packer, I'm a ranger who happens to pack. I learned from other experienced rangers, I learned by going along with the packers over the years, learning from them and their different styles. But this spring I had the opportunity to go to the Nine Mile Wildlands Training Center in Missoula and attended their basic packing course. And I got the opportunity to attend this thanks to the help and funding of the Conservancy. Which I really appreciate.

Peri: Mules are especially popular for packing because they're strong and sure footed. Their personalities vary, but Ellen is a keeper.

Lora: But mules are fun. They've got really strong personalities. Each one one's very different.

Michael: How would you describe Ellen's personality?

Lora: [sounds of packing and tying straps] She's very social. She's patient with me, you know, because I had her two years ago, so she was helping me learn. Affectionate, even. But she'll give you a look. She's like, "What are you doing?"

Peri: Basically, Lora puts the metal pipes into boxes that look like giant dresser drawers. Ellen can carry one load on each side, and after Lora makes sure they weigh the same, she wraps them up in a canvas tarp called a manty, and then finally ties them onto the metal rings of the pack saddle with some elaborate rope work.

Lora: Sometimes you see it in their eyes when a weird load comes over. They're like, "Really? You're going to put that on me?"

Peri: It seems straightforward enough, but it takes a lot of adjusting to get the load to set just right. It's kind of like packing and repacking and adjusting your own giant pack for an overnight trip—except way heavier.

Lora: [talking to Ellen] All right. Ay ay ay. All right.

Peri: [to Lora] A lot of packing seems to me to be tying and untying things.

Lora: I think you got it.

Peri: [to Lora] Am I ready to be a Ranger?

Lora: Your, you're a Ranger packer.

Peri: Spending the day with Lora, I feel lucky to see her in action and get a glimpse of what she and her predecessors have been doing here for over a hundred years. But there aren't many people who know how to do these things anymore. And I guess part of me is wondering, does anyone need to know how to do these things? Do these traditional skills still have a place in the modern world? How do we decide what's worth holding on to?

Lora: I was reading like a book where it's like, one of the tests in the application to become a ranger was, can you saddle and pack a horse properly and quickly? And it was just part of like the job application and the interview process. And everybody could ride and pack and shoe, and all the ranger staff could could do it because it was just the way of life out here, of surviving.

Peri: This isn't the case anymore, though.

Lora: You see older rangers that are reaching towards the end of their careers and the younger folks can't ride or pack. And it's something that rangers have been doing for a hundred years. And so it's like it does it ends now, or do people like me start learning and riding and packing? And we have a lot of young packers in the park, but specifically like the Ranger Packer.

Peri: I'd argue that it's a good idea to keep these thousands of years old skills alive just because—whether it's practical or not—so we don't lose them. But for Lora, it's not just nostalgia.

Lora: I value it because I get to use it day in, day out here to do my job. And I can do my job better with these three.

Peri: [to Lora] Because it's useful.

Lora: Yeah.

Peri: It's like, this is the easiest way to get a bunch of heavy stuff from point A to point B if you're not going to get a helicopter out here, which is expensive and dangerous.

Lora: It's practical, but it's also iconic. So it's that dreamy scene of, you know, the string going through the mountains, over the passes, through the valleys.

Peri: Today, that was us. And it felt like a link to something I didn't know I was missing. And I get the sense that's how a lot of people feel when they come here.

Voice actor September 1988. I live in here with two horses and a mule. And some people would say that I'm a fool, no power, no phone, and all alone. But I say Belly River is a home with a family and friends I've made over the time. I have precious memories that will always be mine. Written by Chris Burke for V.V. O'Shea.

Peri: We get back late in the day, and Lora takes care of General,Tank, and Ellen before sending them off to their evening pasture. The peaks turn rosy with alpenglow, the nighthawks call, and Lora gives us a tour of the station. Which is a functioning Ranger Station, of course, but is also basically a museum of Belly River history.

Lora: So this is the Ranger Station office. We have a library, medical supplies, base station radio. The telephone doesn't work anymore.

Peri: [to Lora] For the record, the telephone is like a 1900 telephone with the little bells that look like eyes and the little, the receiver on the side. [both laughing] I feel like I would describe this room as filled with ranger whimsy.

Lora: I think that's probably accurate. [laughing] We have a typewriter that I think was used until the nineties. Maybe we'll get it back in working condition. Some fun drawings of the mules that were worked here in the past. A photo of the old Bear Mountain fire lookout. And then next to it is Joe Cosley, the first Belly River Ranger.

Peri: Some homes have a photo of the pope hanging on the wall in a place of honor. The ranger station has a portrait of Joe Cosley.

Lora: I do not look to him for my values and ethics based on his actions. But uh, but he's—he's an icon for here. Infamous...

Peri: Joe Cosley, the first Belly River Ranger, was hired under the rationale that to catch poachers, you should hire a poacher. Unfortunately, he never really stopped poaching. But that's a story for another time.

Lora: We also have the historic Belly River file, which has old newspaper clippings, any stories or interviews that people have done about Belly River?

Peri: [to Lora] I feel like not every wilderness district is like this.

Lora: Definitely not.

Peri: It's easy to romanticize these old traditions and ways of life, but it is hard work.

Lora: They always ask me like, "This is the dream job." You know, "how do I get your job?" But they never ask me that question when my head's inside of a pit toilet, or I'm covered in just gross mud and it's pouring down rain.

Peri: And it's not just the physical challenges that can make this lifestyle tough to maintain. There are also logistical challenges to arranging your life in a way that you can do this job. And not everyone can do it.

Lora: At this point in my life, I don't mind being seasonal. I like the change. I like the work. It's just harder and harder to live in this area on seasonal wages and to find housing available in the winters. Logistically, it becomes more difficult when you're trying to balance multiple jobs, multiple health care plans. I've had five health care plans in one calendar year from seasonal work. So I'd like to do this as long as possible, but who knows what the future holds?

Chuck: [drumbeat playing] May 8th, 1990. It's a fine day here in Belly. I'm in for the 1990 season and glad of it. About 40 elk, 4 white tailed deer, and 4 Canada geese on the way in, snowing the whole way. Stored shutters in the annex and caught a glimpse of the saw-whet owl in the large aspen to the east of the pasture. Fine dinner and cribbage lessons provided by Ursula. Good to be back. Chuck Cameron.

[music playing, with a historic audio clip saying: the Stetson that I'm wearing is the hallmark of the Ranger profession. I always tell them, "Put your hat on. That's what makes you a Ranger." Echoing: I always tell 'em, put your hat on, that what makes you a ranger.]

Peri: No one person can do this job forever. But you'll learn a lot if you stick around for a decade or two, and you can pass that on to the generations after you.

