In this episode, the Flathead River reveals our own notions of wilderness, and remarkable fossils. We learn about a glacier with a complicated past—and we climb to a mountaintop to learn that even the park’s most isolated office isn’t as lonely as it seems.
Featuring: Colter Pence, Amanda Wilson, Kurt Constenius, Dale Greenwalt, Christoph Irmscher, Beth Hodder, Karen Reeves, and interviews & letters from Kay Rosengren—courtesy of the NWMT-FFLA.
For more info, visit: go.nps.gov/headwaters
WILD AND SCENIC RIVERS INTRODUCTION
Andrew: In 1940, biologist, Dr. John Craighead, famous for his pioneering work with grizzly bears, wrote a letter for Montana Wildlife magazine, about a raft trip on the Middle Fork of the Flathead River, the southern boundary of Glacier National Park. The following is an excerpt from that letter. Alex (as Dr. Craighead): I have rafted most of the large fast water rivers of the mountain west. There is no doubt in my mind that this is one of the most scenic wild rivers in the northwest. One which conservationists should strive hard to save. It is essential to preserve intact a few of the wild rivers of this region for recreation and education of future generations. The aesthetic and recreational values of a river are so very easily destroyed, far more easily destroyed than similar values of hill and mountain country. It is my belief that we should strive to keep intact some wild rivers on the basis that they're essential to our way of life.
Michael: This idea, born on the middle fork of the Flathead River, and articulated in that letter became the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, which was signed into law in 1968.
Andrew: Glacier National Park is bounded by two rivers protected under the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act. So it's really special that this is where the idea for the act first originated. And while part of the Flathead River is in Glacier National Park, most of it actually lies outside of the park's boundaries.
Colter Pence: The three forks of the Flathead primarily flow through the Flathead National Forest.
Andrew: That's Colter Pence. Among other things she's the Wild and Scenic River Program Manager for the Flathead National Forest. As wild and scenic rivers, the forks of the Flathead River flow through the park, the national forest, as well as state and private lands, making their management a deeply collaborative effort.
Colter Pence: And I would say from my work as a forest service employee, it's one of the more interesting parts of my job. Our common work with wild and scenic rivers has us interacting all the time. And that's why I say some of my closest colleagues are even national park staff.
Michael: Of course, the clear clean waters of the rivers make for spectacular recreational opportunities like fishing and boating.
Andrew: But the river also makes corridors for all sorts of wildlife from giant grizzly bears to the smallest of bugs.
Michael: All of it protected by the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act.
Andrew: In fact, the corridors around the three forks of the Flathead River are home to an amazing array of resources, which the wild and scenic rivers act refers to as outstandingly remarkable values. Here's Colter Pence, again—
Colter Pence: Of our outstandingly remarkable values, it's fisheries, wildlife, botanic in some places, recreation, scenic, historic, ethnographic, like that prehistory, and even geologic. We have all of those present as outstandingly remarkable, meaning to say they're rare or even unique.
Andrew: The fact that these rivers were protected was not inevitable.
Colter Pence: Yeah, you can't take it for granted that a landscape is protected or that it's always been protected or that it always will be protected.
Andrew: And it's important to keep protecting these places because rivers bring people together. You might think of a river as a dividing line, but it can also be a gathering place and a place where people and nature can come together.
Michael: Welcome to Headwaters - a Glacier National Park Podcast. Brought to you by the Glacier National Park Conservancy, and produced on the traditional lands of many Native American Tribes, including the Blackfeet, Kootenai, Selis and Qlispe people.
Andrew: We’re calling this season: The Confluence, as we look at the ways that nature, culture, the present and the past all come together here.
Michael: And we’re both rangers here. Today, we’re headed to the North Fork, the northwest region of Glacier.
Andrew: The North Fork is one of the most rugged, and least developed areas of the park.
Michael: Not a paved road in sight.
Andrew: Which makes it the perfect place for today’s episode.
Michael: Today, we bring you three examples of people coming face to face with the wild and the unknown.
Michael: Okay, Andrew when we started this episode, you brought up the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act. And you mentioned the phrase outstandingly remarkable values.
Andrew: Yeah, I remember that.
Michael: Looking at the act itself and the list of values they included, the word fossils stood out to me. When you hear the word fossils, what do you think of?
Andrew: Well, I guess dinosaurs is probably the first thing?
Michael: Right, me too. Hey Amanda. It's Michael.
Michael: So I called a friend, an old coworker from Glacier who now works at Dinosaur National Monument.
Amanda: Uh, Amanda Wilson, interpretive park ranger, at Dinosaur National Monument.
Michael: What sort of dinosaurs do you have there? I mean, it's your namesake.
Amanda: So our main like "famous" dinosaurs are dinosaurs like stegosaurus, allosaurus was the dominant carnivore at the time.
Michael: Wow. Creatures straight out of drastic park. So you worked at Glacier, were there fossils like that here?
Michael: If I were a visitor, I came up to you and asked about the fossils in Glacier. How would you respond?
Andrew: Well, most of the rock in the park is super ancient, like a billion and a half years old. And it predates most complex life on earth that would leave fossils behind. So really we only have fossil stromatolites, which are these clumps of blue-green algae.
Michael: So most of the rock in the park is too old for fossils more complex than algae or cyanobacteria called stromatolites. And fossil stromatolites are really cool, and certainly it's true that they're the most prevalent fossil in Glacier... But as it turns out, our fossil record has a lot more in common with Jurassic Park than you might think.
Andrew: Wait, what? What do you mean?
Andrew: What else is here? I've been telling people for years that stromatolites are virtually the only fossils here I've been lying to all these people?
Michael: Alright don't, don't worry—I think you're the clear. The visible rock in the park is overwhelmingly ancient, and the only fossils anyone are ever likely to see are still stromatolites. And because of that, for a long time, it was believed that they were really the only fossils in the area. But this story taught me that no matter how well you think you know a place, there is a lot to learn if you dig a little deeper. Which is where Kurt comes in.
Kurt: So my name is Kurt Constenius.
Michael: He has a long title.
Kurt: I am an adjunct professor at the University of Arizona and a research associate of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History.
Michael: I spent a day in the field with Kurt and with Dale.
Dale: My name is Dale Greenwalt,
Michael: Who also has a long title.
Dale: ...Research Associate the Natural History of National Museum of, let me start over.
Michael: He works for Smithsonian. Dale and Kurt are some of the foremost experts on a geologic oddity to this area. Outcroppings of fossils unlike anything else in the park. Now, as a ranger here, you learn a lot about the geology of the park, but I'm not a geologist by trade. So I brought a few friends, Emily and Teagan, along as geologic interpreters. To set the stage, Glacier is a mountainous park. The continental divide runs right through it. To the east, you have the great plains stretching flat into the horizon, and to the west, you can see more mountains, but you'll cross valleys or basins to get to them. And this is where I want to challenge you, Andrew.
Michael: We often describe Glacier's geologic history as having four stages.
