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Climate and the Cryosphere with Dr. Caitlyn Florentine Apr 02, 2024

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A conversation with Dr. Caitlyn Florentine, research physical scientist with the US Geological Survey, who studies snow and ice in Glacier. This episode was recorded in May 2023. Glacier Conservancy: https://glacier.org/headwaters Frank Waln music: https://www.instagram.com/frankwaln/ Stella Nall art: https://www.instagram.com/stella.nall/ Overview of the park’s glaciers: https://www.nps.gov/glac/learn/nature/glaciersoverview.htm ---TRANSCRIPT:--- Lacy Kowalski: Headwaters is supported by the Glacier National Park Conservancy. Peri Sasnett: You're listening to Headwaters, a show from the icy mountains of northwest Montana about how Glacier National Park is connected to everything else. My name is Peri, and this episode is an interview that my co-host Daniel did with glaciologist Dr. Caitlyn Florentine—about how the U.S. Geological Survey studies the park's glaciers. This episode is part of a series of conversations we've been having with a wide variety of climate change experts. These episodes don't have to be listened to in any order. Each one stands on its own. And they all focus on a particular aspect of the way the world is being altered by the burning of fossil fuels. Over the past century and a half, human activity has released enough greenhouse gases to warm the Earth's climate over one degree Celsius, with only more warming on the way. Throughout 2023, Daniel sat down with experts to talk about how that warming is altering Glacier National Park, our lives and our futures. [background drum and bass music builds] Peri: Glaciers are the park's namesake. So digging into the details of the science around them feels like the heart of the park's story. I will say this is a fairly wonky and detailed conversation about glacier science. I studied geology, so I loved it. But I think no matter your background, you'll find it thought provoking. [music concludes] Daniel Lombardi: Dr. Caitlyn Florentine, welcome to Headwaters. Caitlyn Florentine: Hello. Thank you for having me. Daniel: Can you introduce yourself? What's your job? What do you do? Caitlyn: Yeah. My name is Caitlyn Florentine, and I work as a glaciologist for the U.S. Geological Survey. I'm a research scientist. Daniel: So what have you been up to for the past couple of days? Caitlyn: I've been here in the park doing fieldwork on Sperry Glacier. Daniel: So you were up up in the mountains for the past couple of days? Caitlyn: Yes. Daniel: That's exciting. Caitlyn: Yes, We had excellent weather. Daniel: Do you think of yourself as a glaciologist or you study the cryosphere? How do you describe what you do? Caitlyn: I consider myself a cryosphere scientist, and the cryosphere is the portion of the earth that is frozen. So anything involving frozen water: land, ice, sea ice, permafrost, seasonal snow. So I'm a glaciologist, and I think of it from sort of a geophysical perspective. Daniel: You approach the study of the cryosphere, you approach glaciology from a very quantitative way. What does that mean? Caitlyn: Correct. We are interested in being very sort of precise with the numbers. So quantifying the amount of water that's entering and exiting the glacier system, for example. So rather than having a sort of description of the quality of what's happening, we also strive to put numbers to that so that we can start to be a bit more precise and exact in our understanding, which then enables us to connect to other studies and sort of systems of the of the earth. Daniel: So what made you want to get into this field? How did you get started in the study of the cryosphere? Caitlyn: I really love the mountains and to be in the mountains and there is a plethora of snow and ice in mountain environments. So I studied geology as an undergrad at Colorado College, and I was really fascinated by earth processes and I knew I wanted to study something on timescales that were relevant to humans. And so I made a choice for graduate school between volcanology and glaciology. And then my sort of recreational interests led to me choosing glaciology ultimately. Daniel: Oh, that's super interesting. Cool. Yeah, because you could have studied a geology that, you know, spans millions or even billions of years, but you had a desire to keep it on a human scale or closer to a human scale anyway. Caitlyn: Exactly. My colleagues who study seasonal snow, for example, are inspecting processes that are happening over the timescale of seconds or or hours or days. And it's sort of that opportunity to toggle the window of time that we're considering, I think really captivated me and drew me to the cryosphere. Daniel: Oh, that's okay. That plus you want to go be able to go up into the mountains for work. So it's a good fit. Well, what makes your work important? Like, why does the cryosphere matter? Why do glaciers matter? Caitlyn: The cryosphere right now is changing very quickly, relative to what we've observed in the last ten, twemty, fifty, a hundred years. And so that rate of change makes it really important that we not only document the changes that are occurring and understand the sort of pace of that change relative to the historical context, but also that we understand how these systems are working. Because with the rapid change of the cryosphere, so changes to seasonal snow and changes to glaciers, there are consequences downstream. So one sort of motivating example of why glaciers are important is the meltwater that glaciers provide. So a glacier sitting on the landscape will have some discharge of meltwater during the late summer months, at least in this part of the world. And that delivery of meltwater during a time of year that would otherwise be quite dry can be really critical for the aquatic habitats and for sort of broader water resources. Daniel: I'm hearing you say kind of two things in particular there. One of them is that studying the cryosphere is important because it's changing and it's an indicator of change. So it's helpful in understanding how the world is changing. But you're also saying glaciers and the cryosphere is made of water, and water is important to people and wildlife and everything. They're valuable for that reason. Is that right? Caitlyn: Yes, exactly. Daniel: So I don't know if you know this, Caitlyn, but historians think that maybe one of the first euro-Americans to document a glacier here was this military guy John Van Austell, in the 1870s. But the complication is that he didn't realize he was looking at a glacier when he was. And so it wasn't until like ten years later, he came back to the same area inside what is now the park with a geologist. And they're like, oh, that's a glacier. And so then this area starts to be known as a place with glaciers. Of course, the Native Americans, the Kootenai people, the Blackfeet people, they had words describing the ice of this place. They they knew this place was full of snow and glaciers and ice for a long time before that. All of this is kind of me building up to ask you, you know, like some people might be surprised that glaciers are kind of hard to spot, surprisingly. What do you think? I mean, is that does that feel right? Caitlyn: Yeah. So a glacier as it's now defined, it gets trickier when the ice masses get smaller. So if you're in a landscape where, there's, you're looking down a valley, and particularly at a time of year when the seasonal snow is absent. And so you're just looking at bare rock and bare ice, it will probably be quite evident what is a glacier versus what is not. Also, if you're looking at a glacier that has a lot of evidence of motion. So if you're looking at the terminus of a tidewater glacier and there are giant chunks of ice calving off into the ocean, then the sort of, all of the criteria for defining a glacier—ice that moves—is really in your face and really evident. In a landscape like Glacier National Park, the glaciers are much smaller and you have to hike a lot further into the mountains to observe them. And this has been true for the last last several centuries, if not last many thousands of years. This landscape did have big valley filling glaciers, but that was up to tens of thousands of years ago, maybe 12,000 years ago. Daniel: So to put that another way, if you go to Alaska or if you came to this area 12,000 years ago, you're going to notice some glaciers, like they're pretty obvious because they're huge chunks of jagged moving ice. But these days in this place, glaciers are covered by seasonal snow. They're covered in rocks. They're they're smaller. It's a more complicated thing to discern. So it's not surprising that visitors today, when they come to the park or scientists a century ago maybe weren't sure at first when they were looking at a glacier. Caitlyn: Precisely. Daniel: Well, let's get a definition out of the way, then. Really simply what what is a glacier? Caitlyn: A glacier is a body of ice that moves. Daniel: Okay, simple enough. Caitlyn: And when we talk about glaciers as moving bodies of ice, it's important to understand that, like most of us interact with ice when it's stagnant and it isn't under sufficient stress to deform and flow. But ice is actually a vicious material. So a comparable material would be honey or ketchup. So glacier ice will deform when it's under pressure. So same is how you have to hit a ketchup bottle to get the ketchup to come out of the bottle. So we sort of have two components of glacier motion. One is the ice deformation, the sort of vicious, fluid motion that I just described. And then one is the the sliding of the ice over its bed. When water gets to the bottom of a glacier, it can sort of pop the ice off its bed. And that decoupling and reduction of friction causes the glacier to move. Daniel: Interesting. One of the things I'm taking away from what you're saying is that nature and glaciers, they don't really fit in a box. We say like this is a glacier, but in reality it's kind of a continuum or a spectrum of of movement of ice and water and rocks. Right? Caitlyn: Precisely. And that's where science can be helpful for clarifying this complexity and ambiguity that would otherwise be difficult to navigate or interact with. So when we assign a scientific definition for what is a glacier, then we can start to categorize nature and put a more precise understanding to how much water is frozen in the landscape, for example. Daniel: Mm hmm. All right. Well, can you give me some more basic facts about the park's glaciers? How old are they? When, when did they form? Caitlyn: Yeah, that's an interesting question. And I think it's important when we ponder that question to understand that because the glacier is moving, it's sort of cycling ice through itself. Daniel: Hmm. Caitlyn: Every every year at all times. Daniel: So because a glacier is moving ice and it's ice that's, you know, cycling through, any piece of individual ice is going to be less old than the footprint or the existence of a glacier in that area. Caitlyn: Exactly. Daniel: Okay. Interesting. And so let's describe that process now. I guess simply glaciers, you say, are a mass of ice that's moving. How that happens is you get a lot of snow in the winter. It compresses into ice and then it flows under its weight and melts out the other end. So it's this like conveyor belt of moving ice. How do you define or how do you describe that process, like the glacier anatomy 101. Caitlyn: Yeah. So traditionally and sort of in our most well behaved, textbook understanding of a glacier, we have this body of ice that stretches from some high elevation zone to a lower elevation zone. And the high elevation zone typically can be described as the accumulation zone. So there's actively mass accumulating every year in that zone. So there's more snow that accumulates, then melts in the accumulation zone at high cold elevations. And so you have this conveyor belt motion and the snow that's accumulating, up high is compressing and eventually densifying into ice, which then is flowing towards the ablation zone. Daniel: Okay, so basically it's colder up higher and it's warmer, down lower. So the higher zones, you get a lot more snow, it compresses into ice and then the glacier flows and if it's growing, it's going to keep flowing until it reaches a place that's warm enough that it melts. Caitlyn: Precisely. Daniel: And that's happening kind of on a seasonal basis, but it's also happening on a really much larger timescale, too. Caitlyn: Yeah. However long it takes, those particles that are deposited in the high accumulation zone. The sort of timescale of their residence time, if you will, within the glacier will be defined by how fast the glacier is moving. So there are places on the Greenland ice sheet where it takes thousands of years for a snowflake that falls at the top of the ice sheet to make its way all the way to the margin and melt out. The glaciers here in Glacier National Park are much smaller, so the residence times would be much shorter. Daniel: Like, it might take a snowflake that lands at the top of Sperry Glacier a few decades to reach the melt zone or the ablation zone? Caitlyn: Precisely. And we have evidence of materials, you know, materials from the human system being deposited up high on Sperry Glacier, for example, and then melting out several decades later. So that's an indicator of the residence time. Daniel: Yeah. So the evidence we have on Sperry Glacier for that residence time, was there a a ski? That like, got lost up on Upper Sperry Glacier and then eventually melted out? Caitlyn: Yes. Daniel: Okay. So do we know like, oh, this ski is from the seventies or something? Caitlyn: Precisely. Daniel: So you can say, okay, it takes a few decades for the for a snowflake or a ski to move through the glacier. Caitlyn: Yes. Daniel: Interesting. Now, we should explain that moraines are—all the little crumbs of the mountain that the glacier is like scraping off, they pile up around the edge of the glacier, and that's called a moraine. So there's. Yeah. Do you have a good way to explain what a moraine is? Caitlyn: Yeah. So a moraine is a hill of poorly-sorted rock that's deposited on the edge of a glacier. So it's sort of a sharply crusted hill that hugs the edge of the glacier. And so it will form as those crumbs of rock and sediment are deposited along the margin of the glacier. When the glacier occupies the same position for a long period of time. However, when the glacier starts to retreat, that moraine will persist, so it acts as evidence and demarcating the stamp that of land that the ice occupied for some long period of time. Daniel: So that's helpful. If you're a scientist without a whole lot of fancy technology a century ago, you can just like hike around in the park and you can see a glacier, but then you can see like, Oh, there's a moraine, and I can see where the glacier used to be because the dirt pile or the moraine surrounding it is far away from the ice now. So I can tell that the glacier is retreating away from where it used to be. Caitlyn: Exactly. Daniel: Interesting. Yeah. So there's all these clues of what the glaciers have done in the past using those clues. Do we know how? How old are the park's glaciers? Caitlyn: Interesting question. There's been a sort of waxing and waning of glaciers in their present configuration. Now, 12,000 years ago, we have evidence, we know that this entire mountain range was encased in ice when we go further back in time. But the sort of predominant thinking and understanding, piecin…

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Climate and Community with Mike Durglo, Jr. Mar 19, 2024