Lora: I mean, some of the most beloved rangers of Glacier have come through Belly River and yeah stayed a long time. Tracy 16 seasons. Bruce as well for a long time Dave Shea was here. Chuck Cameron. And then Joe Heims, you know, staying here through the winters. I wish they would let me do that, but I'm just a seasonal. [both laugh] Definitely the people that have worked here before, or currently do, hold this place close to their heart, and it's something we all share.

Peri: [to Lora] Well, and I think it's like the relationship goes both ways, too. It's not just like "I live here and it's pretty." It's like I, like I take care of this place every day. And it takes care of me.

Lora: Yeah. And I think that there are definitely people and cultures that have been like that for a long time. And I think I didn't necessarily grow up in that. And I think a lot of us didn't.

Peri: I know the Park Service preserves historic buildings and objects—basically the Ranger Station and a lot of what's in it. But maybe it's also part of our mission to preserve ways of life, and skills and traditions that, if we're not careful, might otherwise go the way of the fax machine in my office.

Lora: We would lose a connection to the past, and we'd lose very practical skills in what and how we manage these lands.

Michael: Yeah, and it feels like this building would go from being like a living home and workspace to kind of a museum.

Lora: Yeah, it would just be a memory, yeah, a memory of the past, or this is what it used to be like instead of "This is what we're doing now." We're still living out here. We're still ranging.

Peri: I came to the Belly for a peek back in time, but if Lora has her way, this might be a look forward to. There will be other Belly River Rangers decades from now, packing mules, looking back at her entries in the logbook, and taking care of ranger business.

Chuck: [wistful violin music begins to play] October 4th, 1989. Final morning in the station. Mopped the floor, final cleaning, covered the generator, shutters on, I guess that's it. It's been a fine season. Please take care of this place, whoever uses it. It is a unique place indeed. Radio 10-7 and I'm gone. South winds and 60 degrees at 1200 hours. Chuck Cameron.

Peri: That's our show. Headwaters is a production of Glacier National Park and is supported by the Glacier National Park Conservancy. We could not make the show without them. You can learn more about what they do at Glacier.org. Headwaters is made possible with help from Lacy Kowalski, Melissa Sladek, and so many people throughout the Glacier community, especially the natural and cultural resource teams. We're grateful for all of you. Our music this season is by the brilliant Frank Waln. The show's cover art is by our sweet friend Stella Nall. Check out Frank and Stella's work at the links in our show notes. Special thanks this episode to Lora Funk, the whole Belly River staff, including Ellen the Mule, and the trail crew for letting us use their cabin. We appreciate Chuck Cameron reading his logbook entries, and the park's archives staff for giving us access to them. And shout out to Alex Stillson for always being willing to lend a hand. Besides sharing this episode with a friend who might appreciate it, you can help us out by leaving us a rating and review in your podcast app. Thanks for listening.

Peri: In this episode, we shared a few log entries from Chuck Cameron, former Belly River Ranger, and a mentor to Lora. Well, this year, he's retiring.

Lora: He's done really incredible things, saved lives—like literally saved lives. And has meant a lot to a lot of people. And I've heard a lot of Rangers say, I want to be like Chuck. And that kind of gives me hope.

Peri: In our next episode, we sit down with Chuck, and hear about his legendary career in Glacier..

Bear spray saves lives, but where does it come from? We follow a Glacier grizzly to learn the story.

Learn how to use bear spray, in the St. Mary episode of Season One: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/confluence-st-mary/id1542669779?i=1000501502018

Headwaters is created by Daniel Lombardi, Michael Faist, Gaby Eseverri, and Peri Sasnett

Glacier Conservancy: https://glacier.org/headwaters Frank Waln music: https://www.instagram.com/frankwaln/ Stella Nall art: https://www.instagram.com/stella.nall

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TRANSCRIPT:

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Lacy Kowalski: Headwaters is supported by the Glacier National Park Conservancy.

Michael Faist: This summer, I came across the story of a bear nicknamed Growly. Growly was a grizzly bear who lived in Glacier National Park in the 1970s. And when he was young, he lived a normal bear life. His mom taught him how to pick huckleberries and dig up glacier lily bulbs. He swam across his first creek, caught his first animal, and—after a couple of years—struck out on his own, ready to take on the world. We also know that by age seven, Growly got into some trouble.

Music: [dramatic drums start playing]

Michael: You see, when you're a bear trying to pack on the pounds before winter, you've got to eat a lot. And if you want to eat, say, 150 calories, you could find and pick 150 huckleberries. Or you could eat one Twinkie.

Music: [quiet contemplative music starts]

Michael: Bear management records from 50 years ago are light on the details, so we don't know exactly what Growly did, but we do know he was labeled a, "problem bear." A term often used to describe bears who associate people with food. More often than not, problem bears aren't malicious or uniquely ill-tempered, they're smart. They know that they need a lot of calories to survive the winter and happen to live around humans who leave a lot of food lying around. One account stated that Growly wandered through a busy campground searching for food. Another claimed that he followed his nose to an empty cabin, "vandalizing" it to get food inside. He hadn't hurt anyone, but this habit suggested it was only a matter of time, and park managers decided to remove him. The next time Growly followed his nose, he followed it into a trap.

Music: [upbeat flute music starts playing]

Michael: For some bears, this is where the story ends. But for Growly, this is just the beginning. Growly would soon leave Glacier, and would go on to change how all of us recreate in Bear Country—and play a part in the creation of bear spray.

Music: [Headwaters theme begins playing; starting with mandolin, then a drumbeat, a flute line, and other instruments layer in before the music finishes]

News Clip: So this is what helped save our lives.

News Clip: I'm going to spray you.

Sound Effect: [spraying sound].

News Clip: She took two steps into the cloud and made a 90 degree turn and then ran out of there.

Music: [Theme music finishes]

Michael: You're listening to Headwaters, a podcast about how Glacier National Park connects to everything else. And in this episode, we're talking about bear spray. I'm Michael.

Daniel Lombardi: I'm Daniel.

Michael: For people who might not be familiar, Daniel, what is bear spray?

Daniel: Bear spray is, it's basically a self-defense spray. Like a pepper spray. A really strong pepper spray that you spray at a bear if you're being charged or attacked.

Michael: Right. And it's become a central part of the visitor experience here in Glacier, because we have one of the highest densities of grizzly bears anywhere in the lower 48 states.

Daniel: Yeah. So most people who come to the park, they're picking up bear spray at the airport on their way here or at basically any store around in the whole area.

Michael: Gift shop, grocery store, all over.

Daniel: It's an essential item around here.

Michael: And if you see a park ranger out and about, they will have a can with them. And if you go on a hike with one, they'll likely sing its praises sometimes, literally. I went on a hike with a Ranger this year who wrote a whole song to let wildlife know we were in the area.

Ranger Frank: [singing loudly to the tune of Jingle Bells] Grizzly bears, grizzly bears, grizzlies in the way. Get off the trail, cause if you charge, with pepper, you'll get sprayed.

Michael: Thanks, Ranger Frank.

