Seeing Glacier Before It's Too Late

At the end of the week we'll be leaving on a trip I've been looking forward to for many years.  My mother often spoke glowingly of a trip she took as a young woman, before I was born and even before she met my father.  Back in the late 1940s she and a couple of friends toured throughout the West to many of the National Parks and Monuments.  That was quite an undertaking for three women at that time, long before the interstate freeway system.  One of the places she spoke of most fondly was Glacier National Park.   

For some time I've wanted to see the park in the northern Rockies known as the "Crown of the Continent," and this will finally be the year.  I've been particularly eager of late because the namesake glaciers are melting fast.  They will probably be gone by 2030, say the climate scientists.  It's all part of an ongoing human-caused catastrophe that's underway and gaining momentum.

In this quarter's National Parks magazine, a publication of the National Parks Conservation Association, the grim facts are presented.  The toll will likely claim, by 2100, roughly 40 percent of global plant and animal species, "including 21 percent of mammals, 37 percent of freshwater fish and 70 percent of plants."  Global sea level is up 2 inches, but over 4 inches on the U.S. East Coast.  As the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets continue to melt, the ocean should rise by over four feet by century's end.  That would inundate the Everglades, a third of Olympic National Park's coastline and a number of island nations.

So we'll enjoy Lake McDonald and traverse Going to the Sun Road.  We'll ride pack horses and hike around Many Glacier.  We'll skip across the border one day and cruise Waterton Lake on the Canadian side.  We'll see moose, elk and maybe grizzlies.  At least the pictures will last!