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A conversation with Mike Durglo, Jr., climate coordinator and head of Historic Preservation for the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes. This episode was recorded in September of 2023. Glacier Conservancy: https://glacier.org/headwaters Frank Waln music: https://www.instagram.com/frankwaln/ Stella Nall art: https://www.instagram.com/stella.nall/ CSKT Climate Resiliency: http://csktclimate.org/ ---TRANSCRIPT:--- Lacy Kowalski: Headwaters is supported by the Glacier National Park Conservancy. Peri Sasnett: Welcome to Headwaters, a show from Glacier National Park, which is the traditional homelands of many Indigenous groups that still live in this area today. This episode is an interview we did with Mike Durglo Jr, who's a climate leader at the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes. We talked about how Native American tribes can lead the way through the climate crisis. This episode is part of a series of conversations we've been having with a wide variety of climate change experts. These episodes don't have to be listened to in any order; each one stands on its own. And they all focus on a particular aspect of the way the world is being altered by the burning of fossil fuels over the past century and a half, human activity has released enough greenhouse gases to warm the Earth's climate over one degree Celsius, with only more warming on the way. [subtle beat begins to play] Throughout 2023, Daniel sat down with experts to talk about how that warming is altering Glacier National Park, our lives and our futures. It's critical to remember that Glacier has been a home for people since time immemorial. This has never been an empty landscape. It has been loved and cared for by people for thousands of years. And to find our way through the next century, we'll need to have a lot more conversations like this one. [synth beat contines to play, then resolves] Mike Durglo, Jr: I call myself a seed planter because just giving people hope. Daniel Lombardi: Thanks for joining us, and can you introduce yourself? Mike: Thank you. [Introduces himself in Salish] Good morning, everybody. My name is Standing Grizzly Bear. That's my given name. My English name or my [speaks Salish] name is Mike Durglo. Currently, I'm the department head for the Tribal Historic Preservation Department for the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes. Working for the tribes for, it was 40 years. Daniel: Wow. Yeah. Congrats. That's pretty amazing. And so that's just down west, southwest of the park, so one of the park's neighbors. Yeah, well, yeah. Give. Give me an overview, then, of what are the climate change impacts that you're seeing on the Flathead reservation, what you're seeing in this area. Mike: You know, you think about the air quality and what's what's been happening, and even even this year, earlier smoke. I mean, it was early. A few years ago I was driving to my office to work, and there was so much smoke that I couldn't even see the mountains. I live right there, you know, at the base of of the mountains at McDonald Peak, and my office was only like eight miles from my house. But I'm thinking, my grandson had doubles this morning, football practice, double practices. And I'm thinking, I hope that those kids are not outside playing, you know, practicing for football right now in this. Daniel: Because the air is so toxic. Mike: Right. And, you know, it was not just the kids, but the elders, and the people that are most vulnerable to the all the smoke. And so we had I don't remember if it was the the Earth Day event that you came to, but it was one of our gatherings where Dr. Lori Byron and her husband attended that. Anyway, I talked about that. I told I shared that story and I shared my concern for the people being out in that smoke. And a few months later, Dr. Byron calls me and says, Mike, would you be interested in putting up some Purple Air monitors? I said, Heck yeah. I didn't really, you know, I was like, So what do we do? And I don't know if you're familiar with them, but they're only about this big, they're inexpensive and they measure PM 2.5 air quality, and they give you real time data. So she sent me seven monitors. We're putting them up around the reservation at seven schools. They have a what's called a flag program that you can, the kids can put out a flag. So if it's a bad air day, they can put out a red flag. If it's a good day, it's the green flag. And there's all these different ones in the middle. And just this year we're putting up I don't remember how many, 14 more? We're going to put them in, inside and outside. Daniel: So that's great. Yeah. And so that's a kind of climate adaptation, the dealing with air quality, which can be degraded by just burning fossil fuels and cars and stuff. Around here, it's often caused by wildfire, which itself is exacerbated and expanded by climate change. Mike: Our fire seasons have shifted. So here what we've seen over the last, I don't know, several years is later wildfires burning later in the season. So we're still fighting wildfires in October and November when the fire season used to, you know, go of like from August to September maybe. So climate change isn't the only thing that that messed up there. We we did too, as human beings. I mean, you're all familiar with that one guy, what did he say? [does a silly, deep voice] "Only you can prevent wildfires." Daniel: Smokey the Bear. [both laugh] Mike: Yeah. Smokey the Bear is like... A hundred years of fire suppression has not helped. Mhm. To speak. I was invited to speak about historic use of fire on the land. Mm hmm. As you read in some of Lewis and Clark's journals of, you know, walking through this beautiful plains with grass up to their shoulders and it's like that didn't happen all by itself. Mhm. That happened from the tribes living on the land for those thousands of years and you know, using fire as a tool. We didn't follow the bison around, the bison followed where we burned. Mhm. Daniel: Because the grass would grow back greener. Mike: We burned those areas and then the bison would go back to those areas and feed. So that it made us easier to hunt. So, you know, a thousand years of that understanding how the land works, it's so, you know, you go back to fire suppression and the way it is now. Climate change plus fire suppression equals catastrophic wildfires. [synth beat marks a transition] Mike: We were one of the first tribes, right, in the United States to develop a climate strategy. That was back in 2012. My boss and my boss's boss, you know, they were asked several times about what is the tribe's stance, what is the tribe doing about climate change? What are you guys actually doing? And at the time I was the Environmental Director, and I was also the chairman of the RTOC, the Regional Tribal Operations Committee, that's region eight tribes. There's like 17 tribes in Region Eight: North and South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah. Daniel: Why do you think it's important to start with a plan? Like was that always automatic, you knew like, the first step is to create a climate plan? Mike: Whatever agency it is, it don't matter if it's a tribe or the city or the county or federal agency, all of the different programs focus on a certain aspect. There's fisheries, there's wildlife. They're focused on whatever their media is there. So really, I feel like, and this might be hindsight, right? I feel like the whole process ended up bringing all of us in a in a tighter circle. When when I was asked to coordinate that effort, I wanted ours to be more comprehensive. And we had nine sectors. So air, water, fisheries, wildlife, forestry, people. And also I wanted to make sure that we included traditional knowledge. My dad was really a big support. He was actually the department head for Tribal Historic Preservation when I was the Environmental Director. So he he contributed a lot to that plan. And I always say that one of the most awesome parts of that process was interviewing my elders. So I did eight interviews, and my dad being one of those, and those are all available on that website and you can watch those. And I wanted to make sure that we we very much included traditional cultural knowledge within the planning effort. Daniel: One of the reasons I'm super interested to talk to you about this is because Glacier National Park, we're in the process of trying to write a climate action plan. So I think what you said about how the importance of a plan early on, at least looking back, was that it brought everyone together and got everyone to kind of get on the same page. Did you find that like people were ready for that or like, was there anyone resistant to like, "Oh, this is going to add more work to me" or anything like that? Mike: When I started doing climate change work it's like, when people saw Mike Durglo coming down the hall, they would slam their door and lock it and pull their shade because they knew that Mike was going to come and ask them to do more work. I mean, they're already busy. They're already doing their their full time work in their field. And I come along and say, "Hey, I need you to come to our meeting because we're talking about impacts of climate change on fisheries" or whatever. They were already doing climate change work without calling it climate change. Daniel: Yeah, climate change is one of those things that so often it seems like it's adding on to... It's not even always creating new challenges, but it's also often just like a layer on top of a heavy workload that already exists. Mike: It's more work. I've been doing, you know, my job as the Environmental Director at the time plus climate. It's really something that you have to be passionate and compassionate about. So the reason I wanted to rewrite the plan was based on that newer evidence, the projections or the the science that we were looking at in 2012 was conservative. Yeah, you know, we had hope. "Yeah. Everybody's going to understand us. Everybody's going to going to get it. That things are changing, that we're we need to start looking at alternative fuel sources and alternative energy and all that stuff, and everybody's going to jump on board." That hasn't happened. Daniel: So let me recap some of that. It was about ten years ago now, 2012, you all released the your climate plan. And now looking back, it looks a little conservative. It looks a little too optimistic. And we've seen the impacts of climate change, that were predicted back then, we've seen them come to pass much sooner than predicted. And so now you're working on updating, creating a new plan. And it seems clear to me that the CSKT, and you in particular, have been leaders nationally in terms of developing a climate action plan, especially leaders in helping and working with other tribes on their climate plans. Does that feel right? Mike: Oh, absolutely. In fact, back in 2016, I received an award from President Obama. I got to go to the White House. And that award was for leadership in climate change. It's not that I do what I do to get an award or a pat on or anything like that, but it was very honoring. You know, I was honored and humbled to be there. And that was just for the work I've been doing to help other tribes like Blackfeet, Fort Belknap, the Crows. I've helped different tribes and even up into Canada. [synth beat plays to mark a transition] Daniel: Climate change is impacting, you know, every sector of the wheel of life, as you were describing it, including people and cultural resources. So maybe let's get into that. What is a cultural resource? Mike: A resource could be a culturally modified tree or a rock cairn, or a fire pit, historical fire pit. Or, I mean, a lot of those are associated with campsites, right? So those resources, like culturally modified trees, how do you protect that from climate change? Mm hmm. In our database and in Glacier National Park's database, we have identified over 300 cultural sites or resources. Daniel: So to zoom out for a second, you worked on a project where you identified cultural sites and resources, which are basically any evidence or significant item or place that was used by or is used by members of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, either today or Mike: Yeah, sure. Daniel: Thousands of years into the past. And so you're identifying those objects. Sometimes they're trees that were modified or used by people, sometimes they're campsites, sometimes they're actual artifacts, sometimes they're just spots and places. And so then you're looking at, how is climate change potentially going to impact these specific resources? Mike: So I'm going to give you an example of of potential impact to a site that's along a stream, and that is another historic campsite. Well, what's happening at that campsite is the banks of the stream are eroding. Mm hmm. And it's I mean, you know, that's a natural process. But however, what we're seeing is increased runoff in, you know, that -- what we like to see is gradual runoff. Right? Right. In the spring, we want the snow to gradually come out of the mountains, causing minimal damage or minimal erosion. But what's happening is it comes crashing down. Like what we're seeing is that snow melt in an accelerated time period, and all that water comes crashing down the side of the mountain. Well that's causing increased erosion in that certain site, not just that site, but all the different sites along the streams. So we look at what what can we do using Western science to mitigate or to help with the process of slowing that erosion. So we come up with a list of maybe four alternatives: we can put riprap into that site; we can move some of those artifacts that are around the site or in and around the site; one alternative might be do nothing. And that's the things that we present to the elders. And and the elders could say, we don't want you around that site. We want we don't want you doing nothing there. We want you just to leave it and let the natural process take place. So those are the kind of things that we looked at in that project, that pilot project, as far as climate impacts to those cultural sites. Daniel: And you found there's lots of sites, significant sites in the park in Glacier National Park. And would you say that they're fairly secure and safe, or would you say that there's a lot of threats to those cultural sites? Mike: It's not just the Confederate Salish and Kootenai Tribes that utilize Glacier National Park. Mm hmm. It was a common use area for a lot of tribes, as you know. Mm hmm. Blackfeet, the Kootenai Bands from Canada, different Blackfeet, Ktunaxa, Piikani bands from Canada, Blood Tribes, and us, used Glacier National Park for millennia. Daniel: So all these different groups, all these different tribes have connections and cultural sites and cultural artifacts and significant connections to areas in the park. Do you feel like those are fairly safe or is climate change threatening them significantly? Mike: I think that's part of the process that we wanted to look at when we did this pilot project. Daniel: You have to figure it out. Mike: Yeah. In the work that I've done, pretty much all of my career in natural resources, you start out with a base study, right? What do we have, and how how is it potentially impacted? We know that a lot of these sites are pretty safe, but they're all being imp…

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Climate Interpretation with Diane Sine Mar 05, 2024