Daniel: Oh, wow.

Michael: [smiling] Yeah, it was very good.

Daniel: I love it.

Michael: But while bear spray is ubiquitous now, it hasn't been around forever. So in this episode, we're diving into the origins of bear spray, and meeting some of the people behind the hottest lifesaving accessory in bear country.

Music: [dramatic drums play]

Michael: [in the car] I think it's this red roofed building.

Daniel: My first question for you then, Michael, is like, what actually is bear spray? What is it made of? And how do they how do they make it?

Michael: Right, how do they make the stuff? And that was my first question, too. And it turns out we don't have to go far to find the answer because a lot of bear spray is made locally, right outside of Glacier.

Daniel: [in the field] Where we at?

Michael: [in the field] We are at the Counter Assault Bear Spray factory in Kalispell, in the Flathead Valley. Hello, I'm Michael. I'm looking for Randy?

Randy Hunt: That's me.

Michael: [in the field] Nice to meet you.

Randy: How you doing?

Michael: [in the field] It's been nice to me, Randy. Thanks for having us.

Randy: Come on in.

Michael: And luckily for us, Randy Hunt, head of operations with the brand Counter Assault, invited us for a tour.

Michael: [in the field] And you manufacture everything right here in house?

Randy: Yes, everything. So our we bring our pepper oil in from, you know, it's brought from the other side of the United States, actually grown in India. And is brought herec and we mix the pepper oil here into different solvents...

Michael: If you're wondering how to use bear spray, you should check out our St Mary episode from our first season. There will be a link in the show notes for this episode. But with Randy, I got to learn what goes in the can. And the central ingredient, unsurprisingly, is pepper oil.

Michael: [in the field] And you said the pepper oil, you get it from the East Coast or other side the country, and it's grown in India. That's one thing I didn't really grasp, was like you're getting it from actual was like cayenne peppers? Or

Randy: They're a they're a heat chili. So if you think your jalepenos they've got heat content in Scoville heat units, there are about three to four thousand scoville heat units in a jalepeno. Your habanero is around 150 to 350,000. We're running 3.2 million.

Michael: They get the oil from peppers or chilies in the genus Capsicum, which includes everything from pepper in pepperoncinis to cayenne peppers.

Daniel: [surprised] So it's like, they're like real peppers that go in food!

Michael: And because it's all from real peppers, it's a food grade oil, which on its own would be safe for consumption. Technically.

Randy: So you can use it, it's safe to eat. You can actually fry chicken wings in it or french fries. You probably won't want to eat them because it will clear everything out of ya.

Michael: [in the field] [laughing]

Randy: But but yeah.

Michael: And this oil is in more than just pepper sprays. It's found in everything from hot sauces to pharmaceuticals, like arthritis cream.

Daniel: Okay, but that's not all that's in the can. There's something else besides peppers mushed up in there.

Michael: Yeah, the pepper oil is actually only 2% of the ingredients, because if it was just pepper oil, it would harden in the can and be useless.

Randy: When you spray it. If you think, if you cook bacon, it will solidify when it cools down and it turns white. But we've got to keep the oil in a liquid form. So we put a solvent in there instead of shooting hard pieces of like, bacon grease out of at the bear,.

Michael: [in the field] [laughing]

Randy: It keeps it in a liquid form in the air.

Michael: So so even though pepper oil is only 2% of the ingredients, bear spray's three times more potent than pepper spray for humans. And so the ingredients are: the pepper oil, a solvent to keep that oil liquid and a propellant to launch the spray.

Michael: [in the field] That's the pepper oil.

Randy: Yep.

Michael: [in the field] [laughing] Oleoresin Capsicum. 3.2 MOS, 40lbs.

Michael: What would you say it looked like, Daniel?

Daniel: It looked just like hot sauce! Yeah, it looked like hot sauce.

Michael: Like a dark, thick, hot sauce. It was. [laughing] I mean, it smelled hot, too.

Michael: [in the field] And so how much of this goes into each bottle or can, like, the pepper oil?

Randy: These two containers ten gallons will make about...

Michael: They were actively filling these cans when we were there. Randy was saying like these two 10-gallon buckets of the pepper oil concoction will make over 1500 cans of bear spray. So a little bit goes a long way.

Randy: Goes a long ways, but it's still not as far as we would like it to go, because, yeah, there's some some spendy food grade oil.

Michael: [in the field] I bet.

Michael: So while there are many brands of bear spray today, Counter Assault holds the distinction of being the first. Opening back in 1986, they helped pioneer this formula of pepper, propellant, and solvent that reputable brands widely use today.

Randy: You know, across the board, all the bear sprays are using a really hot pepper oil, and all of them are going to work. And the biggest thing is: people are safe and the bears are safe. And that's what it's been refined down to, is using a product that's not going to hurt people, it's not going to hurt bears, keeps everybody safe.

Michael: Bear spray's non-lethality—the fact that bears that get sprayed with this will turn around, but ultimately be unharmed—is not only a huge selling point, but it helps explain why bear spray exists at all.

Music: [dramatic drums start playing]

Michael: Ever since Glacier was established in 1910, grizzly bears were on the decline. When the U.S. was founded, there were an estimated 50,000 grizzlies in the lower 48 states living everywhere from Canada to Mexico, between Iowa and California. But by the mid 1900s, Euro-Americans had all but exterminated them. There were less than a thousand grizzly bears left in the lower 48, largely isolated within large public lands in the west, like Glacier and Yellowstone. Something that's still true today. But while national parks are often seen as safe havens for wildlife, the relationship between glacier and grizzly bears was fraught in the mid 1900s. Grizzlies or bears in general were a huge attraction for park tourism, but not in the way they are now.

Daniel: Right. This was an era where a very typical part of the visitor experience was to feed the bears like out of their car, throwing out pieces of bread alongside the road, feeding bears.

Michael: Yeah, like this "animals as a spectacle" approach. The second director of the Park Service, Horace Albright, was actually a huge fan of feeding wildlife in parks. He encouraged the creation of bear feeding platforms in Yellowstone, and Yellowstone even opened a zoo at one point for people to come look at captive animals.

Daniel: Wow.

Michael: So it really was a different relationship than the one we have with wildlife today. And predictably, it had some consequences. Like, encouraging bears to seek out humans when they're hungry seems like a disaster waiting to happen. And it eventually led to tragedy. In 1967, two visitors camping in separate areas of the park were killed by grizzly bears who'd come to their campsites in search of food. These shocking deaths later came to be known as Night of the Grizzlies, and were the first grizzly fatalities in Glacier's 50-year history. In response, Glacier completely overhauled all of its bear policies. They closed some campgrounds, outlawed giving food to wildlife and installed bear proof trash cans. They also found and killed the bears responsible and faced a lot of pressure from the public and even some policymakers to kill more. The park superintendent at one point issued a memo, here daniel, can you read it?