Andrew: Yeah. Silt tilt, slide, and glide.
Michael: So to make it difficult, I want you to describe each stage in 10 seconds or less. Okay. You think you can do it?
Andrew: I think I'm up for it. Okay. So silt. Okay. So over a billion years ago, sediment eroded from highlands and collected at the bottom of an ancient sea called the belt sea.
Michael: Nailed it. Tilt?
Andrew: Okay. So about 150 million years ago, this sediment had compacted into rock and tectonic movement lifted up a slab of it that was several miles thick.
Michael: Great. And slide!
Andrew: This is 60 to 70 million years ago, tectonic forces pushed this slab about 50 miles east; this is what we call the Lewis overthrust fault.
Michael: Nailed it, and glide.
Andrew: Okay. Now we're back to about 2 million years ago, the place to see an ice age and large ice sheets, advanced and retreated repeatedly carving out the valleys and sculpting the mountains of the park.
Michael: Perfect. A whirlwind tour of our geologic history. Silt, tilt, slide, and glide represents the deposition of sediments—it turns to mountains, and then glaciers come in and carve it out. The stage most important to our fossil field day was Slide. That slide, as you mentioned, was driven by the Lewis overthrust fault.
Kurt: The main structure that dominates the landscape here is called the Lewis overthrust. And it, it started motions about 75 million years ago. And they continued up to about 50. And in that it translated a plat—.
Michael: The overthrust took a slab of earth up to nine miles thick and pushed it over another one.
Kurt: And a transported it at about 80 to 90 miles to the Northeast.
Michael: In the mountains you find on the eastern side of the park, didn't start out there but were shoved into place. But the Lewis overthrust that shoving force, it didn't last forever.
Kurt: And then just about like a light switch, immediately after the Lewis thrust had ceased motions, the mountain belt began to collapse.
Michael: When the rock was no longer being pushed upward by tectonic plates, gravity began to pull it back down to earth. The crust broke along fault lines, creating the valleys and basins we see today that separate the mountains in the park from the mountains to the West. One of those basins is called the Kishenehn Basin.
Kurt: The history of that collapse are the sediments that were deposited in the Kishenehn Basin.
Michael: The sediments collected in Kishenehn basin became the rock of the Kishenehn Formation, which is huge. It stretches throughout the western part of the park. You could find it under Park Headquarters, the Apgar Visitor Center, even the Lake McDonald Lodge. The only problem is, something happened more recently that buried the Kishenehn Formation, covered it up.
Andrew: The ice age! That slide stage we were talking about.
Michael: Exactly. Ice age glaciers carved and carried a ton of rock and debris. All of which got dumped out eventually completely burying the Kishenehn. So the only reason we're able to see it is thanks to the Flathead River.
Kurt: The Flathead River and its tributaries have incised down through all the glacial material. And it gives us this window into, into the Kishenehn, some of the best exposure to the tertiary rocks in North America.
Michael: Tertiary in this instance, referring to the most recent era of geologic time.
Dale: WIth potassium-argon dating and they gave us an age from the middle part of the Kishenehn of about 46 million years.
Michael: And we can learn what this place was like 46 million years ago by looking at the fossil record. Now geologically speaking 46 million years ago is actually pretty recent. 20 million years after the extinction of the dinosaurs.
Andrew: Wait. So most of our rock is too old for dinosaurs, but the Kishenehn Formation is too new for dinosaurs. So what did you find?
Michael: Well, if we wanted to find anything, we had to look really closely.
Michael: [Outside] One to two millimeters. I'm just looking at pebbles and like, these are too big.
Michael: We found tiny snails—
Kurt: Snails, some snails are only like a millimeter two millimeters in size. Those can be adult snails out. Yeah.
Michael: Some snail fossils were the size of your thumb while others look like they could fit through the head of a needle. And I actually brought in some of the snails to show you,
Andrew: Wait, are you guys allowed to be collecting fossils?
Michael: Oh—good question. Like anything else in the park, wild flowers, rocks, heck moose. You're not allowed to collect fossils and take them home. The only exceptions to this rule are for research purposes. Kurt and Dale both have permits to collect fossils in the park, and take the restrictions associated with the permit very seriously. They gave me these few examples, but I could only take pictures otherwise.
Andrew: Okay let's see it. Oh cool! There are like dozens or hundreds in here.
Michael: And once they were pointed out to you, you kind of started to see them everywhere.
Dale: So many times I reach for a white snail and it turns out to be a bird dropping. That's disappointing.
Michael: We found clams, this one was underwater cemented in the rock and just slightly covered by dirt. It was beautiful!
Dale: It looks like you can still see the mother of pearl.
Michael: We even found a tooth that belonged to a pretty large mammal.
Michael: [Outside] Yeah, and it's probably an inch and a half long, from root to top or...
Kurt: Yeah, that's right! I'll go get a container for that.
Michael: And then on accident, we knocked it loose and nearly lost it.
Teagan: So it's in this area right here.
Michael: [Laughing] Oh no, now I can't step anywhere.
Andrew: Wait, you lost it? How did that happen?
Michael: It was very precariously sitting in the cliff face and someone trying to take a picture of it, shook it loose and it fell into the dirt.
Andrew: Who was it? Who knocked it loose?
Michael: I will not name names.
Michael: I, I can neither confirm nor deny, but after what felt like an eternity of me being sure that Dale and Kurt were going to ban us from fossil collecting, we found it!
Andrew: Oh—hey, found it.
Kurt: That's it. We've got the whole thing. Emily: Success!
Teagan: I was about to pass out.
Andrew: Okay. Well you said the tooth was what, an inch, Inch and a half?
Andrew: Okay. That's a pretty big tooth. What did it belong to?
Michael: With the benefit of hindsight, and Kurt's friend who is a paleontologist, it was identified as a uintathere, an enormous rhino-looking mammal.
Michael: Yeah. So on top of feeling lucky that we didn't lose the uintathere tooth. We were also feeling lucky that we even found it in the first place. Kurt and Dale had told us ahead of time that it was incredibly rare to find mammal fossils.
Dale: Yeah. What was the chances?
Kurt: I wouldn't say slim to none, but.
Dale: In fact, we were able to collect it twice!
Michael: Finding a tooth like this is about as good as it gets. You rarely find fossils that are completely intact.
Dale: Yeah. You never find a whole fossil organism, unless it's an insect.
Dale: There are some places in the world where the insects are primarily just isolated wings, and they identify everything based on the wings. But in the Kishenehn, almost everything is fully articulated: all the wings, all the legs, all the antennae.
Michael: This is why I got interested in the Kishenehn in the first place: Its unrivaled preservation of fossil insects.
Michael: And this is Dale's expertise. So for our last stop of the day, he took us to one final location where we first had to ford, or walk across the river on foot.
Dale: And there's a place down river, about a half a mile at a site that I call deep Ford because the first time I tried it, I stepped into that pool that looked like it was three feet deep and it came up to my neck and I was lucky that I didn't.
