The Book of the National Parks Part 19

Shale has many varieties, but is princ.i.p.ally hardened clay; it tends to split into slate-like plates each the thickness of its original deposit.

It is usually dull brown or slate color, but sometimes, as in Glacier National Park and the Grand Canyon, shows a variety of more or less brilliant colors and, by weathering, a wide variety of kindred tints.

Sandstone, which forms wherever moving water or wind has collected sands, and pressure or chemical action has cemented them, is usually buff, but sometimes is brilliantly colored.

The processes of Nature have mixed the earth's scenic elements in seemingly inextricable confusion, and the task of the geologist has been colossal. Fortunately for us, the elements of scenery are few, and their larger combinations broad and simple. Once the mind has grasped the outline and the processes, and the eye has learned to distinguish elements and recognize forms, the world is recreated for us.

XIII

GLACIERED PEAKS AND PAINTED SHALES

GLACIER NATIONAL PARK, NORTHWESTERN MONTANA. AREA, 1,534 SQUARE MILES

I

To say that Glacier National Park is the Canadian Rockies done in Grand Canyon colors is to express a small part of a complicated fact. Glacier is so much less and more. It is less in its exhibit of ice and snow.

Both are dying glacial regions, and Glacier is hundreds of centuries nearer the end; no longer can it display snowy ranges in August and long, sinuous Alaska-like glaciers at any time. Nevertheless, it has its glaciers, sixty or more of them perched upon high rocky shelves, the beautiful shrunken reminders of one-time monsters. Also it has the precipice-walled cirques and painted, lake-studded valleys which these monsters left for the enjoyment of to-day.

It is these cirques and valleys which const.i.tute Glacier's unique feature, which make it incomparable of its kind. Glacier's innermost sanctuaries of grandeur are comfortably accessible and intimately enjoyable for more than two months each summer. The greatest places of the Canadian Rockies are never accessible comfortably; alpinists may clamber over their icy creva.s.ses and scale their slippery heights in August, but the usual traveller will view their n.o.blest spectacles from hotel porches or valley trails.

This comparison is useful because both regions are parts of the same geological and scenic development in which Glacier may be said to be scenically, though by no means geologically, completed and the Canadian Rockies still in the making. A hundred thousand years or more from now the Canadian Rockies may have reached, except for coloring, the present scenic state of Glacier.

Glacier National Park hangs down from the Canadian boundary-line in northwestern Montana, where it straddles the continental divide.

Adjoining it on the north is the Waterton Lakes Park, Canada. The Blackfeet Indian Reservation borders it on the east. Its southern boundary is Marias Pa.s.s, through which the Great Northern Railway crosses the crest of the Rocky Mountains. Its western boundary is the North Fork of the Flathead River. The park contains fifteen hundred and thirty-four square miles.

Communication between the east and west sides within the park is only by trail across pa.s.ses over the continental divide.

There are parts of America quite as distinguished as Glacier: Mount McKinley, for its enormous snowy ma.s.s and stature; Yosemite, for the quality of its valley's beauty; Mount Rainier, for its ma.s.sive radiating glaciers; Crater Lake, for its color range in pearls and blues; Grand Canyon, for its stupendous painted gulf. But there is no part of America or the Americas, or of the world, to match it of its kind. In respect to the particular wondrous thing these glaciers of old left behind them when they shrank to shelved trifles, there is no other. At Glacier one sees what he never saw elsewhere and never will see again--except at Glacier. There are mountains everywhere, but no others carved into shapes quite like these; cirques in all lofty ranges, but not cirques just such as these; and because of these unique bordering highlands there are nowhere else lakes having the particular kind of charm possessed by Glacier's lakes.

Visitors seldom comprehend Glacier; hence they are mute, or praise in generalities or vague superlatives. Those who have not seen other mountains find the unexpected and are puzzled. Those who have seen other mountains fail to understand the difference in these. I have never heard comparison with any region except the Canadian Rockies, and this seldom very intelligent. "I miss the big glaciers and snowy mountain-tops,"

says the traveller of one type. "You can really see something here besides snow, and how stunning it all is!" says the traveller of another type. "My G.o.d, man, where are your artists?" cried an Englishman who had come to St. Mary Lake to spend a night and was finishing his week. "They ought to be here in regiments. Not that this is the greatest thing in the world, but that there's nothing else in the world like it." Yet this emotional traveller, who had seen the Himalayas, Andes, and Canadian Rockies, could not tell me clearly why it was different. Neither could the others explain why they liked it better than the Canadian Rockies, or why its beauty puzzled and disturbed them. It is only he whom intelligent travel has educated to a.n.a.lyze and distinguish who sees in the fineness and the extraordinary distinction of Glacier's mountain forms the completion of the more heroic undevelopment north of the border.

