derived from mineral dyes dissolved out of rocks by erosion. The
gorgeous tint of the Vermilion Cliff in Utah and Arizona, the reds and
greens of the Grand Canyon and Glacier National Park, the glowing cliffs
of the Canyon de Chelly, and the variegated hues of the Painted Desert
are examples which have become celebrated.
Geologists distinguish many kinds of sedimentary rocks. Scenically, we
need consider only four: limestone, conglomerate, sandstone, and shale.
Limestone is calcium carbonate derived principally from sea-water,
sometimes from fresh water, either by the action of microscopic
organisms which absorb it for their shells, or occasionally by direct
precipitation from saturated solutions. The sediment from organisms,
which is the principal source of American scenic limestones, collects as
ooze in shallow lakes or seas, and slowly hardens when lifted above the
water-level. Limestone is a common and prominent scenic rock; generally
it is gray or blue and weathers pale yellow. Moisture seeping in from
above often reduces soluble minerals which drain away, leaving caves
which sometimes have enormous size.
The other sedimentary rocks which figure prominently in landscape are
products of land erosion which rivers sweep into seas or lakes, where
they are promptly deposited. The coarse gravels which naturally fall
first become conglomerate when cemented by the action of chemicals in
water. The finer sandy particles become sandstone. The fine mud, which
deposits last, eventually hardens into shale.
Shale has many varieties, but is principally 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 constitute 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 crevasses and scale their slippery heights in
August, but the usual traveller will view their noblest 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 Pass, 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 passes over the continental divide.
There are parts of America quite as distinguished as Glacier: Mount
McKinley, for its enormous snowy mass and stature; Yosemite, for the
quality of its valley's beauty; Mount Rainier, for its massive 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 God, 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 analyze 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 pass the continental divide
between them across a magnificent high intervening valley, and, in the
south, merging into a wild and apparently planless massing 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 pass 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 Agassiz 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 Pass 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 masses 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 principal 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 constitute 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 massive, 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
Passes, there are dull iron-black lavas in heavy twisted masses. 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
analysis, 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 shores, 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 accumulated there sediments which
to-day are scenic limestones and shales, and doubtless other sediments
above these which have wholly passed 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
pass 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 Pass 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 accumulations
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
Pass. 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 constitute 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 titanic 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 compass 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
titanic 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, accumulating giant glaciers only to crush them
into powder; resting, then pushing forward in slow, smashing,
reverberating shoves. How the accumulations of all periods may be
imagined crashing together into the depths! Silurian gastropods, strange
Devonian fishes, enormous Triassic reptiles, the rich and varied shells
of the Jurassic, 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 passes. 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.
To see Glacier as thoroughly as Glacier deserves and to draw freely on
its abundant resources of pleasure and inspiration, one must travel the
trails and pitch his tent where day's end brings him. But that does not
mean that Glacier cannot be seen and enjoyed by those to whom
comfortable hotel accommodations are a necessity, or even by those who
find trail-travelling impossible.