Andrew: Could you not just float across the river?
Michael: I know, it sounds like that'd be the way to go. But it's not especially easy to get to the spot where we crossed. Uh, Dale had tried one lightweight approach in the past.
Dale: Well, you know, I, I bought a big inner tube and I brought it down here, and pumped it up. And had a paddle. And you know what happens when you paddle an inner tube? It goes around in circles and you don't go any place.
Michael: But ultimately he found a spot where we could walk across safely. And before I crossed, I asked him how the insect fossils were preserved in the first place.
Dale: So the insects are flying around, as you can imagine, buzzing all over the place. And some of them land on the surface of the algal bloom or the wind blows them on the surface. If they're big enough, that's not a problem. They just fly away. But the really tiny ones get caught in the slime.
Michael: So small insects will get trapped in the algae, but the algae will continue to photosynthesize and to grow.
Dale: And so the insects are entombed inside the algae, which protects them from degradation, from predation, from the waves, breaking them up.
Michael: Eventually the algae will die and take all the insects it's entombed down to the bottom of the lake with it, where it's covered by dirt. Year after year, this process would repeat accumulating layers of algae and insects on the bottom of the lake. 46 million years later, it's all turned to oil shale, but those layers of algae and sediment called varves, are still visible in the rock today.
Dale: A piece of this material, and look at the edge of it. So this piece here is maybe two millimeters at most, and it probably would have 10 layers.
Michael: Thin layers of dark colored, algae, and light thick layers of sediment.
Dale: It's within that algal mat that you find the fossil insects. And luckily it's also within that algal mat that the shale will split.
Michael: It was like a paleontological scavenger hunt, grabbing pieces of oil shale, getting them wet, splitting them open with a putty knife and finding an insect perfectly preserved inside.
Dale: And have everybody look at it. This is a spectacular specimen here, a tiny wasp, uh, of the family, uh, ichneumonoidea. And it has both of its four wings, beautifully spread out and preserved.
Michael: I mean, it was a childhood dream come true just hunting for fossils for the afternoon.
Andrew: I can imagine. So you found a wasp or what else did you find?
Dale: Plants, One beautiful plant. I think Michael, you found that. Several gnats and midges. A couple of beautiful ants, a couple of beautiful love bugs or bibionids.
Dale: Yeah. What else did we find? We found some crane flies, nice crane flies, a number of other flies.
Michael: The insect fossils at this site were actually first discovered by Kurt's parents back in the eighties. And while Kurt was studying the subject at the time, his parents were just hobbyists. His dad was a dentist in Whitefish. And on top of finding some of the first insect fossils here, they also found some of the Kishenehn's most important, including the one that drew me to this story in the first place.
Dale: They found the first blood engorged mosquito we found—yep.
Andrew: Wait, what? Mosquito [stammering].
Michael: So you remember how they clone dinosaur DNA in Jurassic Park?
Andrew: Yeah. I mean, you're, you're joking, right?
Dale: Uh, the very first one, and we recognized it is a blood engorged mosquito.
Michael: The only mosquito fossils with intact blood-filled abdomens ever found—ever! Anywhere on earth! Have been right here along the boundary of Glacier.
Dale: And if that isn't crazy enough within the abdomen of the blood engorged mosquito are remnants of the blood. The hemoglobin from the host that it sucked blood from 46 million years ago.
Michael: A fossilized mosquito with blood in its abdomen that can still be identified.
Michael: That's full-blown Jurassic Park stuff.
Dale: Oh yeah, yeah. So when, when we published that paper and we got calls from National Public Radio and whatnot, invariably, the first thing they asked was: "Does it contain dinosaur blood?" No, no, it doesn't. 20 million years too late.
Andrew: This is crazy. I've been here for years and had no idea that this is a real life Jurassic Park opportunity.
Michael: I know, I had no idea either, but while this lines up perfectly with the premise of Jurassic Park, it doesn't line up in time. By tracking down that mosquitoes living ancestors, we know it was feeding probably on birds, not dinosaurs.
Andrew: Having this all in, like, one of the most famous movies of all time gave me the impression that this sort of fossil would be way more common.
Michael: Yeah, me too. And Dale said, it's certainly possible that fossils like this one occur elsewhere, but are still buried. And they haven't had a forest like the Flathead River to uncover them. Or that they exist, and we just haven't found them yet. Because after all, they're not that easy to find. Whatever the case, no blood engorged mosquito fossils have been found anywhere else. So Michael Chrichton, who wrote the book that inspired the movie, used a plausible sounding—but in 1990 as of yet unproven phenomenon to bring Jurassic Park to life.
Andrew: But okay, I can't let it go. Can we extract DNA? Can we clone something with these?
Michael: Well, no. As far as we know, DNA cannot survive the fossilization process, let alone for 46 million years. So we won't be cloning, whatever this mosquito had drawn blood from, but that does not mean you can't learn anything from the fossils of the Kishenehn, far from it. Like Jurassic Park, but with much less risk of being chased by a T-Rex, the fossils of the Kishenehn have helped reconstruct this prehistoric world in a relatively unknown era in Glacier. Take the snails and clams, for example.
Kurt: One of the cool things about the Kishenehn, it has the largest molluscan fauna in North America. So there's 72 different taxa, or different species of snails and clams found in the Kishenehn Formation.
Michael: Their fossils can tell us things that no other fossils could, their shells can act almost like a map.
Kurt: The poor snails, they never get any credit. They're, they're a fantastic window into the paleo-environment because they're very similar...
Michael: There were three groups of snails in the Kishenehn: ones that used wet tropical areas as habitat, semi-tropical areas as habitat, and upland or higher elevation areas is habitat. But no matter where they lived, as they slimed their way throughout the day, they'd be forming shells layer-by-layer crystal-by-crystal, from the minerals in their surroundings.
Kurt: I've been working with Majie Fan from the University of Texas Arlington. And what she'll do is she has what they call micro mill. And she'll go through and she can drill microscopically each of those individual crystals.
Michael: And this is where it gets a little technical. Water that falls at different elevations has a distinct molecular signature.
Kurt: Her work is ultimately trying to understand what's what's the paleo elevation? What were the, what were the heights of the mountains and the basin floor?
Michael: And because of a snail's limited home range, their shells preserve a record of all precipitation that came to that area. You could read that record to determine how tall the mountains used to be.
Kurt: And her work showed that the mountain ranges were probably in excess of four and a half kilometers, high, 12 to 15,000 feet. So basically in the Middle-Eocene, we had a towering mountain range. They're bigger, bigger than we have today.
Michael: 12 to 15,000 feet is significantly taller than the mountains in the park today. The tallest peak in the park today, Mount Cleveland is just over 10,400 feet.
Andrew: Wow. That's that's incredible.