II

The elements of Glacier's personality are so unusual that it will be difficult, if not impossible, to make phrase describe it. Comparison fails. Photographs will help, but not very efficiently, because they do not convey its size, color, and reality; or perhaps I should say its unreality, for there are places like Two Medicine Lake in still pale mid-morning, St. Mary Lake during one of its gold sunsets, and the cirques of the South Fork of the Belly River under all conditions which never can seem actual.

To picture Glacier as nearly as possible, imagine two mountain ranges roughly parallel in the north, where they pa.s.s the continental divide between them across a magnificent high intervening valley, and, in the south, merging into a wild and apparently planless ma.s.sing of high peaks and ranges. Imagine these mountains repeating everywhere huge pyramids, enormous stone gables, elongated cones, and many other unusual shapes, including numerous saw-toothed edges which rise many thousand feet upward from swelling sides, and suggest nothing so much as overturned keel-boats. Imagine ranges glacier-bitten alternately on either side with cirques of three or four thousand feet of precipitous depth.

Imagine these cirques often so nearly meeting that the intervening walls are knife-like edges; miles of such walls carry the continental divide, and occasionally these cirques meet and the intervening wall crumbles and leaves a pa.s.s across the divide. Imagine places where cirque walls have been so bitten outside as well as in that they stand like amphitheatres builded up from foundations instead of gouged out of rock from above.

Imagine these mountains plentifully snow-spattered upon their northern slopes and bearing upon their shoulders many small and beautiful glaciers perched upon rock-shelves above and back of the cirques left by the greater glaciers of which they are the remainders. These glaciers are nearly always wider than they are long; of these I have seen only three with elongated lobes. One is the Blackfeet Glacier, whose interesting west lobe is conveniently situated for observation south of Gunsight Lake, and another, romantically beautiful Aga.s.siz Glacier, in the far northwest of the park, whose ice-currents converge in a tongue which drops steeply to its snout. These elongations are complete miniatures, each exhibiting in little more than half a mile of length all usual glacial phenomena, including caves and ice-falls.

Occasionally, as on the side of Mount Jackson at Gunsight Pa.s.s and east of it, one notices small elongated glaciers occupying clefts in steep slopes. The largest and most striking of these tongued glaciers is the westernmost of the three Carter Glaciers on the slopes of Mount Carter.

It cascades its entire length into Bowman Valley, and Marius R.

Campbell's suggestion that it should be renamed the Cascading Glacier deserves consideration.

Imagine deep rounded valleys emerging from these cirques and twisting snakelike among enormous and sometimes grotesque rock ma.s.ses which often are inconceivably twisted and tumbled, those of each drainage-basin converging fan-like to its central valley. Sometimes a score or more of cirques, great and small, unite their valley streams for the making of a river; seven princ.i.p.al valleys, each the product of such a group, emerge from the east side of the park, thirteen from the west.

Imagine hundreds of lakes whose waters, fresh-run from snow-field and glacier, brilliantly reflect the odd surrounding landscape. Each glacier has its lake or lakes of robin's-egg blue. Every successive shelf of every glacial stairway has its lake--one or more. And every valley has its greater lake or string of lakes. Glacier is pre-eminently the park of lakes. When all is said and done, they const.i.tute its most distinguished single element of supreme beauty. For several of them enthusiastic admirers loudly claim world pre-eminence.

And finally imagine this picture done in soft glowing colors--not only the blue sky, the flowery meadows, the pine-green valleys, and the innumerable many-hued waters, but the rocks, the mountains, and the cirques besides. The glaciers of old penetrated the most colorful depths of earth's skin, the very ancient Algonkian strata, that from which a part of the Grand Canyon also was carved. At this point, the rocks appear in four differently colored layers. The lowest of these is called the Altyn limestone. There are about sixteen hundred feet of it, pale blue within, weathering pale buff. Whole yellow mountains of this rock hang upon the eastern edge of the park. Next above the Altyn lies thirty-four hundred feet of Appekunny argillite, or dull-green shale.

The tint is pale, deepening to that familiar in the lower part of the Grand Canyon. It weathers every darkening shade to very dark greenish-brown. Next above that lies twenty-two hundred feet of Grinnell argillite, or red shale, a dull rock of varying pinks which weathers many shades of red and purple, deepening in places almost to black.

There is some gleaming white quartzite mixed with both these shales.