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A conversation with longtime interpretive ranger Diane Sine about a lifetime of watching change in Glacier. This episode was recorded in May of 2023. Glacier Conservancy: https://glacier.org/headwaters Frank Waln music: https://www.instagram.com/frankwaln/ Stella Nall art: https://www.instagram.com/stella.nall/ Overview of the park’s glaciers: https://www.nps.gov/glac/learn/nature/glaciersoverview.htm ---TRANSCRIPT:--- Lacy Kowalski: Headwaters is brought to you by the Glacier National Park Conservancy. Peri Sasnett: You're listening to Headwaters, a show about how Glacier National Park is connected to everything else. My name is Peri, and this episode is an interview that my co-host Daniel did with longtime park ranger and educator Diane Sine about telling stories about our glaciers to park visitors. Peri: This is one in a series of conversations we've been having with a wide variety of climate change experts. They don't have to be listened to in any order. Each one stands on its own and they all focus on a particular aspect of the way the world is being altered by the burning of fossil fuels. Over the past century and a half, human activity has released enough greenhouse gases to warm the Earth's climate more than one degree Celsius, with only more warming on the way. Throughout 2023, Daniel sat down with experts to talk about how that warming is altering Glacier National Park, our lives, and our futures. [Theme music fades in.] Peri: This is one of my favorite interviews in a long time. Diane is an amazing person, a local legend, really. And I found her stories surprising and resonant. She's been visiting the park's glaciers for decades and has seen so much change firsthand. I think you'll really enjoy this conversation. Daniel Lombardi: So, Diane Sine, welcome to the podcast, welcome back to the podcast. Diane Sine: Thank you, Daniel. Daniel: Will you remind people who you are, where you work, how long you've been doing it? Diane: My name is Diane Signe and I work at Many Glacier. I'm the lead interpreter over there and I have been in the park for quite a while. I've been in interpretation pretty much all my adult life during the summers here and even before that, when I was a college student, I worked at the Many Glacier Hotel. So I've been hanging around Many Glacier since 1980. Daniel: Wow. So maybe let's start with what is many glacier for someone who's, like, never been to Glacier. And then I am curious to hear about your first time visiting many Glacier. Diane: So Many Glacier as a region of the park with a rather confusing name. Yes, we get the fact that it's improper English, "Many" is plural, "Glacier" is singular. So there's one of the first problems right there, but it's simply a region of the park. The Many Glacier Hotel is there. And the name came about in the early years of the park, simply referring to the fact that there were multiple glaciers at the head of the valleys, pretty much a glacier at the head of each one of the valleys. Daniel: Yeah. Which is like four or five glaciers or something. It's not like many, many glaciers, right? A few, right? It's Many Glacier. Diane: And it sort of sounds like "mini" glacier, as in "tiny glacier." So we get confusion about people thinking that it's "mini glacier." Sure. Hey, maybe that's an appropriate name in some ways. [Music fades in and then concludes.] Daniel: What is a glacier? What makes Grinnell Glacier actually a glacier? Diane: Remember, I'm not a geologist. I'm an elementary teacher. So a glacier, whether we're talking about those massive ice age glaciers that were thousands of feet thick, that carved out these valleys in Glacier National Park, or whether we're talking about the comparatively small glaciers that were here. Well, are here today. And we're part of the Little Ice Age. Places such as Grinnell Glacier. Diane: To have a glacier, you simply have to have a place where more snow falls every winter then can completely melt during the summers. So over the years, that snow builds up, it accumulates. It actually recrystallizes fairly quickly and it forms a dense ice. And once you have this thick, dense ice, you eventually get—and there are lots of variables—but say when it gets to 70 to 100 feet thick, there is so much mass or so much weight pressure that it actually starts to flow. And so the bottom of the glacier starts to flow and there's actually movement. So a glacier is a mass of a moving ice. And that confuses people sometimes. Sometimes they think, well, is it rolling down the valley? And in the case of all these glaciers in Glacier National Park, they're actually becoming smaller all the time. But there's movement within the mass of ice. There's more accumulation of ice at the upper elevation of the glacier, and then the ice flows through. So whether a glacier is growing or receding is simply a matter of economics. Is there is there more snow and ice being added to that mass every year or is there more melting happening? And the reality here is there's more melting happening. Daniel: Right. Is there is your summer more intense? Or your winter more intense? And that that balance has shifted. Diane: So one of the fascinating things you mentioned, the moraine, and of course, that's the end of the maintain trail today. And it's a very impressive mass of accumulation of unsorted material. We call it glacial, glacial till. So there are large rocks and boulders in there. And there also is a lot of just very small, almost sand and gravel. But it's it's fascinating to my brain to try to imagine how long the edge of Grinnell Glacier sat at one place for that amount of moraine material to pile up on top of itself in that one location. And the glacier still moves that moraine material. There's still there's still rocks and boulders and gravel and sand within the layers of the ice and being scraped from beneath and become part of the mass of moving ice. But throughout my lifetime, the glacier has been receding so quickly that the modern, quote, marine material is just sort of smeared across the limestone ledges up there. There's no accumulation compared to what created that moraine. That was the edge of the ice when George Bird Grinnell was up there. Daniel: So it's a mass of ice that moves. Diane: That's right. The ice within the glacier moves. Daniel: How did Grinnell Glacier get its name? Diane: Grinnell Glacier is named for a guy named George Bird Grinnell and George Bird Grinnell was a well-to-do Easterner. He was very interested in the West. He was interested in conservation issues, really. He came from the background of sort of a gentleman hunter. So at that point, George Bird Grinnell was editor of Forest and Stream Magazine, which was kind of the the big outdoorsman journal of that time. And so in that role, he got to know James Willard Schultz. He read Schultz's writings about this area and became interested in exploring it. So Grinnell first came into this area in 1885, and on that trip he got up up into the Swift Current Valley and could could see Grinnell Glacier from a distance and was interested in it. But then he came back in 1887 with a group of other guys, and they actually hiked up to Grinnell Glacier. And it was on that trip that the friends that he was with basically named the big old chunk of ice that they got to for him for Grinnell. Daniel: So Grinnell didn't name the glacier after himself. His buddies named it for him. Diane: Right. It appears that his his buddies named it for him, although it also appears from his writings that he probably was very agreeable to having something named after him, would be my guess. Daniel: And he did then name a ton of mountains and lakes and everything all around the park. He he was throwing out names pretty easily. Diane: George Bird Grinnell did name all sorts of features in the park. I think it's it's, it's interesting because if you think about it, any noticeable feature, any real obvious kind of feature would have had multiple names already. It's not like there hadn't been people on this landscape for as long as time goes back. So, you know, the Blackfeet, the Kootenai, everybody would have had names for all of these obvious features, but those names hadn't been written down. Some of the names that George Bird Grinnell applied to features in what is today Glacier National Park, very much reflect the kind of trip that he was on in the 1880s. If you go into the Saint Mary Valley, we have names that he gave such as Gunsight Pass, Fusillade Mountain, Single Shot Mountain. And all of those names came from the fact that George Bird Grinnell was on a hunting trip and was thinking a lot about hunting. Daniel: Yeah. Diane: So Single Shot Mountain is actually where he did it. In fact, shoot a bighorn sheep with a single shot. Daniel: Okay. All right, George. So his friends name this glacier for him. He went back many, many times, from my understanding, to Grinnell Glacier and and saw it over the course of his whole adult life, was making trips up to the ice. And I'm curious if you know anything about kind of his how he saw the glacier and how that might have changed over time, because I think early on he made predictions that, you know, this glacier is going to disappear soon. Diane: Right. In a way, we're really fortunate that George Bird Grinnell, was a writer, and so he very much left evidence of how he thought and his impressions. And even that very first trip up to Grinnell Glacier is well documented because he wrote the whole story in various installments so that he could publish them in Forest and Stream Magazine. So we know that after those first trips where where this area really inspired him, as it does so many of us. And he he first suggested in an article that he published that perhaps this was an area that should be protected with national park status. And that didn't happen right away. There were a lot of people who weren't excited about that idea. But finally the park was established in 1910 and he continued to come back periodically and visit it. So he went from coming into the Swift Current Valley, hiking up to Grinnell Glacier, where there was no trail. They were just finding their own route. Certainly people had been there before, but there wasn't a record of people having been there before. And then he came back in later years after the Many Glacier Hotel was built, a road all the way into the valley, and then a developed park service trail from the hotel up to Grinnell Glacier. And he saw those changes both in visitation and the changes in the glacier, the ice itself. Daniel: Yeah, we think about like today, we think about living in a an era of such fast and profound change. You know, now. But from his perspective, he was in an era of profound change, too. He went from really an undeveloped wild area to some extent, and then saw that become a tourist hub and a national park and also saw the climate and the environment really changed the glaciers throughout that time, too. And that would have been, what, from the 1880s to the 1930s. Right. Diane: He very much wrote about the changes in the area due to the, quote, development and visitation. And of course, that was actually something that was partly due to his efforts. It was significantly influenced by his efforts. But basically, he he felt like he had promoted the idea of establishment of a national park for for a greater good. And yet he felt like what had happened as a result of that had basically ruined or certainly compromised the experience that he had personally first had when he had come into this remote wilderness area. Daniel: Yeah. Diane: So it's also interesting because he also wrote about the changes in the ice itself. So glaciers such as the Grinnell Glacier were probably at their largest size in the mid 1800s. So when George Grinnell was up there in the 1880s, you know, that wasn't that long after the maximum size of, quote, modern Grinnell Glacier. And already by his later trips up into the into the valley, I know in the twenties he was documenting that it had changed dramatically and it was a much smaller glacier than he had originally seen. And of course, that was long before any of us were talking about climate change or really understanding what was going on. But he certainly knew what he was observing and understood that there were changes. Daniel: He saw those changes happening. Yeah. Hmm. Yeah. So we here in the park, we have a chance to see, you know, in recent decades, climate change and glacier melt that is really almost entirely caused by human climate change. But in George Bird Grinnell's era, that was climate change that was mostly naturally the ending of the Little Ice Age. Diane: And then we have a lot of records from the park naturalists that were were going up there in the 1920s and 1930s. Morton J. Elrod was the first person employed as a Ranger naturalist, leading hikes up to Grinnell Glacier. And he he was a biology professor from the University of Montana. And so in the mid 1920s, he started to document he had noticed that, you know, every year he was having to actually walk farther to get to the edge of the ice when he went to Grinnell Glacier. So Morton J. Elrod started to document, you know, how many steps it was, how many paces, to get from a certain big rock on the moraine that we now refer to as "Elrod's Rock." And so he set the stage for actual scientific research documenting the changes up there. And so we know that there were pretty dramatic changes, quite dramatic changes in the twenties and thirties. And then it appears that that recession of the glaciers slowed down significantly and then took off again actually after I started working here in the in the 1980s. Daniel: So one of the things that Grinnell was big on was creating a national park here. He was involved in this area for decades before it was a national park. Then in 1910, Congress makes Glacier National Park a reality. One of the things I know you are particularly fascinated in is how does that name get picked? Glacier National Park. Why is it called that? Diane: Yeah, I am fascinated by by the whole issue of the name of the park. Because while we have really good documentation for a lot of things, we do not have a document that said, "We are going to establish Glacier National Park and give it that name because," fill in the blank. Diane: So you come to a place called Glacier National Park, and one of the first questions at a visitor center is, you know, "Where is the glacier?" "Where can I drive to a glacier?" "Where can I touch a glacier?" Diane: And often people are expecting massive ice fields like you have in Patagonia or up in Alaska. They're they're visualizing something different from what we have today. And so I noticed that in my earlier years as a ranger, I would overhear a lot of other people sort of trying to make it okay with visitors saying, "Oh, well, you know, you're not going to be able to drive to a glacier. But really, the park was named for this glaciated landscape from the Ice Age glaciers. So you're experiencing everything Glacier has by, you know, driving up the St. Mary Valley or the Lake McDonald Valley." Daniel: So it's kind of confusing because the park does have active existing small mountain glaciers. And 10,000 years and more ago, the park was carved by massive Pleistocene Ice Age glaciers. So both are true. But which one was the park actually named for? That's a little bit murky. Diane: That that's the question. And that's the questio…

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Glacier’s Bats: A Story of Grief and Hope Feb 20, 2024