Michael: I have been obsessed with this story all summer long because it took something I thought I knew well and turned it on its head. As it happens, we have way more fossils than just stromatolites here. And we are home to fossils not yet found anywhere else on earth. These snails, uintathere tooths, and blood-engorged mosquitoes show us that even in a place as well-studied and well loved as Glacier, there is always more to learn. And perhaps most excitingly, even in the Kishenehn, we've only just begun.
Dale: Published, what, about 20 papers? And we've named about a hundred new species of insects and we've just barely scratched the surface of the potential here.
Michael: And what we can discover next is anyone's guess.
Michael: We’ll be back with our next story after a quick river safety PSA.
Andrew: Hey folks, since we're on the river today, I enlisted Colter Pence of the Flathead National Forest to give us some tips so we can make sure to leave no trace while on the Flathead River system or any river, really. Tip one: plan ahead and prepare.
Colter Pence: You don't just show up and be uninformed. You need to do that research. And we have a great product here, the park and the forest worked together on this. And that is our three forks of the Flathead Wild and Scenic River Float Guide. It's a spiral bound booklet it's made of waterproof paper and it shows all of the three forks of the Flathead calls out the rapids by name and all of the river access sites. Some of us who've seen this river a lot, we still use this as a resource. I do want to encourage people to pick up the float guide.
Andrew: Tip two: minimize campfire impact.
Colter Pence: Campfires. We ask that people use fire pans, fire blankets, and that's particularly important in the wilderness stretch.
Andrew: Tip three: dispose of waste properly.
Colter Pence: Disposing of waste properly, on the North Fork and Middle Fork of the Flathead. If you're camping in the river court, or you are expected to pack out your solid human waste--cat hole method is not acceptable here, and that's maybe acceptable some other places, but not here. Now, if you're going to camp at a river access site that has an outhouse, you can plan to use that, but if you're camping in a place that does not have that feature, you need to plan how you're going to pack out your solid human waste.
Andrew: Tip four: store food properly.
Colter Pence: We're in bear country, there's a lot of bears here. And river users need to take food storage seriously. So you need to have a plan that's consistent with the leave no trace principle, that you have a plan on how you're going to store your food properly.
Andrew: Tip five: be considerate of other visitors.
Colter Pence: It's really important, especially as we have more visitors to this area. Realize you're not going to be the only one there getting ready to go for an hour. You need to do your boat prep and get your gear together on the side so that when you are actually ready to go, you can use the ramp or the slide and quickly get out of there. It is very frustrating when people think that they're going to be the only ones and they clog up the site, so to speak. Being respectful in terms of noise, speaker systems. Many people came here to enjoy the river system and the natural sounds that come with that, that, that flowing water sound, right. We need to be protective of that.
Andrew: By taking these steps, you can help us to keep these incredible places clean and in good shape for generations to come. Thank you.
Andrew: So Michael, if I asked you how many glaciers there are here, what would you say?
Michael: Well, that's a common questions, so I think I actually have this one. As of 2015, the last year we have complete satellite imagery, there were 26 named glaciers, larger than 0.1 square kilometers. But some of those may have fallen below that threshold since our last measurement.
Andrew: So you said 26 named glaciers. They have names?
Michael: Yeah. There's Grinnell Glacier, Sperry Glacier, Jackson and Blackfoot Glaciers, to name a few famous ones.
Andrew: Exactly. Yeah. I've actually got a list here of all 26 names. I'm going to give it to you. Looking at this list. What do you notice about the names in general?
Michael: Well, some of them are named after Indigenous people or Tribes like Piegan Glacier. Others are named for non-Native people like Sperry Glacier, and some seem to be named for their shape or nearby geographic features like Salamander Glacier.
Andrew: Have you ever wondered why these glaciers are called by these particular names?
Michael: Yeah. These features must have had many names over the years. Like Kootenai names, Selis names, Blackfeet names, and probably multiple English ones too.
Andrew: Well, you might notice that while people use a bunch of different names for a place, all official government publications, like our park maps here, will use the same name.
Michael: How did they decide which name to you, I mean, who decides, what name to use?
Andrew: To avoid confusion and ambiguity in these place names, all federal agencies use names approved by the United States Board of Geographic Names, which was created by an executive order of president Benjamin Harrison back in 1890.
Michael: This board comes up with the names, pulls them out of the hat?
Andrew: The board doesn't actually come up with names. They just adjudicate which proposed name should be the official one. Most of the official names of places in Glacier National Park were approved by the board before 1930. So they're pretty old and kind of a grab bag of different things.
Michael: Yeah. Some of the features have names that come from Native people in the area, but others are clearly names given by homesteaders or other early non-Native visitors.
Andrew: Yeah. And even the Native names are kind of a mixture of different things. Some names are English translations of Blackfeet, Selis or Kootenai words, like Many Glacier. Some places are named after Indigenous people by non-Native people like Siyeh Pass. There are even some places where there's still debate over whether the name comes from an authentic Native story or one concocted to sound authentic by white visitors, like Going-to-the-Sun Mountain.
Michael: There are even some places that are named after the Indigenous name, given to a white person like Rising Wolf or Apikuni, named for Hugh Monroe and George Willard Schultz, respectively.
Andrew: Yeah, so it's really all over the place with these names.
Michael: How do you know so much about the Board of Geographic Names?
Andrew: Well, I started to look into it when I got curious about the origin of Agassiz Glacier's name.
Michael: Yeah. Oh, I've seen that one. That there's a phenomenal view of it from the pit toilet at the Boulder pass backcountry site. And honestly, I didn't even know how to say it. Agassiz?
Andrew: Yeah. You've got it. It's Agassiz. Yeah. It's up in the North Fork. The glacier's on the seldom seen southeast shoulder of Kintla Peak.
Michael: So what did you find out about that name?
Andrew: Well, at first it seemed really simple. Agassiz Glacier was named for Louis Agassiz. He was a Swiss scientist who is credited with discovering the ice age.
Michael: Given the importance of the ice age here, it seems like a natural enough connection.
Andrew: Yeah. But then when I looked into the history a little bit further, things got complicated.
Andrew: Well before he took up glaciology Louis Agassiz had actually been an ichthyologist, studying and classifying different species of fish. And he was really good at it. He had studied under some of the greatest scientists of his time, like George Cuvier and Alexander Von Humboldt.
Michael: So how did fish connect to the ice age?
Andrew: Yeah. Agassiz was looking for a way to kind of make his own name and step out of the shadow of his mentors. While vacationing in the Bernese Alps of his native Switzerland, he was hiking. And he started to wonder about the origin of the large boulders scattered around the valleys.
Michael: Like the ones you'll see along the Avalanche Lake trail, erratic boulders?
Andrew: Yeah. And for anyone who doesn't know what is an erratic boulder?
Michael: Sure. Yeah. During an ice age, huge glaciers, scrape massive rocks from the mountains, carrying them down into valleys. And as the ice age ends and the glaciers retreat, the boulders are left behind. And we're talking about huge boulders, they could be car or even house size rocks sometimes.