Next above lies more than four thousand feet of Siyeh limestone, very solid, very ma.s.sive, iron-gray with an insistent flavor of yellow, and weathering buff. This heavy stratum is the most impressive part of the Glacier landscape. Horizontally through its middle runs a dark broad ribbon of diorite, a rock as hard as granite, which once, while molten, burst from below and forced its way between horizontal beds of limestone; and occasionally, as in the Swiftcurrent and Triple Divide Pa.s.ses, there are dull iron-black lavas in heavy twisted ma.s.ses. Above all of these colored strata once lay still another shale of very brilliant red. Fragments of this, which geologists call the Kintla formation, may be seen topping mountains here and there in the northern part of the park.

Imagine these rich strata hung east and west across the landscape and sagging deeply in the middle, so that a horizontal line would cut all colors diagonally.

Now imagine a softness of line as well as color resulting probably from the softness of the rock; there is none of the hard insistence, the uncompromising definiteness of the granite landscape. And imagine further an impression of antiquity, a feeling akin to that with which one enters a mediaeval ruin or sees the pyramids of Egypt. Only here is the look of immense, unmeasured, immeasurable age. More than at any place except perhaps the rim of the Grand Canyon does one seem to stand in the presence of the infinite; an instinct which, while it baffles a.n.a.lysis, is sound, for there are few rocks of the earth's skin so aged as these ornate shales and limestones.

And now, at last, you can imagine Glacier!

III

But, with Glacier, this is not enough. To see, to realize in full its beauty, still leaves one puzzled. One of the peculiarities of the landscape, due perhaps to its differences, is its insistence upon explanation. How came this prehistoric plain so etched with cirques and valleys as to leave standing only worm-like crests, knife-edged walls, amphitheatres, and isolated peaks? The answer is the story of a romantic episode in the absorbing history of America's making.

Somewhere between forty and six hundred million years ago, according to the degree of conservatism controlling the geologist who does the calculating, these lofty mountains were deposited in the shape of muddy sediments on the bottom of shallow fresh-water lakes, whose waves left many ripple marks upon the soft muds of its sh.o.r.es, fragments of which, hardened now to shale, are frequently found by tourists. So ancient was the period that these deposits lay next above the primal Archean rocks, and marked, therefore, almost the beginning of accepted geological history. Life was then so nearly at its beginnings that the forms which Walcott found in the Siyeh limestone were not at first fully accepted as organic.

Thereafter, during a time so long that none may even estimate it, certainly for many millions of years, the history of the region leaves traces of no extraordinary change. It sank possibly thousands of feet beneath the fresh waters tributary to the sea which once swept from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic, and acc.u.mulated there sediments which to-day are scenic limestones and shales, and doubtless other sediments above these which have wholly pa.s.sed away. It may have alternated above and below water-level many times, as our southwest has done.

Eventually, under earth-pressures concerning whose cause many theories have lived and died, it rose to remain until our times.

Then, millions of years ago, but still recently as compared with the whole vast lapse we are considering, came the changes which seem dramatic to us as we look back upon them accomplished; but which came to pa.s.s so slowly that no man, had man then lived, could have noticed a single step of progress in the course of a long life. Under earth-pressures the skin buckled and the Rocky Mountains rose. At some stage of this process the range cracked along its crest from what is now Marias Pa.s.s to a point just over the Canadian border, and, a couple of hundred miles farther north, from the neighborhood of Banff to the northern end of the Canadian Rockies.

Then the great overthrust followed. Side-pressures of inconceivable power forced upward the western edge of this crack, including the entire crust from the Algonkian strata up, and thrust it over the eastern edge.

During the overthrusting, which may have taken a million years, and during the millions of years since, the frosts have chiselled open and the rains have washed away all the overthrust strata, the acc.u.mulations of the geological ages from Algonkian times down, except only that one bottom layer. This alone remained for the three ice invasions of the Glacial Age to carve into the extraordinary area which is called to-day the Glacier National Park.

The Lewis Overthrust, so called because it happened to the Lewis Range, is ten to fifteen miles wide. The eastern boundary of the park roughly defines its limit of progress. Its signs are plain to the eye taught to perceive them. The yellow mountains on the eastern edge near the gateway to Lake McDermott lie on top of the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, whose surface is many millions of years younger and quite different in coloring. Similarly, Chief Mountain, at the entrance of the Belly River Valley, owes much of its remarkable distinction to the incompatibility of its form and color with the prairie upon which it lies but out of which it seems to burst. The bottom of McDermott Falls at Many Glacier Hotel is plainly a younger rock than the colored Algonkian limestones which form its brink.