Daniel: Okay. "When a grizzly bear appears in any area of visitor use, it will be immediately destroyed by a park ranger." Wow. That is a pretty aggressive stance for a park to take against bears.

Michael: Yeah, it was pretty intense.

Daniel: The park is taking a very aggressive stance to kill bears in order to keep people safe.

Michael: Mhmm.

Daniel: But as a species, at this time, they're actually becoming very threatened in the 1960s and 70's.

Michael: Right, as Glacier is dealing with these events, grizzlies are identified as an endangered species by the federal government, which demands a broad recovery effort. you know, scientists started studying how many bears were left, what their habitat needs were—insight that would help them recover and hopefully help our two species coexist.

Daniel: So they need to know more. Park managers are looking for more data about bears in general. But if we zoom in on the story we're looking at here—that is the history of bear spray—you can see this emerging need for a tool that allows people and bears to de-escalate conflicts in a non-lethal way at an individual scale.

Michael: Yeah. Which brings us back to Growly, the bear who apparently didn't like grapefruit.

Janet Ellis: And he told the story that the main thing Growly hated was grapefruit,

Michael: [on the phone] [laughing]

Janet: But he liked oranges fine, he figured out how to slice an orange open. He had really long claws.

Michael: After being captured in Glacier National Park in 1976, Growly was sent to Churchill, Manitoba. A town in northern Canada known for its polar bears.

Janet: I was a research assistant.

Michael: That voice is Janet Ellis.

Janet: And I spent four months on the bears study with the Bears in 1978.

Michael: Janet is currently a Montana state senator, but she spent a few months helping zoology grad student Gary Miller conduct a study on bear behavior.

Janet: The University of Montana had a bear lab up there, way far from town.

Michael: There were four bears in this study. Two grizzlies, Growly and Snarly, and two polar bears nicknamed Magdalen and Guen. Janet helped take care of them.

Michael: [on the phone] So what does it look like to take care of a grizzly bear in a lab?

Janet: So it was cleaning the area. It was feeding them every day and making sure they had water. The Hudson Bay store was the local grocery store in Churchill. And so we would get meat scraps and vegetable, you know, whatever food that they were willing to give away. And that's what the bears lived on.

Michael: Each bear was monitored dawn to dusk, body temperature, heart rate, posture. Reading through the paper, I really liked these little drawings that showed bear body language. And it turns out Janet drew those.

Janet: I did illustrate Gary Miller's master's thesis.

Michael: [on the phone] Oh, you drew the the bear outlines of their different postures?

Janet: Yeah, I did all that stuff.

Michael: Oh those are so cute!

Michael: Finally, one by one, they'd bring the bears into a 13 foot by 20 foot cell, with a drinking well for water and a barred metal door. From outside the cell, an assistant would provoke the bear into charging, approaching the door and stomping if necessary.

Daniel: Wow. That so that's all it took to get them to charge at the gate of the cage?

Michael: Most of the time. Yeah, I mean, Janet said that every bear was different. The polar bears were pretty docile. And one of the grizzly bears, Snarly, was actually really easily provoked. She said that he'd charge whenever somebody just approached the door.

Daniel: So they approached the cage door and the bear could see them and would just charge at the door.

Michael: Mhmm.

Daniel: Wow.

Michael: And when a bear charged, they would deploy a deterrent to hopefully stop them in their tracks. They tried different. Sounds like a handheld boat horn.

Sound Effect: [boat horn noise]

Michael: A referee whistle.

Sound Effect: [whistle blowing]

Michael: They played a recording of a bear growling.

Sound Effect: [sound of a bear growling]

Michael: It was actually a recording of Growly, the bear, growling—which might be how he got his name. And they tested a popular item marketed to alert bears to your presence. Bear Bells.

Sound Effect: [small bells jingling]

Michael: Here's an excerpt from their research, read for us by a voice actor.

Voice Actor: Twice when small bells were tested on growling, he slept through the test. The bells were of the type that are sold to hikers in Glacier and Yellowstone National parks to warn bears of their approach. In these tests, the assistant stood at the door of the cell and rang the bells. Growly was not more than six meters away and never woke up. The idea that small bells will warn grizzlies before approaching clearly needs reevaluation.

Daniel: I've definitely heard a lot of bear bells on the trail here in Glacier, but the problem is I don't hear them until the person's like right next to me on the trail. So yeah, they're just not loud enough to really alert a bear.

Michael: Yeah, I've heard that, you know, the thing you're bothering the most by wearing bear bells is yourself. And it wasn't just sounds. They tried strobe lights. They waved a giant piece of plywood, and they sprayed bears with chemicals or irritants like onion juice and Windex.

Daniel: Oh, wow.

Michael: And they also deployed a product called Halt, which was a pepper spray developed for postal workers who were getting bitten by a lot of dogs in the fifties.

Daniel: While they were throwing everything at these bears. But before this, there really weren't that many choices.

Michael: Yeah, I mean, it seems a little strange now that they'd be trying things like Windex, but there weren't non-lethal deterrents available at the time, so they were just seeing whatever would work.

Daniel: Hmm. So after they tried all this, what were the results?

Michael: Well, sounds like the handheld boat horn worked pretty well, but only if they were extremely loud. And the boat horn also apparently didn't work in low temperatures. The bells and whistles didn't do much. The giant piece of plywood could stop a bear, but the effect didn't last very long. However, Halt—the postal worker pepper spray—worked really well.

Daniel: Hmm.

Voice Actor: Each time it was tested, the bear charged until it was sprayed. The bear then turned and ran to the farthest corner of the cell where it rubbed its eyes and blinked vigorously. In one case, Snarly went to the water well and washed his face with his paws.

Janet: That's the only thing that would stop a charging bear. And that was true with Grizzly bears and polar bears. I mean, they couldn't see! Even if it was for a couple of minutes, and they would just stop and it would freak them out.

Michael: [on the phone] Hmm.

Janet: And so, yes, it was the only thing—because we had again, mentioned boat horns and bells and all kinds of things. So it, it was a precursor.

Michael: Thanks to Growly, Snarly, Magdalen, and Gwen—who endured around 20 tests each—the paper that came out of this study concluded with this line:

Voice Actor: The results of Halt dog repellent in the laboratory indicate that effective repellents can be developed.

Music: [dramatic drums playing]

Daniel: So the study up in Churchill, it showed that this dog pepper spray works pretty well. I mean, was that it? Did they just then package it up and sell it as bear spray?

Michael: There were a few steps in between. So the University of Montana was funding the study Janet was a part of, and with this conclusion that a deterrent could be developed. They started funding a follow up study.

Daniel: I'm guessing that at University of Montana, they were using different bears?

Michael: Yeah. This second study had a new set of bears, including one problem Bear from Glacier that was labeled in the study as a roadside panhandler.

Daniel: Oh, wow.