Andrew: Exactly. So then in 1837, he made a speech where he laid out his theory that the boulders, like the ones in the Bernese Alps or on the Avalanche Lake trail had been carried to those spots by moving ice sheets that had once covered much of the world.
Andrew: Exactly. But this is where the story gets messy. The ice age wasn't really Agassiz's theory. His old college friend, a man named Carl Schimper had already proposed a similar theory, and he'd even used the term "ice age" in a letter he wrote to Agassiz.
Michael: Oh, well, I mean, there's still a glacier here named after him. He must've gotten away with like scientific theft, so to speak?
Andrew: He did. And to figure out how he managed to do that. I decided to bring in an expert, Christoph Irmscher. He's a provost professor of English at the University of Indiana Bloomington and the author of the book, Louis Agassiz: Creator of American Science.
Michael: What did you find out?
Andrew: Well, Christoph told me that at the time Agassiz announced his theory of the ice age, he hadn't actually collected any data to support it. Was just kind of going off his instincts. So then Agassiz had to figure out a way to quantify this ice sheet movement that he had described.
Christoph Irmscher: One of the mountain guides said a little cabin that he built, and Agassiz noticed when he went up to the glacier that this guy's cabin had been traveling, which was an indication that the glacier was moving. Eventually it was entirely gone. So Agassiz started his own field station. He would put stakes in the ice and measure their locations, keep track of their locations. You had a thermometrograph, so you would do temperature readings. So it was sort of a host of things that he would then use, data that he would accumulate. In one particular famous episode that was illustrated at the time, he had himself lowered into one of the crevasses in the glacier, you know, going all the way down. Which of course added to the luster of the famous Agassiz, that he wasn't afraid of doing these things, physically.
Andrew: Agassiz wasn't just a scientist. You should think of him as like a celebrity. He tried to cultivate an image of a brave, manly and physical person.
Michael: Kind of sounds like his approach to the ice age theory too. He was less concerned with actually coming up with a theory, then he was getting credit for it. It's all branding.
Andrew: Yeah. He was very much concerned with his image, but that's not to say he didn't do any good science.
Michael: Yeah, I mean, measuring the movement of stakes and taking temperature readings of the area are similar techniques to what glaciologists use today.
Andrew: Yeah. So he made some real contributions to the development of the scientific field of glaciology.
Michael: I guess the marketing element is important too. A scientific theory doesn't do much good if no one in the scientific community buys into it.
Andrew: Yeah. That's true. And Christoph told me that Agassiz was pretty effective at this marketing. He was able to gain acceptance for the ice age theory in not much time.
Christoph Irmscher: It was actually surprisingly, as far as these things go, when you think about, you know, how long it took for Darwin's theory really to take hold universally. I mean, again, it wasn't super long, but Agassiz was very, very quick. Partially because he was so charismatic and he was his scientific entrepreneur, meaning that once he has a theory, he just goes around to talks about it. So a year later he's at a gathering of naturalists in France, he talks about it. He travels to England and very, very famous people at the time contemporaries, there was some people who never came around, but famous contemporaries would say, okay, yes. Great, fantastic. Yes, I'm on it. Really within a year, a year and a half, you see people essentially saying yes. And of course it helps that other people have been doing the work too and people knew about it at the time.
Michael: What about the other people that were already working on the ice age theory? They couldn't have been happy to see Agassiz get all the credit.
Andrew: Yeah, that's for sure. Agassiz burned a lot of bridges in Europe, both in his professional and personal life and not long after he started this glaciology work, he had to pack up and leave for the United States.
Christoph Irmscher: It was not so much a move or a planned move. It was Agassiz getting out of Dodge really in a way. Because as I mentioned before Neuchatel had become rather precarious for him, for different reasons. His wife left him, which is really unprecedented if you think of it in 19th century terms. His professional life had become complicated because there were people who resented what he'd done. He was a scientific con man in some ways. Taking other people's ideas is never going to win you many friends. And he was in financial trouble. I mentioned that he had his own printing press. He was broke. There was really not much of a way forward in some ways. And Humboldt managed to help him get an invitation to Boston where he delivered the Lowell Lectures.
Andrew: After coming to America, Agassiz never really worked on glaciology again, but at that point, glaciology didn't need him anymore. Once people started thinking about the ice age, they would see evidence all around them.
Michael: That's definitely the case here.
Andrew: Yeah, can you name some of the features here that provide evidence for an ice age?
Michael: Well, I mean, just about every road in the park follows a glacially carved valley. So you could drive through those big U-shaped valleys, looking up at the mountains, you could see the fingerprints of glaciers all over them. There are features like aretes where there's a glacier on either side leaving this knife's ridge. Or horns, like that had three or more glaciers that create these points like the, the Matterhorn.
Andrew: Exactly the features of Glacier National Park were carved during an era called the Pleistocene glaciation, the most recent of Earth's five major ice ages. It started about two and a half, million years ago and the Pleistocene glaciers here probably totally melted out just over 10,000 years ago. So the glaciers that visitors to the park see today, like Agassiz Glacier, are probably mostly distinct from the massive 3000 foot thick ones that carved the valleys in the park.
Michael: Okay. So I pulled up the fact sheet, Agassiz Glacier, like all of the glaciers in the park, is currently shrinking. Between 1966 and 2015, years where we have data from every glacier, it shrank by 213 acres, which is actually more acreage loss than any other glacier in the park for that timeframe.
Andrew: Yeah, it's really shrinking. And like the glacier named for him, Louis Agassiz began to shrink as well, but in reputation rather than size.
Christoph Irmscher: He was really convinced that science had a public relevance and American naturalists were thinking about race, and were trying to come to terms with it. Agassiz arrived as slavery was being hotly debated. And he felt that science had to play a role there. And he went over to the dark side in terms of what was happening in the scientific discussion.
Michael: The dark side... That's ominous. What did he say?
Andrew: After moving to America, Agassiz became a proponent of what can really only be called a racist pseudo-science.
Michael: He had never been interested in that stuff before?
Andrew: No he really never wrote about race in his European work. And it's not like no one in Europe was thinking about these things. Lots of European naturalists of his era had started to develop theories about race, but it was something about his experience here that piqued Agassiz's interest. It's a bit of a mystery, what exactly motivated his racism, but Christoph gave me a couple of theories.
Christoph Irmscher: It gave Agassiz in a sense, a chance to affirm or to privilege whiteness and to make himself a little less of an alien than he was. You know, he'd left his own country behind. He was not an American. He spoke with a very noticeable French accent. He was somebody who had come from outside, that sort of emphasizing that European element of American society gave him sort of a way of normalizing who he was. All these explanations of course don't excuse it. And his racism had very, very tangible forms and left a legacy.
Michael: What did his contemporaries make of all this?