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The twin stories of bats facing white-nose syndrome in Glacier, and a volunteer who dedicated so much of his life to studying them. With disease and decline on the horizon for bats, what does the future look like? This episode is in memory of Lewis Young. Headwaters is created by Daniel Lombardi, Michael Faist, Gaby Eseverri, and Peri Sasnett Glacier Conservancy: https://glacier.org/headwaters Frank Waln music: https://www.instagram.com/frankwaln/ Stella Nall art: https://www.instagram.com/stella.nall ---TRANSCRIPT:--- Lacy Kowalski: Headwaters is brought to you by the Glacier National Park Conservancy. Gaby Eseverri: This spring and summer, park biologists were out all night trying to catch bats. Lisa Bate: Tonight, we're trapping at roost. Our goal is 25. Yes. So what we're going to do is really we're going to catch 30 and then we're just anything after that, we're just going to we can look real quick and see if you see anything odd, if you do we'll collect it. Lisa: We don't have Lewis with us. You guys are filling the shoes of Lewis. Kaile Kimball: Nearly impossible shoes to fill. Lisa: Big shoes to fill. Gaby: They're catching these bats to do a swab test for white nose syndrome. A deadly disease that thus far hasn't been found in Glacier. But it's not too far away. Gabby Eaton: Trapping went so well, I think that everyone worked together really hard and we had a good time. Megan Potter: We're unbelievably efficient. We process a lot of bats. We saw no signs of white. We kept our bats very warm and very happy, very cozy. Kaile: And how how were the bats? What you think? Megan: Oh, they were amazing. Yeah, they were just the sweetest little things ever. Gaby: And while I couldn't join them for the survey, I did catch up with them a few weeks later, when they texted me to run over to their office because the results of the tests were in. Gaby [field]: I'm feeling nervous. I can't imagine how they're feeling. Gaby: Lisa just texted us today that she just got the email, the email telling us if the bats here in Glacier National Park, if they have white nose or not. [Footsteps and door creaking open.] Mixed Voices: Okay. Hi. You actually been waiting? We haven't opened email yet. I want to be here for this. Please. Do you think he is? Really? Gaby: Hey, Lisa. Lisa: Hi. Did you guys hear? I got the results for white nose swabbing? Bat swabbing? Oh okay. Gaby: When did you get the email? Lisa: I've been in the field all week. And yesterday, when I got back, I noticed that it was in my inbox. Lisa: Oh, I guess I'd better find it. I don't know... You can see how my emails reproduce in the inbox. Oh, it's from Emily. Maybe Emily. Yeah. Let's try this. There it is. It's from Emily. Oh, good. So I also took over Lewis Young, who passed away this year, and their house. They came back negative for PD. Hmm. Would you? They asked me to convey this information to Linda. And so I'll do that. Oh, maybe it's just that one, you guys. This is just at his house. Oh, sorry. False alarm guys. Mixed Voices: Oh, okay. That's really good. Okay. So, yeah. Gaby: False alarm. The results for the bats tested in Glacier aren't back yet. But it's still great news from another site in northwest Montana, the home of Lewis Young. Gaby: Welcome to Headwaters, a show about how Glacier National Park is connected to everything else. I'm Gaby. [Theme music fades in.] Gaby: This episode is about bats. Disease and decline are on the horizon for Glacier's bats and their future seems uncertain. Lisa says it's not a matter of if, but when. This story is also about one man who loved bats, who dedicated so much of his life to conserving them. [Theme music plays in full.] Madeline Vinh: Act One: Dusk. Gaby: Glacier's wildlife team hosts an event called "Going Batty" every summer. The public comes and gets to see bats up close. As the sun sets they welcome the attendees and give us all a short introduction. Their enthusiasm spreads throughout the entire crowd. Lisa: The main focus is just to give people a chance to see bats up close and learn about the amazing role they play in our ecosystems and some of the risks and threats they face and what people can do to help bats. And there's an old saying that you kill what you fear and you fear what you don't understand. So we take this as an opportunity to help people understand bats. Gaby: That's Lisa Bate. She's a wildlife biologist with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of energy. She's in perpetual motion, and her staff, who are half her age, have trouble keeping up with her. She studies the park's birds, and if those 250 plus species weren't enough to keep track of, she added ten species of bats to that list as well. Lisa: So far we have documented ten species and that's why we started the bat inventory and monitoring program. I came to the park in 2009 and I've always loved bats. I was the nerdy little kid in the meadow putting rocks in socks and throwing them up in the air and watching the bats come after them. I never really understood why I thought they like them because they were white socks. But, you know, I didn't know about echolocation back then. Gaby: I feel like bats get a bad rap. I think it comes from their associations with Halloween and vampires and like the general nighttime, but they're really remarkable. There are more than 1400 species of bats in the world. Bats are the only mammals that fly. They're expert echo locators and they pollinate over 500 plant species. So the next time you eat mangoes, avocados or bananas, you should thank a bat. And if you need another reason to love them, they eat millions of insects, every night. Lisa: I mean, I'm amazed at what scientists have learned about bats just in the years that I've been studying them. You know, we didn't know a lot, but there was just been this race against time to learn as much as we can before we lose species or, you know, massive amounts of populations of bats. But when I got to the park, I started hearing about this disease called white nose syndrome. Have you guys... Gaby: And white nose syndrome is terrifying. It's a non-native fungal infection that is killing bats as it spreads all across North America. Lisa: It was discovered in a cave in New York in 2006. And it just some cavers went into a cave and saw these bats just hanging there. And they had this white powdery fungus growing on their nose. So they alerted biologists to it. Biologists started going in the caves and saying, oh, yeah, something's really wrong here. [Somber synth music fades in.] Gaby: This fungus loves cold, dark and damp places. So it infects bats while they're hibernating over the winter, often in caves when they're all together. Lisa likes to say that a big brown bat, for example, needs the equivalent amount of fat of one pat of butter to make it through to spring. But when that fungus infects a bat, it makes them restless and active, burning that fat that it needs to survive the winter. This can mean starvation. Lisa: And any time about arouses from hibernation, they are using critical calories to get them through the winter. Think of that little pat of butter. I mean, how long would a pat of butter last us? Not very long. Gaby: But the White Nose syndrome response team has a map that shows how the fungus has spread since 2006. In 2010, it reached Missouri. In 2017, it reached Texas. And in 2020 it reached Montana. And where white nose has spread, their populations have been decimated. At some sites, it's killed between 90 and 100% of the population. And even though it's not in the park yet, we know it's coming. [Somber synth music fades out.] Lisa: We really knew nothing. No formal surveys had ever been conducted. We had like visuals of four species and acoustic recordings of two others. And of those four visuals, one bat, the big brown bat was roadkill. So that was our database. And I was like, Oh my gosh. So I started collaborating with the biologists in Waterton, and then in stepped the Glacier National Park Conservancy, and they funded the first bat inventories here in the park, and that was in 2011. Gaby: But Lisa couldn't do all of this on her own. The Conservancy support was critical, and so were the contributions of other scientists, including Lewis Young. [Light synth music fades in.] Lisa: I took over the program and then with volunteers, mainly Lewis Young. He's a retired Forest Service biologist, and he has been such an integral part of Glacier's bat inventory monitoring program. And I'd really like to honor him tonight. We lost him in April very unexpectedly, but without him there behalf of the bat program here at the park. And then Leah Breidinger, she stepped in and started helping, Lewis taught you a lot, I know, too. And, Gabby, you learned from Lewis. So a lot of us have really grown under the teachings of Lewis. So, you know, we're all just trying to fill his shoes, which are huge shoes to fill. Gaby: Lewis loved bats. He worked with a lot of animals in a long career as a wildlife biologist. But he called bats the underdog of mammals, and he always rooted for the underdog. I remember meeting him last year at Going Batty that year, and every time he trapped bats, actually, he wore a certain accessory. Lisa: Usually when we were here, he would do the fun fact part and wear his big bad hat. Gabby: He had like these hats that are fuzzy black bats with wings out the sides and then little eyeballs. It's like he was a giant bat. Yeah. Yeah. Gaby: It's like he wanted the bats to feel at home in his presence, and he welcomed them into his yard as well, which he basically turned into a bat sanctuary. Gabby: So, Lewis, he was the bat house expert here in Montana. Gaby: When I was a student at the University of Florida, I would often bike by a section of campus where the air was particularly pungent. There are three bat houses each, a little bit bigger than the size of a dorm room mounted on poles 20 feet above the ground. Together, they house almost half a million bats. These are way bigger than a backyard bat house, but they all provide bats with safe places to live. With their natural habitats in decline, setting up a secure and consistent home for them is an act of kindness, of love. Lisa: I love going to his house. He had what I called a bad house garden. It's funny, one of my techs said that to and she went looking for flowers. I'm like, "No," he just had three massive bad houses up on post, 20 feet up. Gaby: Decades ago, he and his wife Linda, built a small bat house in their backyard, but they quickly realized it wasn't enough. So soon after, they added a medium sized one, then a double. Then the condo went up. Lewis suspected that there were about 1200 bats living in their yard, and Linda joked that her neighbors, blissfully unaware of these extra residents, never had a mosquito problem. How many ways do you show those you love that you care about them? Lewis showed up for bats in every facet of his life. Volunteering countless hours, collecting data and training other scientists, helping raise public awareness and providing a refuge for them at his own home. [Somber synth music fades in.] Madeline Vinh: Act Two: Dark. Gaby: It's dark now and people are starting to reach for their jackets. There are bugs everywhere, which is kind of annoying for me, but really good news for bats and for the scientists trying to catch them. They'll assess each bat and gather data on the population before releasing them back into the night. As my eyes adjust to the dark, I start seeing blurry figures rapidly flying above me. I'm torn between wonder and worry for their fate. Gaby [field]: What's a good spot? What defines a good spot? Gabby: Oh, a place that bats would be flying to forage on insects or to get a drink of water. Gaby: That's Gabby Eaton. She works with Lisa on the wildlife team. They use something called a mist net to catch bats because the nets are so fine that they're basically impossible to see, especially in the dark. Gabby: So sometimes we look for places in the trees where there's openings, and then on water, we just kind of think of where they might be flying out from the woods to forage over the water here. Gaby [field]: So this net is set up under a bridge. Has it been successful in the past? Gabby: Yeah, I think that's why we did it. Yeah. [Distant train horn and bird song.] Gaby: They're hung in strategic places where bats might be flying. So in the forest or under the bridge where the smooth water of McDonald Creek slips by. Lisa: We just saw our first bat of the night here at the bridge this year, and they've been seeing bats up there in the forest longer. Gaby: So now I am walking over with Lisa over to their truck and they have all of these tools and equipment ready because it's time to process the bats. Lisa: ... we try to process them as soon as possible... Gaby: Okay. The wildlife team keeps the bats in little cloth bags where they really seem content. If it's a cold night, Lisa will tuck the baggies inside the top of her waders to keep the bats warm. In processing them. The team will measure their wings, calculate their weight, determine their sex, and so much more. All of this information helps clue them in to what species it is. Leah Breidinger: So the first thing we do is weight, right, Lisa? Lisa: Yeah. Leah: Well, put it on the scale in the bag and zero it. Then we'll take the bat out. There's our little bat. Mixed Voices: Oh it's so cute, little buddy! Gaby: This is my favorite part of the night, and I suspect it's everyone else's too. Lisa dims her headlamp and inspects each bat carefully. They're adorable, in an ugly-cute kind-of-way. They have shiny, soft looking brown fur with leathery wings and little wrinkly noses like a pug. Someone on the internet called them sky puppies. Lisa: Do you hear that sounds. Thanks for letting us know. [High pitched bat chittering sounds.] Gabby: Okay. 7.8 grams. Lisa: 7.8? Gabby: Yeah. [High pitched bat chittering sounds.] Lisa: What happened? Oh, they're swarming. Oh, because it's emitting distress calls. Oh, yeah. Sorry, little guy. [Synth music fades.] Gaby: Watching them feels like opening a doorway into a world I so rarely see. Everything that goes on while I sleep each night. To have up close what is normally a shadow flitting by is to see a sliver of darkness in light. This little creature has such a different experience on this earth than my own. Hunting by echolocation and thriving in the pitch dark. Where I am helpless. [High pitched bat chittering sounds.] Lisa: I'm sure it's a female... looks like a female. Mixed Voices: [Sounds of handling a bat.]. Mixed Voices: Female? Female. [High pitched bat chittering sounds.] Lisa: Then we're going to check for reproductive status, see if she's pregnant. I doubt she's pregnant. She would have pups by now. We palpate the abdomen. Leah: So I kind of just feel like that and I don't feel anything. You usually can feel something pretty hard in the stomach if they are pregnant. So. No, not pregnant, is what I would say. Gaby: At Going Batty last year I watched as Lewis processed one of the bats. He gently but quickly assessed the bat, but something seemed different. They released it and he kept reviewing the measurements he'd taken. A few days later, I got an all employee email with great news. Lewis had identified a new species in the park, a western, small-footed myotis. Even knowing the inevitable future of these bats, he was still working so hard to s…

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Does Hiking Impact Wildlife? Check the Camera Feb 06, 2024

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What do animals do when we’re not around? One way to answer that is by using remote cameras. By focusing on two camera studies in Glacier, we learn more about two animals in the park, and those of us who visit it. Headwaters is created by Daniel Lombardi, Michael Faist, Gaby Eseverri, and Peri Sasnett. Glacier Conservancy: https://glacier.org/headwaters Frank Waln music: https://www.instagram.com/frankwaln/ Stella Nall art: https://www.instagram.com/stella.nall/ ---TRANSCRIPT:--- Lacy Kowalski: Headwaters is supported by the Glacier National Park Conservancy. Michael Faist: My parents met working at a camera store, so we always had a lot of camera gear around the house. But when I was 13, my parents gave me my very first DSLR with a big chunky frame and a zoom lens. I had a tiny point-and-shoot camera before that, but I was convinced something that could fit in my pocket would not be enough camera for our family vacation to Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado. Michael: The Rockies were unlike anything I'd ever seen growing up in the Midwest. And armed with my new camera, I took pictures of everything. The view from every scenic pull out, every wildflower. Photogenic cloud or notably large pinecone. But one picture from that trip that stands out in my memory is a photo I took of a moose. The first moose I'd ever seen. Neck deep in a lake holding its massive antlers above the water as it swam from one side to the other. Michael: It was gone within a few minutes, and the photo, looking back on it, wasn't all that impressive. But I think about that moose often as one of the first experiences I had with a wild animal. At least one bigger than a squirrel. It kickstarted a fascination I still have with the natural world and an appreciation of the power the photography has to capture moments like this. Wild animals in the wild. Michael: It's no wonder that cameras are one of the most common accessories you see around Glacier today. They are the lens, pun intended, through which many of us see and remember national parks. But cameras are also increasingly being used by scientists to study the same animals us visitors feel lucky to see especially remote cameras which trigger when they sense movement. These "camera traps," as they're called, can reveal glimpses into a side of Glacier that we can never see, how wildlife behave when there are no people around. [Car sounds] Michael: We are in the car. Peri Sasnett: Where are we going? Michael: We're driving up the road out of East Glacier that heads towards Two Medicine, looking for a camera. Peri: And what's the camera looking for? Michael: The camera is looking for moose. Largest member of the deer family. Very charismatic. Big noses. Peri: I feel like charismatic is debatable. Michael: I love moose. Peri: I think a lot of people love moose and a lot of people think moose are one of the uglier creatures. Michael: What? How could you think Moose are ugly? Peri: I'm not saying I think that, but I've heard people say that. Michael: Gangly? Yes. Ugly? No! Peri: Weird little dewlap thing dangling. Michael: [Laughs] It's charming! [Theme music fades in.] Peri: Some say charming. Michael: You're listening to Headwaters, a show about how Glacier National Park is connected to everything else. I'm Michael. Michael: In this episode, we're zooming in on two different animals one big and one small, one you may have seen and one you may have never heard of. They'll help us understand the increasing use of cameras in the field of wildlife biology and reveal that even if you leave no trace, you have a bigger impact on the natural world than you might think. [Car sounds] Michael: We're turning just before the road to the Two Med entrance. Going off the pavement. Michael: Peri and I went out for a day to check on a wildlife camera with Landon McGee. Landon Magee: Ah, yeah, so my name's Landon Magee. I'm a Master's student at the University of Montana in the Wildlife Biology program. I'm an enrolled member of the Blackfeet Tribe. Michael: We were joined by one of Landon's technicians, Ethan Rowe. The two of them are working for Blackfeet Nation Fish and Wildlife, leading a moose study on the Blackfeet reservation and the eastern portion of Glacier National Park. Landon: You know, they love kind of where areas people call them "swamp donkeys" just because they kind of similar by and they like to hang out in the swamps and wade through the ponds and eat kind of some aquatic vegetation can find them long stream bottoms, creek bottoms, river bottoms... Michael: And Landon, who has been placing cameras all over the place this year, was nice enough to take me and Peri to the easiest-to-reach camera in his whole study. Landon: Yeah, so we're just going to head about 50 yards into this big aspen stand here. Michael: [to Landon] Great, we'll follow your lead. Peri: Sweet! I mean, this looks like moose habitat. Landon: Yeah. Michael: Now I find moose to be really interesting and not even slightly ugly. As the second largest mammals in North America, they're really strong. Bull Moose's iconic antlers can grow up to five feet across, and they use those antlers to fight over female moose. [Grunting moose sounds and clattering antlers.] Michael: Which is a great excuse to remind folks to stay 25 yards away from moose and other non-predator wildlife in the park. Landon: Like any other animal. Give them their distance, you know, just let them do what they need to. You know, it's, you know, the added stress of people trying to get up close just puts more stress on them that they don't really need. Michael: But at the same time, moose are seen as gentle giants. We see them as being so friendly that they usually have Canadian accents in movies like the Disney movie, "Brother Bear.". [Clip from movie begins playing.] Brother Bear Film Clip: "Oh, look, I am sorry. If I was driving this never would have happened, eh. You never let me drive you never let me do nothing. Oh, trample off, eh! I said I was sorry. Let it go. I can't believe you totaled a mammoth." [Clip from movie fades out.] Michael: And maybe this blend of strength and friendliness can help explain why Moose are so popular. We ran a People's Choice Awards contest on Glacier's Instagram a few years ago, and moose were voted the most popular animal in the park, beating mountain goats and grizzly bears. Michael: But despite all their charisma and their massive size, we don't actually know much of anything about how they're doing as a species around Glacier. Landon: You know, we really didn't know what their status of the moose population was on the Reservation. And then the park hasn't done like any kind of moose study in I think somewhere close to 60 years. So they really didn't know anything about their moose population currently either. And so Blackfeet had listed it kind of as a "species of interest." And yeah, just that just I guess, snowballed into this project. Michael: I checked. There haven't been any moose studies in the park in 60 years, but Landon's changing that. His study is measuring the moose population on the Blackfeet reservation and much of the east side of Glacier. And to do that, he placed cameras like the one we're at today throughout his study area. And all of the cameras were placed at random. Landon: Sitting down and trying to pick, you know, 100 camera locations of where, you know, would be good spots would be very time consuming and hard to do. And of course, it introduces a lot of bias. And so having this truly random sampling allows you to get into places you thought you'd never go your whole life. I know there's, there's been a few that I've been to both summers so far. Michael: And so we're visiting this easy to reach camera to make sure it's still working. Landon's technician, Ethan, walked us through the check up. Ethan Rowe: When we're arming the camera, we like to put it waist-high, so it would just sit, like, somewhere right here. Peri: That's like knee-high on a moose! [All laugh] Ethan: Yeah. So right now we're doing a revisit, so we're just checking up on the camera, just if the camera was still functional. We changed the memory card at all... and if we did, the I.D. Of it. Michael: The downside of randomly distributing your cameras, though, is that while some are 50 yards off the road and easy to hike to while holding a microphone, others require miles of bushwhacking through areas with no trails. Honestly, it sounds a little heinous, but that hasn't deterred Ethan. Ethan: And hikes are a big plus of it, you know. Peri: Are you sure? Ethan: I really enjoy the hike sometimes, even though I like to complain along the way. I think when I'm done with it, I really tell Landon, "I really appreciate it out here." Michael: With these randomly placed cameras set far enough apart to avoid double counting the same moose during a certain time frame. Landon can run all the data through a computer model to estimate how many moose live here. And the data isn't just a bunch of ones and zeroes. It's pictures, which for Landon, has been fun to look through, but a lot of work. Michael: [to Landon] With, you know, dozens of cameras out at a time, like, how many pictures do you capture over the course of a summer? Landon: Last year, we did 100 cameras. And I think with all of those, we had over, just a little over 2 million photos. Michael: [to Landon] 2 million!? Landon: Yeah. Thinking about that: these cameras are set to both motion detection, (so anything that walks by, grass blowing, anything will set it off), but it also takes a picture every 15 minutes. Part of a time lapse function on the camera. So it has both of those modes going the entire summer. Michael: [to Landon] So 2 million, how do you go through that? Landon: A lot of time bent over at a computer. [All laugh and drum beat music fades in.] Michael: Blowing grass... waving branch.. blowing grass... Moose? [Drumbeat music stops.]. Michael: He had some research assistants to help sort through these images. And some companies are even marketing A.I. tools that promise to speed up the process. But despite manually sifting through 2 million photos, Landon was excited about the results. Landon: You know, I guess looking through the cameras last year, there was a lot more sightings than I had anticipated. We were a little worried that we weren't going to get a whole lot of moose detections just because of how, you know, just having these cameras in the middle of nowhere. And what are the chances of a moose, you know, walking by my camera in such a large area? Michael: Landon emphasized that one of the things he loves about these photos is you get to see how Moose behave when there's no one around to watch. Landon: One of the cooler photos or videos we had on the video cameras we had out last year was a moose calf nursing. And you could hear like the sucking noise of the calf just going to town. Peri: Wow, that's amazing! Landon: Yeah, it was cool. It's probably the best video I have. Michael: This is the audio from that clip. [Nature sounds and sucking sounds fade in.] Michael: To paint the picture, the calf is mostly hidden by thimbleberry bushes as it reaches up to its mom. An adult female moose can easily be six feet tall and weigh 1,000 pounds, while a newborn calf weighs as much as a small dog like a corgi. Landon: And this getting that firsthand view into, you know, what their life looks like when nobody is out here. You know, they've there's probably been some areas where they've never seen a human or a big gray box strapped to a tree. And so seeing what they do and how they interact with that, it's been pretty cool. Michael: [to Landon] I guess, just as a baseline, like why why use cameras as a tool in the first place instead of like going out in the field and sitting around all day? Landon: Well, I think I mean, a lot of the stuff that I'm trying to do can be accomplished with more invasive techniques like collaring, capturing, chemical immobilization, helicopter, all that, just really invasive kind of stresses animal out a lot and also costs a lot of money. Michael: As with so many things, the biggest factor is cost. There are a lot of species deserving of study and relatively little money to go around. So you have to have a good reason to get a wildlife study funded for Landon's. It's the fact that moose hunting funds a lot of conservation work on the Blackfeet Reservation. Blackfeet Nation Fish and Game, along with Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, issue a small amount of moose tags every year, permits to hunt a moose on Tribal, state or federal land. But to be clear, not in Glacier National Park. Landon: Say, do an auction system until they bid on the tag. And I think the starting bid for moose is like $14,000. And we usually get it up to like $30, $35,000 for a moose tag. Yeah. So, I mean, that's a huge source of revenue for the department. I mean. Michael: By better understanding the number of moose on the Blackfeet Reservation. Fish and Game can issue an appropriate number of tags without fear of harming moose populations as a whole. And on top of that, we'll also get insight into the moose in Glacier, which speaks to one of the appealing traits of camera traps. They're pretty cheap. High quality cameras are getting less expensive every year, and the only expense beyond that is the time it takes to install and remove them. Landon, Ethan and their small team can realistically study a huge area. Landon: You know, Moose don't know political boundaries, so, you know, you're going to have moves that are going back and forth and whether you're going to get them on the reservation during your time, sampling is going to be difficult to predict. And so having cameras in the park kind of allows you to understand that transboundary movement. Michael: Landon's work stands to help Glacier and the Blackfeet Nation manage Moose, but his study is still underway, so there's no population estimate for him to report just yet. Landon: People always tell me that, you know, "How many moose out there?" Peri: Let me get back to you in a couple years. Landon: Give me two years. I'll let you know. [everyone laughs] [Music fades in] Michael: We'll have to stay tuned to see what Landon learns down the road. But you don't have to wait to see the results of a camera study. You just have to look to another animal. [Music concludes] Alissa Anderson: So they have these very specialized adaptations for living in the deep, deep powdery snow environment. I don't know. I mean, they're cats. You know, cats are kind of weird. Michael: This is Alissa Anderson. Starting in 2019 as a grad student at the University of Montana, Alissa led a camera trap study of a mammal in Glacier that is far more elusive than moose, the Canada Lynx. Michael: [to Alissa] Have you ever seen the lynx in person? Alissa: I have only seen a lynx associated with a live trap for research, so I consider that to be cheating. I did work for one winter trapping for research. I walked up to the trap there just like I had one lynx that literally I think it was singing death metal to me. [Clip of a lynx yowling] Michael: It's rare to see any wildcat in Glacier this summer. After ten years of working and living here, I finally saw my first mountain lion. And they're four times bigger than lynx are. Alissa: It's funny. And then you get all these tourists who go to Glacier for one day and send you these videos, and they're like, Hey, is this a lynx? I…