Michael: And these new bears were sent down to Fort Missoula.

Daniel: Who led this follow up study?

Michael: So the student that was working on this study was named Carrie Hunt. And it's funny, newspaper articles that you read about Carrie go out of their way to highlight that she is five foot one, 115pounds, and just like the first study in Churchill, is provoking these 500 pound grizzlies into charging in order to test these deterrents.

Daniel: So this had the same premise as the first study?

Michael: Yeah, very similar. A magazine actually interviewed Carrie about the experience.

Voice Actor: Hunt step to the barred door of the bear's cell, by stomping her feet, she provoked almost all the bears into charging. More than once, concrete dust flew from the hinges as a huge bear rammed the cell door.

Voice Actor: Even though the situation was controlled and there was no way I could get hurt. It was still frightening. The power and aggression of an angry charging grizzly is overwhelming.

Voice Actor: If the bear charged it received an application of the repellent being tested.

Michael: A lot of the things they were testing were very similar to that first study, they did sounds like in this case rock music. They did Halt, that same dog spray.

Voice Actor: Everything from tear gas to rock music was tested, but only a commercial dog repellent spray had any significant effect. The spray's active ingredient was capsaicin, a derivative of red peppers.

Michael: Ironically, the study was actually funded by a competitor to what we now know as bear spray called Skunker.

Daniel: Oh..

Michael: Can you guess what soccer is?

Daniel: I'm guessing it smelled really bad.

Michael: Yeah, it was a synthetic skunk spray. And turned out Skunker didn't work, and it just kind of made the bears sad.

Daniel: [laughing] I'm not surprised.

Michael: They didn't leave the area. But Halt, once again, did work. The only problem was that's not how people have bear encounters in the wild.

Daniel: Sure.

Michael: You know, and this tiny can of pepper spray, designed for a dog that's biting a postal worker, like it doesn't shoot far enough. It's not strong enough. And so Carrie highlighted that, you know, this is a really promising thing to follow up on, but it would need some refining. It needs some iterating to turn it into an effective bear deterrent for public use.

Daniel: So now there's two studies that are both showing that some kind of pepper spray is probably going to work pretty well to stop a charging bear.

Michael: Yeah.

Daniel: But to work in the real world, it needs some modifications.

Michael: Right. And this result started to trickle out into, like local Montanans that either were connected to the university in some way and found its way to a guy named Bill Pounds. After hearing Carrie's results, he reached out and offered to help refine it, and eventually that collaboration turned into Counter Assault.

Randy: Over the years has been refined, has got different propellants, it's got different concentrations of the pepper.

Michael: One of the big things that they worked on was the delivery method. You know how the spray would leave the can?

Michael: [in the field] Yeah, you mentioned the spray. That was one thing I realized I hadn't mentioned, because like some of the earlier brands were shooting six feet in, like a pencil-thin stream, like Wasp killer.

Randy: Right. So that stream, you're not going to hit a bear from 30 feet away in the eyes, especially when you're in a panic yourself. I mean, I don't care who you are, you're going to be in a panic when a very charging at you. They wanted that shotgun pattern, as it's called, a fog pattern. Fog.

Daniel: Okay. So this this is part of the process we saw. They're taking a canister full of the ingredients and they're putting like a spray nozzle on the top of it that shoots the bear spray out into a fog or a cone.

Michael: Yeah, exactly. And through testing and conversations with bear biologists, you know, they refined that fog into a spray that would last 7 seconds and shoot 30 feet.

Randy: That fog is going to get in the sinuses. It's going to get in the eyes. It's they're going to inhale. It's going to get in all the mucous membranes, the lungs. That's what changes their senses, and they just stop. It's it's a shock to their system like it is ours.

Michael: There were some obstacles along the way before bear spray was widely adopted. There were fraudsters making weak knock offs, and some serious misunderstandings, like thinking you used it like bug spray, or that it was a spice rub you could buy at the grocery store.

Voice Actor: When I first heard about bare pepper spray, I rushed right down to Albertsons to see if that store stocked it. But alas, though, I looked among the spices, the cooking oils, and even in the meat department, I found no bear pepper spray.

Michael: That was from a newspaper article back in 1999. So it took a lot of education and messaging to get people to understand and carry bear spray. But what really got people on board was its track record. It was working.

Larry King: He and his family were in the sights of three bears, recently managed to get away.

Michael: This is a newscast from Larry King where he's interviewing a guy who had to use bear spray here in Glacier.

Larry King: Sounds like Jack was lucky. What happened, Jack? What happened to you and the Bears?

Jack Hanna: Well, Saturday night, Larry, just Saturday night, my wife and I went to Grinnell Glacier in Glacier National Park. We lived here 20-something years. It's a favorite place to hike.

Michael: So the story is about this group hiking the Grinnell Glacier Trail when a bear started following them, and after following them for a little while, started running at them.

Larry King: I waited to get about 30 feet and unloaded one blast. It kept coming. My wife stood about ten feet right in my face. I just went bam, right in his face and ran away again.

Michael: Bear spray stopped it in its tracks.

Larry King: So this is what helped save our lives.

Michael: A lot of stories like this come up when you Google bear spray, including this line.

Voice Actor: Thanks to God, a friend and pepper spray. I'm still here.

Michael: That quote comes from a bear attack survivo,r who would go on to found his own bear spray company called UDAP, which is based in Butte, Montana. Testimonials like these have slowly won people over, and even folks who doubted a pepper spray could work as well as a firearm.

Randy: You know, like I said, I was retired military. I'm a gun guy. It's fine. But these guys are like, Well, I need my gun. Okay, well, you're still trying to hit something, if it's a charge—that you've got a kill zone that's, you know, maybe grapefruit-sized, that you have to try to get a bullet through. Well, you may not be able to do that. And I don't care, I carry weapons, but I carry bear spray when I go in the woods.

Michael: And because of this effective track record, Glacier suggests all visitors to the park carry bear spray. Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks recommends all hunters carry it, too.

Michael: [in the field[] So how many cans do you put out from here in a year or a month?

Randy: Now, in 2021, we did 375,000 cans of bears spray. And it's just education. That's what's helped. Back in the day, a few years ago, like I talked with Pride here, he says: I remember when we did 30,000 cans in a year. I said, I'm doing that in a month. So that's how much it's picked up from those first days back in the eighties and where the word has gotten out.

Michael: Even still, bear spray is no substitute for common sense. Being safe in bear country involves storing food properly, making noise on trail, hiking in groups, not just grabbing a can of bear spray and calling it a day.

Daniel: Yeah, I've actually heard some bear experts talk about the downside of bear spray is that people think they just strap it on their back and then they're safe, and that it actually discourages the kind of awareness and mindfulness of bear safety that you need to have in mind.

Michael: You don't want to get complacent.

Daniel: No, you can't just put it in the bottom of your backpack and think it's going to help with a bear attack. I mean, you can't put on your seatbelt and drive off a cliff.

