A climate change song of ice and fire
We set out hiking across the Continental Divide, heavenly blue skies over our right shoulders, hellish clouds of smoke over our left.
“It’s the Sprague fire,” a volunteer ranger we meet on the trail tells us, her face invisible beneath the rim of her ranger hat. I wonder how she can see what we’re talking about.
A hard wind tugs at our shirts and carries the odor of burning timber. Overhead, the gusts seem to tear a gash in the gray drapery of smoke, leaving the skies to the north and east sharp and clear, the skies to the south and west a whorl of orange, gray and black that chokes out the sun.
I ask where it’s burning and she gives a precise description based on place names that meant nothing to me then. Above Lake McDonald Lodge. Across Lincoln Ridge.
“I guess you’d recommend against hiking up there,” I say. I mean it as a joke, but she doesn’t take it that way. It’s probably only one of the dumbest ideas a volunteer ranger hears.
“The Park Service would probably turn you back,” she says.
My wife Cristina and I brought our twin 16-year-old boys here to Glacier National Park to see its namesake glaciers before they’re reduced to spring water. Even before we arrived, though, we realized we would barely glimpse them. A smoky haze filled the Montana valleys below, and it chased us up the Going-to-the-Sun Road through the park as we snaked our way past rivers and waterfalls and orifice-puckering cliffs better suited to mountain goats.
As we stopped at pullouts along the way, the boys mostly stayed in the car.
“That’s a glacier?” one asked, peering through a haze at an icy splotch below a distant peak. He didn’t sound impressed. It’s not that the kids don’t appreciate nature. They do. They think it makes a fine background on their computer screens.
Cristina and I felt they should have a more visceral sense of the wonders of the natural world while they were still wonderful. A photographer, she pointed her camera at the peaks receding behind layers of haze, only to drop it in disappointment.
“Sfumato!” I said conjuring a word I remembered from my college art history class. Wasn’t haziness one of the things people loved about da Vinci paintings?
Cristina shook her head. “There’s too much smoke,” she said. “You can’t see anything.”
Smoke had preceded us everywhere we went on this trip. It dimmed the skies of Yellowstone, where we spied bighorns, bears and the descendants of the last surviving bison roaming amid thermal springs, blasting geysers and broad meadows. It sheltered the roof of the Tetons. It billowed over the Flathead Reservation, where we stopped and watched as firefighting helicopters circled the skies, scooping up giant bucket loads of river water and dumping them om plumes of smoke blossoming from the mountainsides.
“Thank you, firefighters,” signs read along the highway. It looked like those signs would need to stay up awhile.
Wildfires were burning across the West, including two dozen here in the Northern Rockies. Fire is as much a part of the Western landscape as glaciers, but in recent years, they’ve reached sizes and intensities never seen in history. That’s partly due to a century of fire suppression that left the landscape ready to burn. But it’s also due to climate change plunging the region in drought and leaving forests dead from beetles and disease.
It’s no coincidence that as fires grow across the West, glaciers are shrinking. Geologists predict that here in the park named for them, several glaciers will vanish in the next 13 years or so, which doesn’t seem like much time at all. It’s roughly as long as I’ve been thinking I better get to Glacier National Park and see the glaciers, and a few years less than our boys have been on this earth.
In the time that I’ve been on this earth — about three decades longer than them — these glaciers have melted by as much as 85 percent, a clip slightly faster than my hairline. Ancient ice fields, they once filled the very valleys they themselves carved here eons ago. Glaciers were the architects of the mountains, valleys and plains that stretch across the midsection of the continent. Soon, they will be driven altogether from the land they created.
The Going-to-the-Sun Road led to a visitor’s center where Cristina checked out the gift shop while the boys and I drove laps in our rented Jeep through the parking lanes, pumping heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere while we waited for a space to open up. While I was imagining the glaciers melting in my exhaust before I found a parking space, Cristina spotted a photo of a place called Hidden Lake, a picturesque mountain lake fed by melting snow, in a book in the store. It was just down a short trail that led from outside the visitor’s center.
“Maybe it will be clear there,” she said when I caught up with her.
I shouldered my backpack. The boys pocketed their cellphones. We went to find out.
The trail to Hidden Lake is a popular one, leading past parking lot crowds to high-country tundra across a boardwalk. Our footsteps thudded over the wooden planks until we reached an overlook, where we found Hidden Lake hidden by smoke. Behind it, Bearhat Mountain rose into a cap of gray.
“It’s like a ghost mountain,” Cristina said. “It’s like the world isn’t here.”
As we watched, the Sprague fire was leaving its mark. The Park Service had already shuttered the Lake McDonald Lodge below as smoke filled the valley and flames loomed closer. Park officials swathed an old fire lookout on the ridge line in foil-like material to protect it. By the time we would reach our hotel later that evening, the fire had leapt through the timber and reduced a 103-year-old backcountry lodge in the park accessible only by trail, the Sperry Chalet, to a skeleton of stone walls.
It was hard to ignore the fact that while this fire — and others in California and Oregon and across the West — were burning, Hurricane Harvey was drowning Houston. Somewhere over the Canary Islands, Hurricane Irma was summoning super-storm strength. As scientists always remind us, we can’t blame any single fire or any single storm on climate change. Still, this battery of windstorms and firestorms happens to look exactly like they warned us they would.
Montana would happily take some of the hurricanes’ rain, I think, as I peer into the haze. It seems like a fair bargain for coping with the meteorology of the End Times. The only clouds we see, though, are whorls of smoke as the Sprague fire burns on.
We had come here to Glacier National Park to see the lessons of climate change written in slowly melting ice. We found another lesson altogether, burned onto the landscape around us as we watched.