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Chasing Waterfalls: The Search for Glacier’s Hidden Wildlife Jan 23, 2024

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Chasing one of Glacier’s most elusive species, and getting comfortable in the dark. This is the story of Black Swifts in Glacier. Headwaters is created by Daniel Lombardi, Michael Faist, Gaby Eseverri, and Peri Sasnett. Glacier Conservancy: https://glacier.org/headwaters Frank Waln music: https://www.instagram.com/frankwaln/ Stella Nall art: https://www.instagram.com/stella.nall/ ---TRANSCRIPT:--- Lacy Kowalski: Headwaters is supported by the Glacier National Park Conservancy. Peri Sasnett: How many animals have you walked by and never noticed? How many species live around you that you've never even heard of? Amy Seaman: Most people are kind of excited that they had no idea another thing existed and I think that is-it's like yet one more mystery. Peri: One of these unknown species is a rarely seen creature that most people here have never heard of. They live behind waterfalls and can travel up to 90 miles an hour. Amy: Yeah, it's fun because they're really dark and you just think it's a bat or something, so we started calling them black lightning. Peri: To have a chance at seeing them. Most of the time you'll need to leave the trail, bushwhack for hours with alders swatting you in the face and mosquitoes trying to bite you as sweat drips down your face. Then those same alders lend a hand. As the terrain turns steep and you use them to pull yourself up precipitous slopes. Then the shrubs fade away and you're clambering up a steep field of loose rock, feeling them shifting as you step and hoping they stay put. Oh, and by the way, it's 4:00 in the morning, so it's pitch black. [theme music fades in; starting with a mandolin] Finally, you reach the base of a waterfall where the rocks are slick underfoot and it's loud from the pounding water and cold and damp from the ever-present mist. And this is where you find them. Black swifts. [theme continues; a drumbeat, a flute line, and other instruments come in, before the music finishes] Peri: I'm Peri, and you're listening to Headwaters, a show about how Glacier National Park is connected to everything else. I love birds, seeing them, hearing them, and also counting them. This year so far, I found 242 species and counting, but I've never seen a black swift. For a lot of birders, seeing a brand-new species can be a highlight of your month or even of your year. It's called a life bird. I've looked for black swifts every summer I've lived here, but I strike out every time. They're basically big black cigars that fly thousands of feet in the air, and they're incredibly hard to see. But today, I'm going out with Amy Seaman from Montana Audubon and her team to survey for these elusive birds. And hopefully I'll be in luck. But this isn't just a story about me going birdwatching. It's a story about learning to feel comfortable in the dark and how to cherish the mysteries we may never solve. [birds singing] Amy: Once it shoots out, your eye might not pick it up until like out here, where it's out further from the waterfall and I think part of that is just the speed they come out. Peri: [in the field] Which is how fast? Amy: So fast. [laughter] [voices slowly fade under the narration] Peri: That’s Amy. She's an all-around bird expert, but has spent a lot of the last ten summers looking for black swifts in a collaborative effort between Montana Audubon and the Park with support from the Glacier Conservancy. With her help, I thought it'd be a lot easier to find them, but it is definitely not easy. Peri: [in the field] So birds are basically too fast to see in your binoculars. Amy: They really are. Peri: And if you want a glimpse of them, you're going to have to do an alpine start. Peri: [in the field] I rolled out of bed at 3:05, got dressed and brushed my teeth and tumbled down the stairs and had just enough time to zoom out the door into the car to then drive an hour to get here. Peri: So I'm tired. There's rain in the forecast and it's also fully dark outside. Black swifts are early risers, much earlier than me. They're not quite nocturnal, but they aren't just active during the day either. Amy and other researchers have had the most luck looking for them around their nests at dawn or dusk. Peri: [in the field] We’re on the side of the Going to the Sun Road, where a creek flows below the road through a culvert, and we're starting to hear the first birdsong. And we're staring at a waterfall, [birds singing] trying to see these little black specks moving at 90 miles an hour. Peri: Black swifts are aerial insectivores, meaning they catch and eat bugs as they fly, especially flying ants. One study found swifts regularly flying at altitudes over 13,000 feet, and they're almost always flying. When they're not nesting, they spend 99% of their time in the air day and night. That's something like eight months of flying. [pensive synth music fades in] How do you study a bird that basically never stops? [birds singing] [sound of rushing water fades in] Peri: [in the field] So how long have you been doing swifts surveys? Amy: This is actually year ten, the beginning of the 10th year. Peri: [in the field] Oh, wow. Amy: Yeah. Which is so fun to think, but it's fun. We have just as many questions, but we have learned a lot more. [music fades out] Peri: [in the field] So when you started, you didn't know how many birds there were, didn't know how to look for them, didn't know what their nest sites really looked like. Amy: Exactly. Peri: But despite the things that Amy and others have been able to learn, there's plenty of mystery left. And Amy loves it. Amy: [to Peri, in the studio] I've always wanted to know what's around me. That was a lifetime goal of like when I'm a kid and I want to grow up, I want to say, hey, I'm on a hike, and what is this thing that I'm walking near or pretty flower that I'm looking at? Then you're like, wait, there is stuff we don't know. So it was this whole circle of like- Peri: You're a black swift explorer. Amy: I can't believe there's a bird that we found the sixth nest of in the state. Peri: That's incredible. Amy: It's a wild sentence, and it's so fun, and you're like, we didn't know where they wintered until 2012. Peri: [narration] Scientists have learned about many birds migrations through banding programs that started in the early 1900s. But it wasn't until 2012 that we started to learn where swifts migrate. Using tiny geo locators, researchers in Colorado discovered that they were wintering in the lowland forests of Brazil. But where exactly our swifts from Montana go, is still a question, but we do know that they're declining. A 2016 report compiled by Partners in Flight estimated dramatic declines since 1970. Climate change, pesticides and habitat disturbance are all pressuring these birds. So much about them, especially Glacier’s population, is unknown. Amy: And I'll never forget my first year at Sperry Chalet meeting a person who had hiked here for decades and had never heard of this bird. And he could name every plant on the side of the trail. So he's like, well, what are you guys here for? And we’re like, oh, actually, these birds right up in this waterfall that he's-you mean you can look out from the chalet and you've seen for years, and then he was just floored. Peri: And Amy's been working to study swifts and spread the word about them for the last ten years. Amy: There's enough sites now to start monitoring to a number of birds because, of course, at some point, you know, funders want to know. Conservationists want to know like, well, what's the number? Are we running out? Are they declining? Are they not? [pensive synth music fades in] Peri: Personally, I'll just be happy if I get a little glimpse of just one. [birds singing] [rushing water sound fades in] Peri: [in the field] Okay. Have I missed anything? Amy: Not yet. Just staring. [Peri chuckles] Peri: I'm standing with Amy and her team, [music slowly fades out] all of us staring intently at the waterfall, coming out from under Going to the Sun Road. I'm bundled up, but the cold, damp air is still somehow seeping in. Peri: [in the field] It's 5:25 now. I still see no swifts, although it's seeming less absurd that I might be able to see them now that it's a little lighter. But it hasn't happened yet. Amy: We do call them the swifting hour. There's like a certain light that starts to settle in in the morning or night, and you're like, oh okay, this is I can feel the activity now… [Amy’s voice fades under narration] Peri: Maybe Amy could feel it, but I was not at her level. [birds singing] [rushing water sound fades in] Peri: [in the field] So I'm just looking at the waterfall in my binoculars and we talked for like two hours yesterday about how you can find the nest and what to look for and this kind of nook or crevice or the whitewash from their pops out of the nest. And they made it all seem very straightforward. And I am befuddled. [rushing water sound fades out] Peri: Needless to say, seeing a swift, even with Amy's help, was not going to be as simple as I'd hoped. But compared to most of their sites, which involve not just a drive but hiking miles off trail to get to… this is a breeze. [rushing water sound fades in] Peri: [in the field] So is this like the cruisiest survey spot you guys have? Amy: Yes. [Peri chuckles] I would say I've never rolled up and I was like, I'm going to wear Crocs just because I can this morning. [Peri chuckles] Peri: It was enough of a challenge for me to get up at three in the morning and grateful we did not have to backpack here or bushwhack for hours up a mountain. Amy: So like swifting is not for the faint of heart. [Chuckling] Peri: You would be right. Amy: Also, because you get so excited sometimes like, oh, I'm going to have a heart attack because of my excitement level. [Peri chuckles] Peri: I can't say that I was at heart attack levels of excitement, but some booms of thunder did start to get my heart going. [thunder and rain fade in] Peri: [in the field] Okay. Status update. It's 5:59 a.m. It's thundering quite a bit, seeing some lightning off to the north. I still have seen no swifts. I don't know if this is looking promising. [thunder and rain get louder] Amy: Shoot. I might just put my rain jacket on. If it's pouring, we won't survey, but we have done some like half rainy ones. Peri: It's honestly hard to tell if it's passed on yet because the storm clouds have made it so dark. We take refuge in the car and the storm lets loose. [car door opens and closes] [thunder and rain intensifies] Rain is coming down in sheets and pouring off the cliffs above the road. In a way, the wet weather is appropriate. Black swifts nest behind waterfalls peeking out through the mist with their big dark eyes. As the clouds empty around me and my nose fogs the car window, I suppose I'm getting a glimpse of what their habitat might feel like. [rain and thunder fades out] One question I had was why did they so often nest behind or around waterfalls in the first place? There isn't conclusive evidence, but experts think it serves a few purposes. The first is to avoid predators, and another possibility is climate control. Amy: But then, apparently the water is good for the temperature to be cool because they're not fluctuating. Amy: Like they're not getting so hot either- Peri: [in the field] It’s just steady. Amy: Yeah I think it stays basically like 45 degrees all the time. Peri: Glacier has plenty of waterfalls in the spring, fed by melting winter snow. But by late summer, most of them run dry. Black swifts are smart enough to only pick waterfalls that will protect and cool their chicks all the way until the end of summer. And those can only be fed by glaciers and persistent snowfields, which this park has a lot of. Amy: [in the studio with Peri] We have realized that this-they love Glacier National Park. There are more nests here than in the rest of the state combined, that we know of. Peri: But as temperatures warm with climate change, the sources of these waterfalls, those glaciers and snowfields are declining. Peri: [in the studio with Amy] Because I guess you could see the swifts as a bit of a canary in the coal mine. And as you say, like the waterfalls or where they are, they can't move up in elevation, but also they feed on insects. And so as insects decline, like, that's even more invisible. Amy: Yeah. And I think you're totally nailed it because part of the interest in studying black swifts isn't just that they do have a unique place that we just didn't know about them, but they totally share a decline with other aerial insectivores and the jury's kind of out on exactly what issues are happening…[Amy fades out under narration] Peri: This is one of the biggest motivations for their studies in Glacier, trying to figure out what the population is like and how worried they need to be. Amy: And it also helps us know like, oh, maybe we don't need to hit the panic button either right away. There is a lot of great habitat in Montana, and it could be that we have a lot more of these birds than we thought. Peri: But all of Amy's work can still only go so far. Amy: We can also learn only what we can learn in Montana. We don't know anything that these birds are encountering on their migration or on their wintering grounds. Peri: And even with ten years of data from Glacier and efforts in Colorado and Idaho, we still know remarkably little about these birds compared with almost every other species I might see on a morning walk. It makes me wonder what else I'm missing. Amy: If a tree falls in the forest and you don't hear it right, like what happens? [pensive synth music fades in] And then so it's like if a black swift disappears from a waterfall, but we never know they were ever at the waterfall. To me, there's something really interesting that's lost in that. [mellow synth music gets louder] Peri: Still hiding out from the rain, talking with Amy in the car, I've pretty much lost all hope of seeing a swift today. Maybe of ever seeing one. I feel like the thunderstorm is an embodiment of climate change and all the threats these little birds are facing looming over all of us. As the park's glaciers retreat and disappear, people notice and they care. But does it matter if a bird that I might never see disappears? Can you love something you've never seen? [music continues] Peri: [in the field] All right. It's 6:38 now. The storm has abated. [car drives by] [birds singing] There are a lot more cars now. I'm still seeing no swifts, but... so you would normally survey until 7:15. [car drives by] We have another like half hour. So do you think you see any swifts? Daniel Lombardi: I mean, there is like a smudge back there that could be something, but it's not moving and… Peri: Right. I see a smudge, but I don't see… Technician: I’ll put on the data sheet, smudge on nest. [group chuckles] Daniel: Yeah. Amy: I'm pretty sure this is a bird. It's a bird. There's a bird. Peri: There's a bird. But I'll take a look on the scope and see if I can see anything of what I just thought was a blob. Daniel: Was it a smudge or a blob? Peri: A “smob”? [Daniel and Peri chuckle] Peri: It’s tucked away back in this little nook. And I can see a white blob above the smudge. See, I thought I saw it move, but now I'm second guessing myself. [cars drive by] Maybe I'm just moving. Oh. Oh, I see the,…