Perhaps thousands of years after the overthrust was accomplished another tremendous faulting still further modified the landscape of to-day. The overthrust edge cracked lengthwise, this time west of the continental divide all the way from the Canadian line southward nearly to Marias Pa.s.s. The edge of the strata west of this crack sank perhaps many thousands of feet, leaving great precipices on the west side of the divide similar to those on the east side. There was this great difference, however, in what followed: the elongated gulf or ditch thus formed became filled with the deposits of later geologic periods.

This whole process, which also was very slow in movement, is important in explaining the conformation and scenic peculiarities of the west side of the park, which, as the tourist sees it to-day, is remarkably different from those of the east side. Here, the great limestone ranges, glaciered, cirqued, and precipiced as on the east side, suddenly give place to broad, undulating plains which const.i.tute practically the whole of the great west side from the base of the mountains on the east to the valley of the Flathead which forms the park's western boundary. These plains are grown thickly with splendid forests. Cross ranges, largely glacier-built, stretch west from the high mountains, subsiding rapidly; and between these ranges lie long winding lakes, forest-grown to their edges, which carry the western drainage of the continental divide through outlet streams into the Flathead.

The inconceivable lapse of time covered in these t.i.tanic operations of Nature and their excessive slowness of progress rob them of much of their dramatic quality. Perhaps an inch of distance was an extraordinary advance for the Lewis Overthrust to make in any ordinary year, and doubtless there were lapses of centuries when no measurable advance was made. Yet sometimes sudden settlings, accompanied by more or less extended earthquakes, must have visibly altered local landscapes.

Were it possible, by some such mental foreshortening as that by which the wizards of the screen compress a life into a minute, for imagination to hasten this progress into the compa.s.s of a few hours, how overwhelming would be the spectacle! How tremendously would loom this advancing edge, which at first we may conceive as having enormous thickness! How it must have cracked, crumbled, and fallen in frequent t.i.tanic crashes as it moved forward. It does not need the imagination of Dore to picture this advance, thus hastened in fancy, grim, relentless as death, its enormous towering head lost in eternal snows, its feet shaken by earthquakes, acc.u.mulating giant glaciers only to crush them into powder; resting, then pushing forward in slow, smashing, reverberating shoves. How the acc.u.mulations of all periods may be imagined crashing together into the depths! Silurian gastropods, strange Devonian fishes, enormous Tria.s.sic reptiles, the rich and varied sh.e.l.ls of the Jura.s.sic, the dinosaurs and primitive birds of Cretaceous, the little early horses of Eocene, and Miocene's camels and mastodons mingling their fossil remnants in a democracy of ruin to defy the eternal ages!

It all happened, but unfortunately for a romantic conception, it did not happen with dramatic speed. Hundreds, thousands, sometimes millions of years intervened between the greater stages of progress which, with intervening lesser stages, merged into a seldom-broken quietude such as that which impresses to-day's visitor to the mountain-tops of Glacier National Park. And who can say that the landscape which to-day's visitor, with the inborn arrogance of man, looks upon as the thing which the ages have completed for his pleasure, may not merely represent a minor stage in a progress still more terrible?

The grist of Creation's past milling has disappeared. The waters of heaven, collected and stored in snow-fields and glaciers to be released in seasonal torrents, have washed it all away. Not a sign remains to-day save here and there perhaps a fragment of Cretaceous coal. All has been ground to powder and carried off by flood and stream to enrich the soils and upbuild later strata in the drainage basins of the Saskatchewan, the Columbia, and the Mississippi.

It is probable that little remained but the Algonkian shales and limestones when the Ice Age sent southward the first of its three great invasions. Doubtless already there were glaciers there of sorts, but the lowering temperatures which accompanied the ice-sheets developed local glaciers so great of size that only a few mountain-tops were left exposed. It was then that these extraordinary cirques were carved. There were three such periods during the Ice Age, between which and after which stream erosion resumed its untiring sway. The story of the ice is written high upon Glacier's walls and far out on the eastern plains.

IV

Into this wonderland the visitor enters by one of two roads. Either he leaves the railroad at Glacier Park on the east side of the continental divide or at Belton on the west side. In either event he can cross to the other side only afoot or on horseback over pa.s.ses. The usual way in is through Glacier Park. There is a large hotel at the station from which automobile-stages run northward to chalets at Two Medicine Lake, the Cut Bank Valley, and St. Mary Lake, and to the Many Glacier Hotel and chalets at Lake McDermott. A road also reaches Lake McDermott from Canada by way of Babb, and Canadian visitors can reach the trails at the head of Waterton Lake by boat from their own Waterton Lakes Park. Those entering at Belton, where the park headquarters are located, find chalets at the railroad-station and an excellent hotel near the head of Lake McDonald. There is also a comfortable chalet close to the Sperry Glacier.