Michael: Right. And it is also worth pointing out, like I've carried bear spray on all the hikes I've done here in the last ten years. I've never had to use it, have you?

Daniel: No. My whole life I've been in bear country, and I've never used bear spray.

Michael: Right? I mean, I've taken it out a few times.

Daniel: Uh-huh.

Michael: But I've never had to spray it. The only times I've actually been around it going off was when people set it off on accident.

Michael: The adoption of bear spray coincides with a shift in our relationship with bears: a shift from managing bears to managing people. That change, which we're all a part of, makes a huge difference for our wildlife. Compared to the 1960s, there are a lot more bears and humans in Glacier. Around 100 more grizzlies and literally millions more annual visitors. But that hasn't led to an equivalent rise in bear human conflicts or problem bears like Growly needing to be removed. Thanks to these tools that help us coexist, more bears get to live out their normal bear lives, even as more and more people like you and me come to visit.

Music: [dramatic drums playing]

Daniel: I think I just have one question left for you, Michael.

Michael: Yeah?

Daniel: Whatever happened to Growly?

Michael: Growly, you could say, was actually the first life that bear spray saved. Here's Janet Ellis again talking about the end of that first study in Churchill.

Janet: They were shutting down the bear lab after we left. And so we had two grizzly bears, the polar bears were released back into the wild, but the grizzly bears were going to be destroyed.

Music: [somber music playing]

Michael: It's not easy to release a food conditioned bear back into the wild. So it's standard practice in cases like this for the bear to be euthanized. But after taking care of Growly for months, Janet had taken a liking to him.

Janet: We could play tug of war with him, where his forearms were gigantic and so couldn't fit through the bars really very far. Just a little bit. But he put his hand out of the cage and you could grab his claws. He could give up, and he was going to win.

Michael: She fed growly, gave him water, got him exercise. Apparently he really liked playing with these giant tires they had lying around.

Janet: He'd just pounce on them, he could put them up in his mouth and shake them like a rag. I mean, he was so strong.

Michael: So when it seemed like Growly was going to be euthanized, she started writing letters to friends and family.

Janet: Well, I wrote various relatives to see if they had any ideas. And it was my dad, who was an attorney in Columbus, Ohio, that talked—there was a city councilman I think, who was in his law firm. And then he knew somebody else who was head of Parks and Recreation, and they knew Jack Hanna. You know, It was that sort of thing.

Michael: Through her dad's network, Janet reached Jack Hanna, the director of the Columbus Zoo—and coincidentally, the guy you heard Larry King interviewing earlier, because years later, he used bear spray on the Grinnell Glacier Trail. Anyway, they asked Jack, you know, if we can raise enough money to feed Growly for a year, would you take him? And he said yes.

Janet: So they raised, they raised enough money, I know, for him to be fed for a year and then also to pay for the transport down.

Michael: The only problem was, Janet had to take him there herself. He wouldn't fit on a plane and there wasn't even a road out of Churchill.

Janet: So you had to get on a train. We had a a big culvert trip. Have you seen? You know-

Michael: [on the phone] Yeah, the giant metal cylinders.

Janet: But this was for polar bears, so it was really big.

Michael: [on the phone] [laughs].

Janet: And then we rented a three-quarter-ton pickup and drove from there.

Michael: After a 30 hour train ride, Janet loaded Growly's culvert trap— this big metal cylinder—into the bed of a pickup truck, and drove another 25 hours to the Columbus Zoo. Apparently, Growly was pretty cooperative.

Janet: He was in a culvert trap with the, in the back. I could see him when I was driving and he was looking forward. And that's where the grate was so he could watch. And he hadn't been outside in two years at least. So he was really interested in what was going on. But he didn't really rock the truck.

Michael: Like anyone on a road trip. Greatly needed food and water along the way. Janet could slip him food through the grate, but she had to get help with water.

Janet: But when he stopped at a gas station, you did need to water him. We went. I had to water my bear in the pickup to explain why you needed the hose [laughs] at a gas station. That's the thing that's most entertaining.

Michael: Ultimately, Growly was a great road trip companion, and the drive went off without a hitch. So after a few days of travel, Growly was introduced to his new home at the zoo.

Janet: They had trees and boulders, and he wanted day bed, he just rearranged the whole thing, and they had to put wire around the trees so he wouldn't destroy them. Yeah. He had his own opinion on redecorating his new home.

Both: [laughing]

Michael: I grew up in Columbus, and spent a lot of time as a kid at the Columbus Zoo. So there's a real chance Growly was the first bear I ever met. And I might have run into Janet there, too.

Janet: My son, he's 28 now, but he remembers Growley, cause we would go to the, every time we went to Columbus, we would go to the Columbus Zoo.

Michael: Grizzly bears are formidable neighbors. Not to be taken lightly. And in the 20th century, their future was uncertain. Some Americans argued they should be destroyed entirely, that our two species could not coexist. But tools like bear spray have proven that wrong.

Music: [music begins to build under narration]

Michael: Today, we have access to an easy and effective tool to diffuse bear encounters that doesn't harm the bear. And while no deterrent is a guarantee, Growly showed us that bear spray works. Seeing him at the zoo, I didn't know about the cabins he vandalized or the summer he spent in Canada enduring boat horns, onion juice and pepper spray. I doubt anyone there other than Janet knew the whole story. But I did know that it was special to see a grizzly bear. And thanks in part to Growly, you don't have to go to a zoo to do that.

Music: [credits music continues to build, and plays under the credits]

Peri Sasnett: That's our show. Headwaters is a production of Glacier National Park and is supported by the Glacier National Park Conservancy. We could not make the show without them. You can learn more about what they do at Glacier.org. Headwaters is made possible with help from Lacy Kowalski, Melissa Sladek, and so many people throughout the Glacier community— especially the natural and cultural resource teams. We're grateful for all of you. Our music this season is by the brilliant Frank Waln. The show's cover art is by our sweet friend Stella Nall. Check out Frank and Stella's work at the links in our show notes. Special thanks this episode to Randy Hunt and everyone at Counter Assault. Janet Ellis, Carrie Hunt, and Chuck Bartlebaugh for discussing this project with us, as well as Growly, Snarly, and all the other bears who contributed to the creation of Bear Spray. Besides sharing this episode with a friend who might appreciate it, you can help us out by leaving us a rating and review in your podcast app. Thanks for listening.

As parks become more and more popular, what do we want the visitor experience to be like? In this bonus episode, learn how Glacier is trying to answer this question.

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TRANSCRIPT:

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Lacy Kowalski: Headwaters is supported by the Glacier National Park Conservancy.

[drumbeats]

Peri Sasnett: I’m Peri, and you’re listening to Headwaters, a show about how Glacier National Park is connected to everything else.

