How About Glacier?

Yellowstone has Old Faithful but Glacier is a world of its own!

Photograph of Glacier National Park: from Marlene Samuels’s collection

A few years ago, I visited Glacier National Park in northwestern Montana. I knew nothing about it but simply went there as my second choice to Yellowstone — impossible to visit between May and October without serious advanced planning.

Glacier sits on the Canadian border along Alberta and British Columbia. I was stunned to learn that Glacier encompasses over one-million acres, has two mountain ranges and over 130 lakes plus hundreds of animal species. It’s a protected area of 16,000 square miles!

That area that became Glacier National Park was first inhabited by Native Americans. When European explorers arrived, Blackfeet dominated the east and Flathead dominate the western regions. In 1895, Blackfeet ceded mountainous regions of their treaty lands to the federal government. Later it was incorporated into the park. Incredibly, it has most of its original native plant and animal species; grizzly bears, moose, mountain goats. wolverines and even Canadian lynxes.