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Art, Science, and Alpine Potatoes Jan 09, 2024

Show notes

The cutest animal in Glacier may be at risk of disappearing, but it's hard to study an animal that lives under rocks, high in the mountains. How can we understand the hidden parts of the world around us? Headwaters is created by Daniel Lombardi, Michael Faist, Gaby Eseverri, and Peri Sasnett. Glacier Conservancy: https://glacier.org/headwaters Frank Waln music: https://www.instagram.com/frankwaln/ Stella Nall art: https://www.instagram.com/stella.nall/ ---TRANSCRIPT:--- Lacy Kowalski: Headwaters is supported by the Glacier National Park Conservancy. Michael Faist: [to Lucas and Alyssa] Do either of you have a particularly good pika impression? Alyssa Quinn: Lucas does. Lucas Moyer-Horner: I do. I can give it a try. "Eep! Eep!" Eh. Kind of like that. The thing is, there's different "eep" dialects. Michael: [to Lucas] How interesting. Lucas: Even within the park, sometimes you'll hear one that sounds like it has a hoarse voice and or one that you sort of assume must be a really young one, because it has a really kind of a meek and high pitched eep. And then others are pretty strong eeps. But but they're all eeps. They're not whistles like the rodents do. Michael: Pikas are the cutest animals in Glacier National Park. No contest. Lucas: Pikas are lagamorphs. So the order group of mammals that they belong to called lagamorphs includes rabbits and hares. Pikas are about the size of a Idaho potato, classically, is how folks like to describe them, and it fits well. Michael: They're like little fuzzy Idaho potatoes. I mean, even their poops are cute. Lucas: Pikas’ poop is the only one that is almost a perfect little sphere and pretty much the size of a peppercorn. So if you see tiny little peppercorns, that's for sure going to be like poop. Michael: [to Lucas] I've heard people joking about using old pepper grinders as they're like a collection container. Lucas: Seems dangerous. [both laughing] Michael: This is Lucas. Lucas: My name is Lucas Moyer-Horner. I'm an instructor with the University of Utah, and I'm also a pika researcher. Michael: And Alyssa Quinn. Alyssa: You can call me Alyssa. I am a writer of primarily fiction, and I am currently an assistant professor of creative writing at Kenyon College. Michael: The two of them have spent a lot of time in the mountains looking for pika this summer, and they're also a couple. Lucas: The very first time we met was me giving a bear safety talk, and Alyssa was in the audience. Alyssa: Yeah, and I thought he gave a very good bear talk, like the best bear talk I had heard. So I was like, I need to get to know this guy. Michael: [to Alyssa] Bear talks can be convincing. Life-saving advice. Alyssa: He gives a very calm bear talk, which was reassuring. [both laughing] Michael: Lucas and Alyssa came here this summer because of a mystery. Pika might be in big trouble. If you search for them online, you'll see headlines like this: "pikas disappearing from parts of the West;" "the world's cutest mammal on the brink;" and "the American fur ball being threatened by a warming climate." But if you search for pikas in the mountains here, I'm not quite sure what you'll find. That's why Lucas and Alyssa are here, to help us learn more about what's happening to pika in Glacier. [theme music begins to play] But I wanted to talk to them because they argue science alone isn't enough to understand pika or the threats they face. And so, if not science, what else could help us? [Headwaters theme music plays, with flutes and drums, as pika "eep" sounds play] Michael: You're listening to Headwaters, a show about Glacier National Park and how it connects to everything else. I'm Michael. In this episode, we're exploring how science and storytelling can shed light on the American pika. And my guides are Lucas and Alyssa. Lucas: I think that one hike we did where we walked through some talus was the only time I tried to find a hay pile. And I was lucky enough to find one. Alyssa: Yeah, we saw two... We saw two pikas together, which was a very rare occurrence. Yeah, that was exciting. So, yeah, they just flock to you now. Michael: As you'll hear, Lucas and Alyssa come to a love of Pika from different spheres of the brain. Lucas's lens is science, while Alyssa brings the mind of a writer. For a few months this summer before work pulled Alyssa elsewhere, she helped Lucas conduct pika surveys. [to Alyssa] Was this your first time surveying pikas this summer with Lucas? Alyssa: Yes, it was. Michael: [to Alyssa] How'd you like it? Alyssa: It's very fun. It's very hard work. It's.... Yeah, I definitely was a blob, I slowly de-blobbed over the course of the summer, but now I'm back to blob-ifying again until next summer. The... It's exhausting because you hike these sometimes very massive peaks, and that's fun. You get to the top. It's gorgeous. You're excited, you've hit the peak, you're kind of ready to turn around and head for home, but instead you have to spend multiple hours up there doing the survey. And that can be really strenuous, too, because you're clambering over these giant boulders up and down, up and down, and trying to keep track of where you've been. Michael: Our story starts back in 2007, when Lucas, then a PhD student, led the first large scale pika study in Glacier. Lucas: Our extent of our research is the entire park. So the 1 million acre Glacier National Park is where the surveys take place, and we try to cover as many different patches as we possibly can. Michael: That word "talus" describes a hillside of loose rocks and boulders, and are the only places that pika live. Lucas: Basically, they can only be found where there are piles of big rocks. They use the spaces between those rocks as a refuge from extreme temperatures, whether it's too hot, too cold. And they also can use those areas to escape from potential predators. Michael: So the first step is to identify where this talus or pika habitat is even found. Lucas: Yeah, I think I've probably covered around two thirds-ish of the park. That's been one of the ongoing efforts was to get up high on ridges and peaks to try to look and see where talus occurs in the park. Michael: Once they know where the talus is, they'll visit each patch and look for pika. Lucas: And we're looking for any signs of a pika. So that could be seeing a pika, hearing a pika finding a pika's hay pile, or finding pika scat. Alyssa: We sometimes go by the Pika Poop Patrol because we are also collecting pika poop. Michael: Pika poop is currently being used by other researchers studying pika genetics to see how different pika populations are connected to one another. It's not Lucas's project, but he and Alyssa are helping out. Alyssa: Yeah. How many Ziploc gallons of books are full of poop now? In the cabin? Lucas: In the cabin? I think we're up to four. Michael: That's four gallon sized bags of peppercorn sized poops. Lucas: Conveniently pikas, they're active during the day, so we can survey for them during the day and be more likely to see them and hear them. And they also are solitary and defend their territory from other pikas. So that means if you find if you see a pika, you know that there's not going to be another pika within about a ten meter radius of that pika. Michael: This summer, 15 years later, he's surveying the same spots all over again to monitor how they're doing and see how pika populations have changed over time. Lucas: So we'll go to the GPS location where this survey started 15 years ago, and then we'll attempt to survey the same part of the patch that they did. Hopefully the entire patch. Michael: Alyssa has experienced this work firsthand in the field, and she's also created some of her own written work based off of Lucas's research. Like a poem titled Ochotonidae, the Latin name of pika. Alyssa: So the poem is a cut up poem, which is a poem that takes an existing text, in this case, I took Lucas's paper "Predictors of current and long term patterns of abundance of American pikas across a leading edge protected area." Catchy title. Lucas: Thank you. [laughing] Alyssa: You're welcome. I took that article and I cut out a bunch of pieces of language from it and then rearranged those pieces to form a new poem. And I allowed myself to change capitalization and punctuation. But no, no language. Michael: The poem spans several pages, many of which look like Alyssa took white out to most of Lucas's paper. The few scattered words left behind tell their own story. Alyssa: His is longer. [all laugh] Mine has a lot of whitespace. There's small phrases, words and phrases sort of pasted across the page, separated by large gaps. Michael: We asked if she'd read an excerpt for us. Alyssa: Here we go. [subtle synth music plays] "We acknowledge that scale and size are efforts to avoid division by zero, to minimize the error of man made structures, julian date, observer bias, train tracks. And finally, we acknowledge that our ability to identify patterns has been extremely null, especially in centuries made of days." Michael: This isn't the only piece Alyssa has written about pika, and she'll read a short story for us later in the episode. Michael: [to Lucas] Lucas, are you much of a writer? Lucas: No. As you can tell from the title of the paper that they used. [all laughing] Michael: The two of them approach this topic from such different vantage points, but each helps the other see their own work in a new light. Alyssa: It's the absolute best thing in the world to have him around and to have his very different perspective sort of constantly there. There are times when he'll sort of drop a piece of knowledge that he has that I'm like, "You knew this thing all along and you haven't told this to me yet?!" Like this amazing sort of biological factoid that you have just been sitting on for years. Lucas: It's exciting. It's like new perspectives on life and interactions and networks, and it can kind of sort of reinvigorate my interest in my own investigations and science that I'm doing, think about things in new ways, and I think that can help your science be better science. As a scientist who part of my work is looking at the effects of climate change, and it can sometimes seem like, you know, you're writing your notes in your diary as the Titanic is going down. About, you know, just how big the hole is and what caused it and all these things. Art has opportunity to be much more impactful. Michael: Alyssa and Lucas are both driven by a concern for pika, as these little potato shaped animals grapple with climate change. And each of them approach their work with scale in mind, knowing that their results, whether in research or creative writing, are driven by the scope of their project. Lucas: And so, you know, it really depends on how much you're zooming in or out, what it is you're observing, and what types of questions you're asking. Michael: Alyssa mentioned this specifically with her cut up poem. Alyssa: One reason I wanted to try this was to think about what it might-- since I'm interested in scales of space and time, so what happens when you zoom really far out or really far in? And so I wanted to try doing that to a paper. What would a zoomed out version of this paper look like? Michael: So to understand the threat climate change poses to pika, I wanted to start with the big picture. We know what pika are, but what are their lives look like? [to Lucas] On a social level, Why do you think pika are so endearing to people? Lucas: Why are pikas so cute? You know, humans seem to really like baby animals, and I feel like pikas, when they're fully grown adults, still seem like they're little babies. So that's [laughing] that's my analysis. And they're mammals, so they're fluffy. Alyssa: I think people also like this image that they are hard working. They work all summer to collect this hay and to store it. Um, and that seems industrious to us. It seems like they they really, you know, deserve to survive the winter if they work that hard. I think it's easy to kind of attach that-- that meaning onto them as well. Michael: That industriousness Alyssa mentioned? They have to do so much work gathering hay all summer because they don't hibernate over the winter, like so many other mammals here. Lucas: They are going to stay awake and survive in other ways during the winter, unlike rodents who love to just sleep, you know, two thirds of their lives, which is a pretty cool approach too. Pikas, since they can't hibernate, have to collect food to make it through the winter. And so that's what a haypile -- that's the primary purpose of a haypile is they'll collect vegetation, store it, usually under a sort of a big airy rock where it can dry out, and then presumably just hang out underneath the snow, which is really good insulation, and eat their haypile during the winter. Michael: [to Lucas] Yeah. One way I've heard it described as an analogy to try to communicate how much food pika are setting aside is that if they were as big as we were, they would be collecting the equivalent of several school buses worth of food every year. Lucas: Right. Michael: If you see pika frolicking through rocky hillsides, it's usually because they're collecting plants to eat or trying to pillage their neighbors hay piles, despite the fact that they're related to most of their neighbors. If you hear them make their telltale "eep," it's a predator response. Lucas: So I mentioned, you know, the kindly pika neighbor that warns they're cousins and mom and dad and other relatives that live nearby by eeping. But the problem with eeping is that that alerts the predator to your individual presence. So you're really endangering yourself by warning your neighbors. So a pretty altruistic move. But there's been studies where people have introduced like images and stuffed predators to see how pikas respond. And most often the one predator that they did not eep in the presence of was the weasel. Michael: [to Lucas] Hmm. Lucas: And so the thought there is that weasels are such good predators on pikas that it's not worth eeping, because it's going to get you. [bpth laugh] Michael: But besides being cute, busy, and altruistic pika are known for being extremely sensitive to heat. Lucas: Yeah, pikas just can't handle getting warmed up very well. The thought then is well, pikas will avoid being active above the rocks when it's hot outside because it'll cause them to overheat. And if that is the case for much of the summer, then they might not be able to collect enough vegetation to survive the winter under the talus for their haypile. Michael: Around the time of Lucas's first study, researchers observed pika elsewhere in the U.S. were disappearing at lower, warmer elevations. Lucas: And so that was one of the initial kind of alarm bells saying, hey, perhaps there's some impacts here of temperature on pikas. Michael: [to Lucas] So pika have a really limited ability to thermoregulate like we can sweat when we're hot, dogs can pant, but pikas have to live in an environment that can keep them cool. So higher elevations or staying under the rocks when it's hot outside. And changes to the temperature outside could affect where they're actually able to live, right? Lucas: Yes. Alyssa: I would add that they are considered ecosystem sentinels, meaning that they can sort of indicate the…