[drumbeats intensify and then fade]

Peri: So my first season working on the podcast was in 2021—for the whitebark pine story—but that wasn’t actually my first season in Glacier. I started here in 2017, which was a historic year: the first time we counted more than 3 million visits to the park in a single year. And in July 2017 alone, Glacier broke records for the most visits in a single month.

It was overwhelming as a brand-new employee, but it was also overwhelming for longtime rangers. Traffic often slowed to a halt, it was impossible to find parking in the middle of the day, and emergency calls felt nonstop. A lot of days, rangers would have to close this or that gate to the park because it was just too full. I would get alerts from dispatch all the time—West Entrance is closed, Bowman Lake access is closed, Many Glacier entrance is closed—because there were so many cars that emergency vehicles couldn’t get into these areas.

Summers like this got people thinking about the future: as parks become more and more popular, what do we want the visitor experience to be like? How will Glacier, and parks across the country, respond to this increasing visitation?

[beats with base begin to play]

In this bonus episode, we take a look at how Glacier is trying to answer these questions. The park’s vehicle reservation system has just begun for 2023, which means that visitors need reservations to enter popular areas of the park during peak hours. To learn more about how the system works—where to get a reservation and whether you’ll need one—visit our website. But to learn about why Glacier is trying this system in the first place, my cohost Daniel talked to Dr. Susie Sidder, who researches visitation at the park—studying why visitors come here, what they’re looking for, and what their experience is like.

[beats with base intensify then fade]

Daniel Lombardi: So, Susie, will you introduce yourself?

Susie Sidder: Yeah, happy to. My name is Susie Sidder, and I am the Visitor Use Management Program Manager here at Glacier National Park.

Daniel: The park gets a lot of visitors. We have millions of people visit here. And your job is to help figure out how to make that go smoothly.

Susie: Yeah, and we use lots of different techniques for that.

Daniel: Maybe let's, let's zoom out. Let's think about the big picture. Why does this exist?

Susie: At Glacier, we receive upwards of 3 million recreation visits annually, and that's a lot of different people that are trying to come into Glacier. We kind of reach a point where we have to start really understanding how can we help people come to the park while also still achieving that mission of protecting natural and cultural resources, not only for visitors to experience today, but also to ensuring that those resources are available for our future visitors. And so Glacier is not the only national park that has started to really invest quite a bit in trying to understand visitor use and to manage visitor use across the national park system, we are seeing many different types of parks start to engage in more systematic ways of managing visitation.

Daniel: So okay, Susie, it sounds like what you're describing is, is I guess I've heard it called a dual mandate: that the Park Service has to balance protecting and preserving the place while still allowing people to enjoy it today.

Susie: I definitely find myself in a balancing act. My background is focused on natural resources, specifically like thinking about things like wildlife and soil and plants. That was my undergraduate degree. But slowly through my education, I started realizing that there's also a very real human component to understanding how we can protect and preserve resources. Daniel: One of the ways that Glacier is kind of finding that balance between preserving and protecting this place, but also allowing for its future and current enjoyment is through managed access. Specifically, there's a program now we have called vehicle reservations. Right?

Susie: Right.

Daniel: So, well, let's start. What is managed access?

Susie: So managed access is when any type of protected area in this case, Glacier, decides that we need some sideboards, some boundaries, around how and when people can come.

Daniel: Like this is something that exists not just here at Glacier. Managed access is like a, a process or a system that national parks do all the time. Right?

Susie: Right.

Daniel: What are some examples? If you're going to tour a historic house or museum, you can't just go in, like you have to at least go up to the front desk and sign in because they don't let unlimited amount of people into the building at once. Is that managed access then?

Susie: Yes, that's definitely managed access. And it's a different type of managed access than we're using at Glacier, where our system is designed around vehicles. But it's exactly that. Managed access is when you have to select a scheduled tour time before you arrive at a national historic site. Managed access is when you have to get a permit to float a river. Managed access is when you need to purchase a ticket in order to ride a shuttle. So there are many different ways that parks can manage where and when people go.

Daniel: So there's all kinds of managed access systems that different national parks do all the time. Like this is a thing that has existed for a long time. I think a maybe one, one example that comes to my mind is Denali, Denali National Park in Alaska. Right? They have a managed access system. How does that one work?

Susie: I actually went to Denali as a visitor in 2018 and got to experience their managed access system and I just thought it was so cool. And so I rode on a shuttle all the way to the Eielson Visitor Center.

Daniel: So in Denali, there's like one main road, and it's this long dirt road. Most people, they hop on a shuttle bus to go down that road and see—that's the main way they see Denali.

Susie: Yeah, we saw all different kinds of wildlife, several different instances of brown bear crossing the road. There was a mother brown bear with her cubs.

Daniel: Oh, cool.

Susie: We saw moose. It was just a really unique experience, and I definitely attribute that to the success of the managed access system that they've designed.

Daniel: That's cool. And Denali didn't just like randomly make that up. A lot of social science, I'm sure, went into that. So let's talk about how is the science getting put into practice here in Glacier? Glacier has a system of managed access and it's called vehicle reservations.

Susie: So the vehicle reservation system is a system that's designed to allow predictable visitor access.

Daniel: Basically, tell me if this is right. A vehicle reservation is like a dinner reservation.

Susie: Yes, in a way, a vehicle reservation is like a dinner reservation. Before you arrive at Glacier, you've got to get a vehicle reservation in advance.

Daniel: Okay. So you want to go out to dinner somewhere that's popular, really popular. That's fine, you know you can't just show up. You're going to need a reservation. So you call ahead, you get a reservation, and that, that ensures you that you're going to have a table when you get there.

Susie: It's kind of like that. So our reservation system guarantees entry into the park and that allows visitors to drive on our park roads. So once you get in with your vehicle reservation, you can make whatever decisions you want in terms of where you drive or where you park. And sometimes parking isn't always available at those key destinations. But with the vehicle reservation, what you're guaranteed is entry into the park—that reliable access. If we're going back to the dinner example, we can think about when you might need a dinner reservation. So if I want to go to a popular restaurant at seven, I probably do need a dinner reservation. But maybe if I want to go to the restaurant at three thirty or four, right when it opens, I probably don't need a dinner reservation.

Daniel: Right.

Susie: Depending on how popular it is.

Daniel: And the same thing is true here at Glacier.

Susie: Exactly.

Daniel: You only need a reservation for your vehicle for the peak hours.

Susie: Yes.

Daniel: So in Glacier, what are the—what's our peak time? What's our dinner rush in Glacier National Park?

Susie: So in Glacier, that often falls right around the middle of the day. So you can think about, you know, visitors are in their hotel rooms, they’re waking up in the morning, they decide to drive to Glacier. And before we had the managed access system, many people were following kind of that same routine and arriving right around the same time.