Andrew: When Asa Gray, the great botanist, first heard Agassiz lecture. He was pretty disturbed
Christoph Irmscher: Asa Gray said, oh my god, that's not what's going to help us. He said, he doesn't realize how dangerous this is here in America. He doesn't understand it. He's coming from somewhere else. You know, this is not what we need.
Andrew: So his views were pretty offensive to many people in his circle. His particular racial theory, which was called polygenism was dismissively summarized by the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow as the idea that there was a separate Adam and Eve for each race. In fact, Christoph first came to studying Agassiz because rangers from the National Park Service at Longfellow House, National Historic Site in Massachusetts, asked him to look into how Agassiz and Longfellow could have even been friends when they had such disparate views.
Michael: Yeah, I guess that's pretty disturbing to think of.
Andrew: Yeah, and there's an ongoing conversation about what to make of historic figures with views like this. And it's not just about Agassiz, but also other people that are important to the conservation movement, but who held racist views, like John Muir. Only by acknowledging the dark parts of the past and shedding light on them can we begin the process of healing.
Michael: Well I guess with what we know about his life, Louis Agassiz's name itself carries a lot of baggage.
Andrew: Yeah. And Christoph told me that some institutions, like schools, that had been named after Louis Agassiz have now changed their names for that exact reason.
Christoph Irmscher: Yes. And if people are now saying his name should be dissociated from the museum of comparative zoology, I have no problem with that. The fact remains that he was the one who gave the impulse for that he, you know, implanted in people's minds the notion that science literacy is important. Unfortunately, Agassiz didn't apply it to himself and made himself as literate in everything regarding science as he should have been because that obviously would have educated him about race. But that's something that is also part of Agassiz's legacy. And as you know, we have an enormous, enormous knowledge gap. And when it comes to science today and the public about global warming and so forth, which we always come up against whenever there's opinion polls or something like that. So I would sort of describe these different impulses. If he had not gone to the United States, he would probably be remembered as a great data guy, right. A data collector essentially, but he did his best to destroy that when he came over here.
Michael: Well, nature here is sort of taking care of that name question already. As the atmosphere warms and ice melts that outlined around his name is shrinking on the map. Eventually it'll be gone.
Andrew: Yeah. It's interesting. Louis Agassiz's reputation and Agassiz Glacier have followed kind of a similar trajectory once big and formidable. They're both now reduced to a mere shadow of their former selves.
Michael: So it seems like now through his own doing Agassiz's remembered more for his racist beliefs than for his science, if he's even remembered much at all.
Andrew: Yeah. Because of his hubris, he failed to recognize the mistakes in his own thinking. He didn't turn the scientific lens back on himself and his own actions and ideas.
Michael: But I suppose in his mistake, we can see a better path forward.
Andrew: Definitely. One where there's a confluence between a scientific mindset and our collective action. One where we can come together to forge a better future for our planet.
Andrew: After the break, our final story.
GLACIER NATIONAL PARK CONSERVANCY AD
Andrew: Each episode, we seem to cover at least one thing that like this podcast wouldn't be possible without the support of the Glacier National Park Conservancy.
Michael: With the help of some friends over there, we got the number of executive director, Doug Mitchell, and decided to call him up out of the blue to ask about these projects.
Andrew: For this episode, we wanted to ask about the preservation of historic documents.
Doug Mitchell: Good afternoon, Glacier Conservancy. Doug Mitchell speaking.
Michael: Hey Doug. It's Michael and Andrew.
Doug: Hey fellas. How's it going in the park?
Michael: It's going pretty well. And for this episode, we want to learn more about historic fire lookouts. So we're going to put you on the spot.
Michael: Do you happen to know when the Numa Ridge Fire Lookout up near Bowman Lake was constructed?
Doug: I do not have any idea, but it's a great question. You know Glacier Park has a terrific archives that is really becoming publicly accessible through a digitization project we've been very proud to support at the Conservancy, the Montana Memory Project. And I think that's really going to be a great tool for people to answer these and other great questions about the history of the park.
Andrew: That's a good idea. I've heard that they've digitized some superintendents reports all the way back to 1911.
Doug: It's really amazing. I've been able to see some of those, you know, Franklin Delano Roosevelt came out to the park in 1934 and the superintendent notes about that and the preparation for that are really something to see. And, and this Montana Memory Project and the work that's happening to be able to take those documents and make them accessible to the public is really, really significant.
Michael: I mean, it's hard enough to get access to things anymore that started digital. So to be able to bring elements of the past into the present is pretty remarkable.
Doug: Yep. You can go online and find a lot of information and we're adding to that every year. Not everything's there yet, but our goal is to be able to really make as much as possible and whether that's in written form or film form or audio form, eventually gentlemen, you're going to be in the archives and people are going to be wanting to look this up a hundred years from now.
Michael: Oh gosh. That's...
Andrew: ...that's a scary thought.
Michael: Well, thank you so much for pointing us in that direction. We'll be sure to add to the show notes where people can find this information, but I guess we'll talk to you later. Thank you.
Doug: Hey, thanks you guys, take care.
Michael: For our last story, we're going to fast forward a little bit beyond Louis Agassiz's time to May 11th 1910, when an act of Congress established Glacier National Park and protected over a million acres of pristine Rocky Mountain landscapes. A few months later, it was burning. Consumed by one of the worst fire years the West had ever seen, over 120,000 acres of Glacier had burned by the end of 1910, burdening park managers with their first real problem. Now we know that public land managers sought to totally suppress wildland fire for much of the 20th century, and we talk more about that history in the Lake McDonald episode. But before anyone could fight fires, they first had to find them.
Beth: They started to make camps and people were climbing trees and doing everything to see if they could find fires.
Michael: That's Beth Hodder.
Beth: Yes, I'm Beth Hodder.
Michael: She's a board member of the Northwest Montana Forest Fire Lookout Association.
Beth: We are soon to be changing our name to the Northwest Montana Lookout Association because we will...
Michael: An association that safeguards structures that have been integral to our relationship with fire: fire lookouts. Structures built on mountain tops and high vantage points, allowing observers to spot fires as soon as they start. And this new approach proved to be pretty effective.
Beth: Anyway, these lookouts kept building and building and building because it was easy to put these buildings in—not easy, but I mean, they had the ability to do that and they wanted—
Michael: Glacier built 17 lookouts in the park, but the neighboring Flathead National Forest built 147 lookouts by 1939.
Beth: Until all of a sudden World War II came along and they no longer had the funds to go into these lookouts. And from there, they started to realize that they could not take care of all of them.
Michael: Of the 17 towers erected in Glacier, today only nine remain. And of the eight that were destroyed, some were claimed by weather, but many were raised to the ground by rangers. Why would they be tearing down lookouts?
Beth: There were airplanes and helicopters and infrared technology and everything that was a lot cheaper to look for fires than to have people funded up in lookouts.
