April again and the wind turns on the Great Plains. Wedges of geese,
high and determined, began this storm of spring, their voices sharp as
the morning frost. Sicklebills cry to claim the land, sandhill cranes
wheel and talk overhead, and everywhere the killdeer shout.
Pasqueflowers push the bleak soil aside, beginning the westward rush
that I must join, seeking again the sight of mountains.
In Glacier National Park the land is folded up. On the east, Chief
Mountain, Curly Bear, and Rising Wolf break the prairie’s hold. When the
early French fur trappers saw these peaks glistening in the distance
with summer-long snows and perpetual ice, they named this region “the
land of shining mountains.” But for all the ice and snow that reflect
the summer sun, the park’s present glaciers are but snowflakes compared
to the mighty rivers of ice that carved this land. Glaciation, the
magnificent sculptor, left its bold signature everywhere, and this park
honors with its name the force that shaped it.
But the essential excitement of this land is more than cliff face,
spire, and sudden storm. It comes to you when you realize that here is
an aggregation of dramatically differing life zones, where a day’s walk
can easily take you from prairie and forest to treelimit and tundra;
where a dense forest of redcedar and hemlock, similar to the rain
forests of the Pacific coast, exists a score of kilometers from the
great prairie sea.
Or it comes when you discover that these mountains—young and sharp with
shadows, snow-jeweled and newly gowned with forests—are chiseled from
the oldest unaltered sedimentary rocks on earth.
I come from the prairie and love its broad strokes; I’ve learned to hear
the singing in the grass and to see those long, slow seasons soar the
level horizons like gliding hawks. But here I learned to match my days
against a wild earth, and in me grew the mysterious need to know a
mountain from its every side. Mountains that wear the dawn like yellow
hats, repeated in the named and nameless lakes. Mountains that stretch
the storms between them and balance rainbows ridge to ridge.
I must see again the secret forest places, where the paleflowered
wood-nymphs hover like a breath, and know once more the endless meadows
painted camas blue.
I need the perfect freedom of this land, to be able to say, _today I
will climb Siyeh_: to stand, for a time, on the rugged shoulders of this
upright earth.
[Illustration: The sharp spire of little Matterhorn and the broad
face of Mt. Edwards loom above Going-to-the-Sun Road in the upper
McDonald Valley. During warm days in spring the valleys of the park
resound with the thunder of avalanches.]
[Illustration: Twilight view.]