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Surviving a Near-Death Fall in a National Park Dec 19, 2023

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Morgan Bell spent 10 seasons working on Glacier’s trail crews—one of the toughest and most demanding jobs in the park. Until a single day—a single step—changed everything. Headwaters is created by Daniel Lombardi, Michael Faist, Gaby Eseverri, and Peri Sasnett. Glacier Conservancy: https://glacier.org/headwaters Frank Waln music: https://www.instagram.com/frankwaln/ Stella Nall art: https://www.instagram.com/stella.nall/ ---TRANSCRIPT:--- Lacy Kowalski: Headwaters is supported by the Glacier National Park Conservancy. Gaby Eseverri: Note: this episode deals with an intense accident in Glacier. Please take care while you're listening. Morgan: I remember this distinct feeling of getting off that hitch, and having that weekend to myself, and just being completely content with life. I remember that moment of just like, Oh, I'm so happy and I feel so good with where I am and who I am right now. Gaby: So what happened on the walk back? Morgan: I was on an incline, and when you walk on an incline and snow, you kind of like lean in: kick, kick, kick, dig, kick, kick, kick, dig. So I had kicked into the snow, that there was enough where I had kicked in and exposed it that I actually kicked in to ice. And I stepped on it, and it just took me out immediately. Gaby: You fell. Morgan: I did. Gaby: You fell off the Highline. Morgan: I began to slide. Yes, I fell off the Highline. Gaby: Every community—a high school, a workplace, a national park— has its set of stories: local legends, colorful rumors and cautionary tales told in hushed whispers. They come and go, as people do, but I think some of these stories are etched into the fabric of these places. When I moved to Glacier last year, I started to learn the stories and characters of my new community from the stories we've told on Headwaters, to the old locally-famous characters I see referenced everywhere. Like Joe Cosley, the notorious park ranger and poacher. Or Josephine Doody, the moonshine mogul. One of these stories is that a trail crew employee once fell from the highline trail onto Going to the Sun Road and lived. It's almost beyond belief. And it felt a little taboo to know this about one of my neighbors. To know what happened, but not know them. Music: [somber flute music starting] Gaby: To know what felt like their secret, but not their telling of it. This year, I became friends with that person. And I quickly realized that they don't see it as a secret. This story that I saw as a dark piece of their past was something that they brought light to. And in doing so, brought light to so much more. You're listening to Headwaters, I'm Gaby. This is a show about how Glacier National Park is connected to everything else. In this episode, we talk about how one event can change a life. This is a story of Morgan Bell's relationship with Glacier: a career on trail crew, and how a single day, a single step, changed everything. Gaby: Do you get the sense that you'll go down in park history? Park lore? Morgan: I think, with such a substantial experience and story of survival, yes. I think my name will be associated with this place for a very long time. My name is Morgan Bell. I am a concession management specialist here at Glacier National Park, and I have been employed here for 22 years. Gaby: What brought you to Glacier then? What brought you to Montana? Morgan: I had received a letter from Glacier National Park in the mail advertising positions for trail maintenance. Gaby: Had you ever been to Glacier? Morgan: I had never been to Glacier. In all honesty, I had never even heard of Glacier National Park. Gaby: [laughing] Okay, cool. So when you came out here at 22 to work trails, this place sort of represented adventure. Morgan: Yeah, it really set a stage for me to be my own person. It was my first time on my own. Gaby: 22. Yeah. So what was working trails like here when you started? Morgan: It was super intense. It was exposing, not only to the elements, but emotionally, you know, like personal level exposing—of being embodied in the woods with strangers for six months. Gaby: And you're physically doing a lot of work because you're clearing trails? Morgan: Yeah. Gaby: Yeah. What does that actually mean? And what are you actually doing? Morgan: It consists of typically a season that runs from April to October. And you, primarily in the spring, are focusing on clearing downed trees that would have fallen through winter storms. Gaby: Okay. So to get them ready for visitors. Morgan: Yeah, yeah, for hiking. So we'd go out and clear trails with chainsaws, sometimes crosscuts. Clean all of the drains so that water can move off of the trail. We build structures so all of the bridges that you cross across creeks and rivers. Gaby: So it's taking a lot of you physically to be able to do all of that. Morgan: Physically and then mentally. I mean, you're put into the wilderness and working hard and building relationships. But it really laid the foundation and gave me a glimpse into my, like my ability of self, what I could and couldn't do. It was a really strengthening period for me. Gaby: So tell me about this culture of trails. Morgan: There's a lot of pride in it. There's a lot of ownership and there's a lot of longevity. Gaby: If you're a newbie, it's like, Are you going to stick around? Morgan: Are you going to stick around? Gaby: Yeah. Are you going to be a, what do you trail people call themselves, trail dogs? Morgan: Trail dogs. Gaby: Okay. [laughing] Morgan: Yeah. Yeah, trail dogs. It's a right to become a trail dog. You have to work for it. It's a sense of pride to become one. Yeah. To become part of the pack. There was an authenticity to the relationships that you could build with individuals in such extreme environments. It was a community that provided instantaneous support. It was a wave of, like, experiences with each other. Gaby: Hmm. Morgan: We have ten days where it just pours rain on us. Gaby: Everyone's unhappy. Everyone's miserable. Morgan: Everyone's unhappy. Yeah. Yeah. But that somehow connected us, and we still got the job done. We still had fun. We still made our meals together. Yeah. Gaby: So you moved here when you're 22, you started trails. Morgan: Mm hmm. Gaby: At some point, you became crew lead. Morgan: Yeah. So typically, each crew, depending on the district, is made up of anywhere from 4 to 6 individuals. My crew that year was myself (the crew lead), and then I had a maintenance worker, and I had two laborers. I had a lot of, I was very excited and had a lot of pride to be a trail lead. Gaby: How old were you when that happened? Morgan: 32. I really started to see how Glacier had shaped me into the individual that I was becoming. I can hike a trail, like I can in my mind, I can envision a trail without being on it because I've been on it so many times. Gaby: That makes me think of knowing our homes in such an intimate way. Morgan: Mm hmm. Gaby: And so these trails are sort of. Yeah, like a home. Morgan: It is home. It is home. You know, I have a favorite tree. I have a favorite rock. Gaby: Aww. Both: [laughing] Morgan: And I have memories built in certain areas right? There's like, those keynote moments that are kind of ingrained in my being. I became very integrated with Glacier. I identified with it. There's an intimacy of how I connected with Glacier. My literal blood, sweat and tears were put into the ground. Gaby: From working trails. Morgan: From working trails. Trails exposed me to the deepest parts of myself. It built a level of strength and identity within me to understand myself. That was like a level of intimacy. Who would I be as an individual if I wasn't shaped. Gaby: By trails. By trails. It solidified that this was where I was supposed to be. I'm all about universal signs. [laughs] And there was a moment before I came to work here. I was working in a physical therapy office at the front desk. And there was a calendar that I had, and one of the photographs I really admired. And so once the month had passed, I tore that page out and stuck it on my wall and would just look at it. Fast forward, and I'm standing at the top of Logan Pass, and I look around and I was like, [gasp], this is that picture. And so that was a pivotal moment for me where I was just like, This is where I'm supposed to be. Gaby: Logan Pass is the highest place you can drive to in Glacier, home to the highline trail. The highline is cut steeply into the mountainside, and parallels Going to the Sun road for several miles. When I hiked the trail, I was surrounded by beargrass and other colorful wildflowers in bloom, and I was sweating as the warm summer breeze hugged me. When Morgan and her crew were there on that day in 2012, it was still spring: gloomy and snowy, and her cheeks were pink from the cold mountain air. She was there to get the trail open, clearing it of snow and debris to get it ready for the thousands of eager boots that hike the highline every summer. This is no easy task on any trail. But now imagine one with drop offs so steep that it feels like every butterfly in the world made its way to your stomach. As if that weren't enough. Out of snow and ice to the mix. Morgan: The morning had started, July 3rd, 2012, but it was raining and it was like a low cloud cover. Definitely still spring-summer in the high country. Historically, trail crew is responsible for blasting snowfields on trails of high use. So we walked out, got to our destination—the last snow field we needed to assess—and then we geared up and begun our walk back to the trailhead. One of my trail members was in front of me. I was second in line in the group of five, and him and I were just chatting up a storm. We were just like having a really good conversation. And we had crossed a number of snow fields by this point and we had approached our last one that we needed to cross. I got pretty far across it, and I could see there's seasonal water. This part, section of the trail, seasonal water flows. What had happened is that water had froze, and created like an ice layer. I was on an incline and when you walk on an incline in snow, you kind of like lean in, kick it, kick, dig, kick, kick, kick, dig. So I had kicked into the snow. But there was enough where I had kicked in and exposed it that I actually kicked in to ice. And I stepped on it, and it just took me out immediately. It was fast. Like, it wasn't like a "whoopsie" slip, it was like a slip. Hit the ground. Start sliding. Gaby: You're still on snow and ice. Morgan: I'm traveling, still on snow and ice. Yes. And I was crossing, the snow had kind of collected in a couloir of sorts, or like a you know, a natural chute that had been created through this water feature. Gaby: Okay. Morgan: So snow ran from the trail all the way to the road. It's not fluffy, It's not soft. It's not playful. It's icy, hard-packed, compacted snow. Very. Gaby: Rough. Morgan: Rough and hard. Gaby: And if anything, it's only making you slide faster. Morgan: Faster. Yeah. And the slope of which I was sliding was also steep. I hit the snow immediately, and began to slide. And I recall when I first fell, I was on my back and I was going headfirst, downhill. I attempted to self arrest with the hand tool I had, which was a shovel. So it's a method of putting it across your body and trying to dig it in and use it as a break. I didn't have crampons or an ice axe. That wasn't something that we typically carried with us. I was able to like, spin myself around with my shovel, and then I was feet first going down, trying to break. Gaby: So now you're seeing. Morgan: Now I'm seeing. Gaby: The ground. Morgan: The ground and where I'm going. But I'm like laying on my back still and trying to use my shovel. At some point, my shovel was ripped out of my hand. And I lost it. And I remember in that pivotal moment, it was so fast, but everything was like so slow in that moment. And I remember just being very aware of what was happening, but extremely like, methodical in my actions. So once I lost my shovel. I flip myself back onto my stomach. And so now I'm traveling. Feet first on my belly. And my only attempt to slow myself down was to expand. So I put my arms out, starfish, essentially. Put my arms out really far. Began to dig in with my hands and my nails. My feet started to, like, kind of really push my toes into the snow. I remember, like the sensation of my face dragging on the snow, and the sound of it, the speed of it. Music: [low, dramatic bass music starts in the background] Morgan: And like the snow that I was gripping and moving across, like flying around me. And like, screaming, it was incredibly loud. Really, really intense, primal fear, like loss of control and completely terrified. What my crew members experienced as well is that they heard me yell, I can't stop. Gaby: So they're hearing you while they're still standing on the highline? Morgan: Yes. And they're watching me. They can see me sliding down. At a certain point, they lost sight of me and didn't know what the outcome was, but knew that I had made it to the road because from the highline they could see the road itself, but they could see vehicles going around. Gaby: Something. Morgan: Something. Gaby: On a slippery patch of hard snow and ice. Morgan slid 350 feet from the highline. That's more than the entire height of the Statue of Liberty. Then she free fell another 12 feet onto unforgiving pavement. Onto Going to the sun Road. Morgan: I remember a majority of the slide and at some point I lost consciousness, on the snow field. And I came to on the road. I don't know the duration after I fell, like if it was seconds, minutes. I remember like being on all fours, you know, on my belly and just kind of like lifting my head and seeing blood everywhere, like pooled up on the on the road and all over my face. I was like, Oh, my gosh, okay, I'm on the road. And at that very moment, it was like these little black shoes came running up and came within my view. And I was almost like in Child's Pose, hunkered down, and this individual was saying to me, like, are you okay? Where did you come from? I don't know how clear I was in communicating, but I recall saying I fell from the highline. I'm trail crew. I was on the highline. I slid. I recall laying down instantly, feeling a lot of pressure in my head. Intense pressure in my head, in my face. Just holding my head. Music: [music fades, shifting to background flute music] Morgan: And I recall people coming in. So visitor service assistants from Logan Pass came down to assist. They started performing an assessment on me of my injuries and stabilizing me, you know, my C spine and everything like that. The individual who had come upon me on the road was actually a registered nurse from Billings. From what I understand, Rangers got on site and Alert—which is an emergency helicopter—was called, and took off immediately to come LifeFlight me to the hospital. And so I was put on a board and put in the back of the shuttle bus and transported to Big Bend. And once Alert was on site, they put me in an induced coma and got me in the plane or in the helicopter, and we took off. Music: [dramatic flute concludes] Morgan: I would never be who I was again. Even with complete healing, I would always be different. It would never be the same. That trails would never be the same, that my life and my activities and my existence as I knew it would never be the same. Gaby: Do you remember waking up in the hospital? Morgan: Mmhmm. Gaby: Was it where you confused or. Morgan: No, I was incredibly ashamed. I remember my supervisor, who I have great admiration for. He…