Michael: Despite it all, several lookouts in the park are still staffed today. And while a lot of people are drawn to the structures themselves—their architecture and location—I've always been fascinated by the people who staff them. People who spend their whole summer living in extreme mountaintop tiny homes. In the North Fork, nearly 3000 feet above Bowman Lake, you'll find the Numa Ridge Lookout, and it's been staffed off and on since its construction in 1934. In 1975, it was even staffed by Edward Abbey—the controversial but celebrated author of books like Desert Solitaire and the Monkey Wrench Gang. And most who know Abbey know him for his musings about the desert. Sometimes they were angry manifestos about industries like ranching or mining. And other times they were love letters to what is now Arches National Park, and the idea of being alone in the wilderness.
Michael: His writing from his time at Numa Ridge is sometimes poetic, often funny, but always grumpy.
Karen: Yeah. I don't think Abbey liked the weather much.
Michael: That's Karen Reeves who staffed the lookout in 2020.
Karen: …he was used to the Southwest and he really was a desert rat. And he didn't…
Michael: And it's worth noting Abbey, wasn't up here on his own.
Michael: I think his wife did most of the lookout duties when they were up here. Uh, at least she made most of the entries in the actual day-to-day journal.
Michael: And Abbey infamously wasn't alone during his time at Arches National Park, either stories about Edward Abbey and fire lookouts, often romanticize isolation, celebrating a sort of rugged individualism. And these ideas are appealing. Heck I think when I first moved to Montana, that's what I was looking for. But that's not what this story is about. The longer I've worked here, the more I've come to understand that this place isn't the utopia for rugged individuals that I'd imagined, but a place where folks from all walks of life bond over a shared love of a place. When I was looking into the history of numerous lookout, I learned about Kay Rosengren.
Kay (Interview): I grew up in Fargo, North Dakota, flat as a pancake Fargo.
Michael: Beth Hodder from the lookout association interviewed Kay Rosengren a few years ago about her experience as a lookout.
Kay (Interview): What year was this? This was in 1958. Okay.
Michael: Kay also provided copies of letters to the Northwest Montana Lookout Association as part of their ongoing work to preserve lookout history.
Kay (Letter): Dear Mom and Dad Rosengren: Well, here we are in Glacier National Park and loving it.
Michael: In 1958. Kay turned 21, got married to her husband, Keith, and they both moved out to Montana to staff the Numa Ridge fire lookout. This is the story of that summer. A story about how no matter what it is that brought you to Glacier, you can find yourself, head over heels, and welcomed into an ever-growing community of park stewards. And right off the bat, you get a sense of Kay's personality: witty, charming, and empathetic.
Kay (Letter): Before I go on it is only fair that I clear something up. I am not pregnant. I say gathered. You thought when we told you over very modest and hurried wedding plans, the reason we mobilize so hastily was because we didn't know until three weeks ago that I would have a job too. Did you even know that Keith had a job out here? Did you know that we were engaged? I suspect not as your son is not much of a communicator.
Michael: A friend had suggested to Keith, her boyfriend at the time that he should apply to be a lookout. So he applied and got the job. In his hiring paperwork, it mentioned that for some positions, they also hired wives.
Kay (Interview): So my husband wrote back and said, if I get a wife, will you hire her? Well, about two weeks later, he got a letter saying you better get that wife because she has a job.
Kay (Letter): Keith will be on the payroll five days a week. And I will work two days a week.
Kay (Interview): I finished college finals the day before, and then we got married in, came up.
Kay (Letter): The challenge now is to learn to cook. I can boil water, scramble eggs, but beyond that and completely ignorant, I will try not to starve or poison Keith
Michael: After arriving in Glacier. Kay and Keith went to fire school or training for their new job.
Kay (Letter): Fire school was interesting and scary. We were told we would receive just 40 gallons of water every two weeks. And those gallons will be for everything. These precious drops will be delivered by mule pack, train to you, dudes. The words leave me imagining Keith and buckskins and me and a Calico. And Sunbonnet, as you can tell, I'm trying really hard, but not successfully to resist the romance of the old West. However, fanciful, my image of life on a mountain top is there was one young wife at fire school from Chicago whose grasp of reality is even shakier than mine. She asked me what kind of washing machine there will be in their lookout. At first I thought she was joking, but then I realized that she either didn't hear or chose to ignore no electricity and water bypass drain. I didn't tell her there was no Maytag in her immediate future, less she cut and run right back to Illinois.
Michael: After training, they set out to reach their new home.
Beth: Now, to reach the lookouts. Did you hike? Did you head, were you given a horse to take up?
Kay (Interview): No. You hiked.
Kay (Letter): The hike up here was beyond my powers of description. Suffering of the sword is not noble.
Kay (Interview): And I thought I was going to die. I didn't know about altitude and breathing and...
Beth: Where they towers? Did they sit on the ground?
Kay (Interview): They sat on the ground. Two stories. The bottom of was storage. And then the top was where you lived. And that was glassed in, of course.
Kay (Letter): Your son. You may notice the change from my husband to your son found my faint heart did not make me a fair maiden. He arrived up top all you're going as to explore the mountain, then the lookout, while I languished on the lumpy mattressed cots.
Kay (Interview): Two cots, and, um, a table in the corner.
Michael: And I asked Karen, the lookout from 2020, the question on everyone's minds, where is your bathroom?
Karen: It's down over the hill. I just got a new outhouse last summer. The other one was chock-full [laughing].
Kay (Interview): The outhouse on Numa was wonderful because the view was fantastic [laughs] and there was nothing in front of it. Nobody could come and see you.
Michael: Once they got there, they settled into the job itself. A job they quickly learned was less solitary in practice than it was in theory.
Kay (Letter): Today, we turn on our two-way radio. We check in at 8:00 AM and at 4:00 PM. Once in a while, we are expected to report to headquarters or to the lookouts on Apgar Mountain. In the evening, we have a little up here containing some instruments and Duff pine needles, et cetera, to simulate the forest floor and doing this. We get the burning index BI, which gives us a fair idea of how dry the forest is and how quickly fire might spread.
Michael: Their work was only effective because they were part of a network of other regional lookouts and fire managers, their new community, who all worked together to protect their new home.
Kay (Letter): During fire school, we were taught to assess the kinds of clouds. We have their stages, et cetera. We keep speculating that all of the other lookouts in the Northwest are as unsure as we are about what they're seeing. Keith and I often disagree. And we shudder to think that our collective ignorance might be taken as gospel. To track the lightning, a fire finder is used. It is a large round wheel with a map in the center. It has a metal rim that can be moved. To the middle of the contraption is what looks like a ruler. When a storm threatens, we are to place a piece of paper on the map and draw a line—along the metal piece, on the paper—to indicate the line of sight from the lookout to the lightning strike.
Beth: Did you have fires while you were up there that you had to call in?
Kay (Interview): Yes, the first year again, you know, they tell you in fire school, well, "fire might smolder for two weeks" and I thought oh yeah right. You of course record all your lightning strikes, and our first fire was two weeks after we had recorded that strike.