[drumbeats marks a transition]

[Swainson’s thrush singing; Townsend’s warbler singing; footsteps]

Daniel: [in the field] I'm really curious to see how this whole thing is playing out on the ground. [birds singing] So I'm going to walk through the forest here to where the Rangers are greeting visitors and helping them navigate the new system. [footsteps] It's kind of one of those wet mornings where the clouds are stormy, but there's also sun beaming in, and that might be slowing down the busyness of the park a little bit.

Ranger: Yeah, we'd like for it to be a little bit busier, but it's busy enough to where we can get some good training in and stuff like that. So it's nice that we didn't get crushed on the first day. So it'll pick up later today for sure.

[car drives by]

Daniel: [in the field] The Rangers are — they seem to be having quite a bit of fun there. They have a good group here. The whole mission is to help people navigate the new system as they come into the park. And pretty much everyone's smiling this whole time. Ranger: Morning, welcome to Glacier! Do you have a vehicle reservation?

Visitor: Thank you, have a great day!

Ranger: You too.

Daniel: [as car drives by] And here comes in another car, so the Rangers are going to stop and give them some information about the vehicle reservation system. [ranger conversing with visitor in the background]

Ranger: Do you have a vehicle reservation for today? Awesome.

Daniel: [as car drives by] Okay. So this is cool, this this car definitely has their vehicle reservation ready to go. They're holding up their phone. They've got the, they've got the vehicle reservation right on hand. So that was pretty smooth. [car driving by] Looks like they're from Wisconsin. They're driving into the park now. I'm guessing that the mid-morning is probably the busiest time for these Rangers. Talking to everyone about vehicle reservations. The cars are starting to come in a little bit faster now.

Ranger: Ticketed entry starts today through the park between 6 a.m. to 3 p.m.. Yeah you need a reservation for your vehicle. I'm just gonna have you take a right at the stop sign, there's more people waiting around the corner to give you information. All right.

Daniel: [as car drives by] That car had a couple of really cute dogs and they didn't have their vehicle reservation. They didn't seem to know about the system. So the Rangers directed them to just pull into a spot where they can park and learn about how it all works.

[drumbeats mark a transition]

Daniel: [to Susie] When it all boils down like, what are we really doing with the vehicle reservation system? What are we trying to do?

Susie: Specifically, we want people to have a good time when they come and have an awesome visitor experience. And we also want to make sure that the number of people in the park is not an unsafe number.

Daniel: Yeah.

Susie: And so what happens when we get a lot of people that want to drive into Glacier all at the same time is that our parking lots and our roads physically reach a limit where no more vehicles can move.

Daniel: Bumper-to-bumper in a national park.

Susie: Exactly. Bumper-to-bumper in a national park. And if you're looking at wildlife and you're stopped still on the road, that's probably awesome.

Daniel: Yeah.

Susie: You can get that chance to get that photo or see that grizzly. But if you're having a medical emergency or if you just really need to use the bathroom and are looking to reach a visitor facility, or if you have a kid in the car that screaming, that can be a really stressful situation. And so when we get that bumper-to-bumper traffic, that also means that not only can visitors not move, but our law enforcement and our emergency response folks also can't move in that system. And so that was definitely happening in Glacier before managed access.

Daniel: It's really a balance of all these different concerns and values and things you're trying to achieve. But two things that resonate with me the most are just safety and emergency management, making sure that there's not too many people in case of an emergency, and then two, like just preserving the experience that people want to come to Glacier to have. And that's not bumper-to-bumper traffic.

[red-breasted nuthatch singing]

Daniel: [in the field] I wanted to get one more layer to the vehicle reservation system. So we actually came into the park and I'm in Apgar now, and everyone here, they somehow got in through the vehicle reservation system. So we're just going to chat with some people and see what they have to say. [Western tanager sings] It's really nice here this morning, just walking along the shore of Lake McDonald [Western tanager sings] and people are enjoying the park and it's kind of cloudy, but sunny and...

Visitor: Are you recording bird sounds?

Daniel: [in the field] We are recording for Glacier’s podcast. Um, so we're just talking to people about the vehicle reservation system and seeing what they think of it and stuff like that.

Visitor: I did it last year.

Daniel: [in the field] How did it go?

Visitor: Oh, we didn't get a Going-to-the-Sun pass the first try, but we got it for the next day. So.

Daniel: [in the field] So you found it to be okay?

Carrie: Well, I had to wake up and make sure that I was on the website first thing in the morning when it opened to get a pass. And I didn't get one, like I said, the first day, but the second day I was able to for Going-to-the-Sun. But for the first day we decided to go through the Polebridge side. So we had a good experience up there on the first day and then spent our second day on Going-to-the-Sun. But yeah, it was frustrating because people are trying to get those permits like first thing in the morning and they go really quickly. Yeah.

Daniel: [in the field] Are you from around here?

Carrie: Oregon.

Daniel: [in the field] Okay. So you knew you were coming out, though, and you planned ahead?

Carrie: Correct. Okay. Yeah. I knew about the system and planned ahead, and so that was helpful. I think a lot of people probably get frustrated if they don't know about it. But it was nice because there wasn't, there was a lot of traffic, but it wasn't like an overabundance. So it was a little easier to navigate through Going-to-the-Sun Road and find parking spots for pull offs and stuff like that.

Daniel: [in the field] Okay. So that visitor kind of expressed how a lot of people feel about the vehicle reservation system. I think anyway, like, no one's really excited about it, but they definitely see advantages and disadvantages. It's frustrating sometimes if you don't get a reservation, but on the other hand, you come into the park and when you have one it, your visit can be really smooth and pleasant because it's not nearly as crowded.

[drumbeats mark a transition]

Susie: [to Daniel] We want people to come to Glacier and remember the beautiful hiking, the wildlife, the really awesome interpretive ranger that taught them about the park's history.

Daniel: [to Susie] It's a balance between trying to protect wildlife and... but it's also so that you can come and enjoy the park the way that you know you're expecting to and not be in bumper-to-bumper traffic.

Susie: Yes. And this is just one type of managed access system.

Daniel: I guess one of the main takeaways I'm having then is that it's not set in stone. It's not like this is how it's going to be like. It's a constant process of studying and figuring out what works best in any given park or any given region of a park.

Susie: And then if it's not, changing course.

Daniel: Trying something else

Susie: Trying something else.

Daniel: Cool. Well, thanks for coming and chatting with us, Susie.

Susie: Yeah, thanks so much for having me. And I'll see you out in the park this summer.

Daniel: Great.

[calm piano music plays under the credits] Peri: Headwaters is a production of Glacier National Park with support from our partner, the Glacier National Park Conservancy. This episode was made by Daniel Lombardi, Peri Sasnett, Michael Faist, and Gaby Eseverri. Frank Waln wrote and performed our music. Thank you to Dr. Susie Sidder and the whole vehicle reservation team. Check out our website at nps.gov/glac if you’re looking for detailed information about vehicle reservations. Thanks for listening.