Kay (Letter): We were told to record strikes until storms are so close the hair on the backs of our necks stands up. At which time we are to retreat to the safe corner. The fire finder is metal, as are the cots and the stoves, which means only the corner with the wooden table and chairs is safe.
Karen: And it's kind of fun. When you get lightning storms, it's kind of a front row seat to a pretty extreme firework show.
Michael: Now some parts of the job are flashy, even scary. Like the neighbors.
Kay (Interview): I tell you, I'll be honest. I thought some grizzly had been given my name and I did not leave Numa the whole summer.
Michael: In reality. One of the biggest challenges of the job is not bears, but boredom. Kay and Abbey both brought a load of books to Numa just to stay entertained.
Karen: It's a good place to bring projects. And you find out if you are interested in that hobby at all or not. I found out that I was not a quilter. [laughs] You bring it up here and you've got the time. So if you're not going to do it up here, you're not ever going to do it. So, um, I've been able...
Michael: The way Kay tells it though. The hardest part was cooking.
Kay (Letter): Perhaps the biggest challenge up here on Numa Ridge is learning to cook. I clearly remember pledging not to poison your son. There are days when I feel as if that was a promise made in haste. There's no way bread can be kept here. There's no freezer never mind a refrigerator. So I had my first foray into the wonderful world of baking bread. It was heavy enough to be a doorstop. It was gray and it quivered. Spam is a staple for us and we are both sick of it. But Keith has devised a sauce that kills the taste of the stuff, not to mention our taste buds. I am grateful. I'm also grateful for a small stained booklet that goes with the place. It is a basic cookbook written with bachelor lookouts in mind. It has become my Bible.
Kay (Interview): It was invaluable because I didn't know how to cook. I did. I knew nothing.
Kay (Letter): The recipes are simple and clearly explained. On the cover. It says it was compiled by some wives of forest service personnel. Bless them.
Karen: The cookbook was very specific that you should eat butter at every meal. That’s a cookbook I can get behind.
Michael: Finally, she highlights the moments that stood out.
Kay (Letter): A father and son hiked up from Bowman Lake campground a couple of days ago. The son appeared to be about 16.
Kay (Interview): The kid said to me: "What do you miss most up here?" And I said: "A, Coca Cola." And the child hiked up with one for me. It's the sweetest gift I ever got.
Kay (Letter): If anyone had told me before we signed on for this job, what life up here would be like, I would have cut and run a bare bones description would have sounded grim and impossibly austere. What it is instead is an adventure and proof that much of what we prize in the way of possessions and comforts is expendable. I've saved the best for last. The view of Bowman Lake below us is sublime. The water is emerald green with a touch of turquoise. And when it is still, the surrounding scenery is perfectly mirrored. The whole area is so lovely that I get teary at times. As we have no camera, our memories of this awesome splendidness will have to suffice.
Kay (Interview): No, we didn't have a camera at that time.
Kay (Interview): No, we didn't get so many wonderful photographs that we could have gotten because we didn't have a camera.
Kay (Letter): If I could be granted one wish while I live on this mountain, it would be that we could somehow communicate the beauty of this place, and the exhilaration of breathing the air, and the reverential feeling we have as we go about our daily chores.
Karen: And I can't emphasize enough how much the light and the play of light is one of my favorite things about being a lookout.
Kay (Letter): Mornings, especially are magical. I find myself holding my breath as if the very act will break the spell and will be sent below to live among mortals. It is not hard to see why the Greek mountains inspired toxic gods and special beings.
Karen: Sunrise, sunset, moonrise, reflections of Bowman Lake, northern lights. This year, the comet NEOWISE, I mean. There's just. The light is always playing. It's fabulous.
Kay (Letter): This morning dawned with just the peaks of surrounding mountains, and us, above clouds. Which were white and perfect, and looked solid enough to walk on into infinity. It is a picture we will treasure always.
Beth: If you had to do it again, would you?
Kay (Interview): Oh, yes, it was fine. And there was something new every day. Never once wished I was somewhere else. Yeah, no, I certainly would have done it again.
Michael: Kay and Keith have both since passed away. These letters and her interview give us the chance to share in her charm and wit and to be transported back to life as a lookout in 1958. And a lot has changed since then: there was the moon landing disco, the Berlin Wall, perms, Y2K and Facebook. But throughout all that time, life as a lookout has more or less stayed the same. Karen has a few more gadgets in 2020, but otherwise her job is the same as Abbey's in 1975 or Kay's over 60 years ago. From Numa Ridge, it is easier to see the things that have—like the lookout itself—stayed constant. And Kay's story helps to show that the passion for the park I've seen in visitors, friends, and peers, a love for Glacier and a commitment to preserving it—time hasn't changed that at all. Lookout towers were built by an optimism that our participation in public lands could protect them. And while we romanticize the isolation that comes with their location, protecting a place like Glacier is a burden too big for any individual. So if you're in search of a weekend alone in the woods, by all means come and visit. But you may find more than you bargained for. After all, even in one of Glacier's most remote destinations, Kay and Keith found a life and community here, and spent summers in Montana for the rest of their lives.
Michael: That’s our show for today—If you’re interested in learning more about the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, fossils, Louis Agassiz, or fire lookouts, you can find links in the show notes for more info—including to the Northwest Montana Forest Fire Lookout Association website.
Andrew: Thanks for listening!
Renata: Headwaters is a production of Glacier National Park with support from the Glacier National Park Conservancy. The show was written and recorded on traditional Native lands. Andrew Smith and Michael Faist produced, edited and hosted the show. Ben Cosgrove wrote and performed our music. Alex Stillson provided tech support Quinn Feller designed our art Renata Harrison researched the show, Lacy Kowalski was always there for us, and Daniel Lombardi and Bill Hayden were the executive directors. Support for the show comes from the Glacier National Park Conservancy. The Conservancy works to preserve and protect the park for future generations. We couldn't do it without them, and they couldn't do it without support from thousands of generous donors. If you want to learn more about how to support this podcast, or other awesome Conservancy projects, please go to their website at glacier.org. Of course you can always help support the show by sharing it with everyone you know— your friends, your family, your dog... And also leave us a review online. Special thanks this episode to Colter, Brian Dao, Echo Miller-Barnes, Dale Greenwalt, Kurt Constenius, Teagan Tomlin, Emily Crampe, Christoph Irmscher, Jean Tabbert, Karen Reeves, Lora Funk, Beth Hodder, and the Northwest Montana Forest Fire Lookout Association.
In this episode, the Flathead River reveals our own notions of wilderness, and remarkable fossils. We learn about a glacier with a complicated past—and we climb to a mountaintop to learn that even the park’s most isolated office isn’t as lonely as it seems. Featuring: Colter Pence, Amanda Wilson, Kurt Constenius, Dale Greenwalt, Christoph Irmscher, Beth Hodder, Karen Reeves, and interviews & letters from Kay Rosengren—courtesy of the NWMT-FFLA.
For more info, visit: go.nps.gov/headwaters