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Living Seasonally: Advice from a Lifelong Ranger Dec 05, 2023

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We sit down with Chuck Cameron, a lifelong Glacier Ranger, to learn about his incredible and unusual career. Headwaters is created by Daniel Lombardi, Michael Faist, Gaby Eseverri, and Peri Sasnett. Glacier Conservancy: https://glacier.org/headwaters Frank Waln music: https://www.instagram.com/frankwaln/ Stella Nall art: https://www.instagram.com/stella.nall/ ---TRANSCRIPT:--- Lacy Kowalski: Headwaters is supported by the Glacier National Park Conservancy. Michael Faist: Have you ever met somebody for the first time, introduced yourself and had a nice conversation only to walk away and immediately forget their name? I have. It feels like one of the great shared human experiences to have that guilty conversation with yourself. Was it John? Jim? Shoot. Which makes it all the more surprising when you meet someone who seems to be immune to that phenomenon. Someone like Chuck Cameron. Chuck Cameron: My name is Chuck Cameron. [squirrel chirping loudly] There's a squirrel. Gaby Eseverri: [laughing] There's a little squirrel. Michael: [in the field] All right. One more time without the squirrel [laughing]. Chuck: Yeah, without the squirrel. [clearing throat] My name is Chuck Cameron, and I'm a wilderness ranger here in Glacier. Michael: Chuck has been a ranger in Glacier longer than I've been alive, and he's a bit of a local legend. Even so, after meeting me once for 30 seconds at a party during my first season here, he remembered my name months later, shook my hand and was happy to see me. Which felt nice because I'd heard Chuck's name a lot. He's the sort of person that everyone you meet knows and loves, and the incredible stories you hear about them don't seem to line up with the calm and mild-mannered person you've met. But while Chuck has led a long and storied career here in Glacier, the most surprising part of that career is that the park terminates him, every fall. Well, kind of. A common question we get from visitors is what does it take to be a park ranger? And while there is no one answer to that question, as there's no one type of park ranger, a good answer is you've got to be willing to move every six months. Ninety five percent of Glaciers visitors come between May and October. So it makes sense that the park doesn't really need most of its staff in the wintertime. So to find a career in the NPS, a lot of people move across the country every six months, bouncing between summer and winter jobs. My friend just told me last week he's moved 48 times. And for most, the ultimate goal is to land one of the few competitive permanent positions in the Park Service. I've always seen that as the path to an NPS career. But it wasn't Chuck's. Michael: [in the field] And how long have you worked here in Glacier? Chuck: This is my 42nd season. Gaby: 42nd? Chuck: Yeah. Gaby: Woah! That's a lot of seasons. I'm on-I'm on season two [laughing]. Chuck: You-You only have 40 to go, and we'll be the same [Chuck, Michael and Gaby laughing]. Michael: Chuck's been a seasonal his whole career. One of the few people I've met in Glacier who can say that. [theme music fades in] I wanted to sit down with him because I think his unusual path says a lot about the unusual job that is working for the National Park Service. Equal parts, delightful and stressful, noble, yet often bizarre. But I also think that few people could have had the career that Chuck has. And I want to know how he did it. [theme music plays, with the strumming of a string instrument, a flute, and drumbeats]. Michael: You're listening to Headwaters, a show about how Glacier National Park connects with everything else. I'm Michael. [music fades] And today I invited lifelong Glacier Ranger Chuck Cameron over for dinner. Michael: [in the field] [laughter] Yeah, let's go to the porch. Michael: Chuck's a laid back guy, very tall, the warm smile, and he's easy to get along with. You can tell just by looking at him. He showed up to dinner wearing an aloha shirt cooler in hand,. Michael: [in the field] [someone cracks open a canned beverage] Serve yourself, we've got pulled pork and coleslaw sandwiches. Michael: The plan my fellow producer, Gaby, and I came up with was to sit around the campfire with Chuck and share stories. But unfortunately, a much larger fire had just started a—wildfire seven miles away, so we were under a strict burn ban. No campfires. So instead, I made pulled pork sandwiches and we settled down on a porch with a view. Chuck: Thank you. That was delicious. Michael: [in the field] You're Wilderness Ranger now. What was the first job you had here in the park? Chuck: I worked on the trail crew as a Laborer in Many Glacier in 1982. Michael: Was that the first time you ever came to the park? Chuck: The first time I'd ever been to Montana. Michael: Woah. Gaby: Really? From where? Chuck: Well, I worked actually at Rocky Mountain National Park in 1980 and 81, right out of college. But I was looking at the map, and I saw Glacier National Park, and I like the sound of the name. It just sounded cool. And it was in Montana, and I'd never been here. So I threw in an application and they called me up and offered me a trail crew job. Michael: There are 745.9 miles of trail in Glacier, and each year the park hires 50 to 60 people across 12 different crews to maintain all that mileage. They clear dead and downed trees, brush the trails to minimize how much thimble berry and thistle you have to walk through, dig drains to move water off and make steps. Honestly, they do a lot of work that often goes unnoticed. Chuck: I liked being out for ten days at a time with the same people, and you build this sort of bond with this crew you’re on because you're working, cooking, eating, sleeping in all kinds of weather for ten straight days and you learn to rely on each other a bunch. It's just a really unique work situation, I think. You know, I never really thought like everybody working at JC Penney, like hung out after work and cook-went home and cook dinner together. Gaby: Shared the same room. Chuck: Share the same room, or slept the same tent or… Gaby: Yeah. Michael: During his time on trail crew, Chuck worked on a lot of trails, but he highlighted one especially odd project. Chuck: Uh, I think the most craziest season I had on trail crew, we cut the International Boundary Swath in 1987 and [someone in the background says “wow] I was a crew leader on the east side and it hadn't been dealt with in 20 years. Michael: Glacier’s northern boundary is the U.S.–Canada border, and since the 1860s there has been a swath, a gap through the trees to mark where it is. Chuck: It marks the international boundary and it's has monuments, steel obelisk monuments spaced out the entire 5,000 mile international boundary. Michael: To keep trees and brush from filling in the swath, it's needed periodic maintenance in 150 years it's been here. Chuck: And it's a 20-foot-wide swath cleared of all vegetation, so you can see from monument to monument, basically. Yeah, we spent 80 days, ten-day hitches at a time doing nothing but clearing the boundary. Michael: [in the field] Jeez. Gaby: Wow. Michael: So Chuck and his crew were cutting it out by hand in the late eighties. But I'd heard a rumor that in the sixties, someone decided to use Agent Orange to clear the swath. The infamous ingredient used in napalm. Michael: [in the field] …said at one point, they used Agent Orange to clear the boundary swath. Chuck: They did, that's what they had done the time before we cut it by hand. They defoliated it from the air, which wasn't very accurate. And so the boundary swath was this like snaking thing through the. And so our job was to straighten it out and so we surveyed it as we went from monument to monument. Michael: You're redrawing the line. Chuck: Redrawing the line, yeah. Peri Sasnett: That’s a lot of responsibility. Chuck: Well, it was and it was kind of nutty because sometimes the swath was just going through the forest. There was no like, cut. It was just point A to point B. [someone laughs in background] We just up the side of one mound and down the side of the, you know, [someone in background days “wow] and we went around beaver ponds. We handed tools up cliff bands, you know, five-gallon cans of gas up through these cliffs, you know, [someone chuckles and someone says “wow” in background] to get to the next bench and keep going. Michael: Because normally trail crews working on trails requires a lot more thought and care into where the trail is placed than many people realize, and so the boundary swath is kind of atypical. It's like, yeah, straight ahead- Gaby: Straight across. Chuck: Yeah, our-our slogan, and we made a T-shirt, was, uh, “total destruction is the only solution,” [lots of laughter] [bass line fades in] which is it's a line from a Bob Marley song about nuclear war, and that's kind of how we felt about it. [bass line continues and fades] Michael: But like all seasonal jobs, Chuck's season on trail crew came to an end. Every fall, you've got to find something else to do. This is when a lot of folks crisscross the country to work in warmer southern parks. But those jobs are few and far between and pretty competitive. It's not really a sustainable solution for most people. Michael: [in the field] But, uh, what did you-what do you spend your winters doing? How did you string together the other six months of the year? Chuck: That worked out. I was really lucky in that regard because I got a job on Big Mountain, and I worked on the ski patrol there for 26 years. Michael: Big Mountain is home to Whitefish Ski Resort, less than an hour from Glacier. Chuck: Ski season and this season fit together extremely well, and about the time I'd get sick [clears throat] of ski patrol and in April they'd lay me off and I'd get to come here and do something completely different. And then about, you know, late September, I get sick of working here, [laughter] and they'd lay me off here and I'd have a couple of months off in the fall to go do whatever, and then I'd go back skiing again. Michael: Ski patrol in the winter, trail crew in the summer. And Chuck’s season cutting the border swath highlights that a lot of work in Glacier is extremely physical. Gaby: So was this your-was this year hardest hitch? Chuck: Yeah, that was my-I felt invincible at the end of that summer. Gaby: I bet. Chuck: I thought, if I can do this, I can do anything. Gaby: Yeah. Chuck: So then I quit trails and got a Ranger job. [everyone laughing] Basically. Gaby: That’s-I mean that's cool a way to go out from trail crew. Chuck: Yeah. Gaby: Yeah. Michael: After his summer on the border swath, Chuck got a job as a Law Enforcement Ranger. He went to Law Enforcement Academy with one of his trail crew friends. And after that, got a job in the Belly River, a remote part of the northeast corner of Glacier. Chuck: And I worked for a guy named Dave Shea, who was an incredible wealth of knowledge, a scientist just, you know, knows everything about everything. And, yeah, a great guy to work for. My first year in there, so that was awesome. He started here in ‘67, I think, or something. Michael: [in the field] Was that intimidating? Like to have your first Ranger job kind of… with him? Chuck: No, it was great. He's so humble and just so knowledgeable and not afraid to share knowledge. You know, like, he would just take me out and show me all these things. And Belly River, the old wagon roads, the old cabin sites, the tracking and birds and just... Yeah, he-he's amazing. And he just took me under his wing, and I spent the whole summer with him. Michael: This is the sort of job I feel like most people picture when they imagine being a park ranger. Chuck: You know, we patrolled every day because that's why you're there. You know, we were up one valley or the other… into the campgrounds, talking to all the visitors, checking permits, um, digging out fire rings, cleaning pit toilets, just making sure everything's still working. Michael: [Chuck’s voice fades out in the background] If you want to learn more about life as the Belly River Ranger, we interviewed Lora Funk, who has that job now, in our last episode. We'll have a link in the show notes. Lora learned from Chuck, and Chuck picked up the tools of the trade from his mentor that first summer. Chuck: It was great. And then unfortunately, at the end of that summer in 1988, we're sitting around in the behind the ranger station having dinner, and he said, “I just want to tell everybody this is ViVi’s and my’s last summer here.” And I'm just like, what? I just got here, you-you can't leave. You know, this is my first year. I want to keep working. You know, I was going to plan on working with him for a long time. It was good for me. I got the Lead Ranger job in there, you know, and spent the next nine years in there. But it was hard for me to adjust from being trail crew, you know, the kind of the renegades of the Park Service, right? You're kind of out there, out of uniform, doing whatever, digging in the dirt and, you know, and then to a Law Enforcement Ranger. Michael [in the field]: Yeah. Chuck: Wearing a uniform. Michael: In the uniform, in the campgrounds. Chuck: You know, people come to the Ranger Station when they're in trouble or need something, and so the typical day can be very atypical very quickly if somebody shows up at 8:00 at night. Michael: And to hear Chuck tell it, there was a bit of a learning curve to becoming this new type of ranger. Chuck: I was hiking back down from Helen Lake, I think, and I got to the foot of Elizabeth and there was a beargrass flower in the trail, the whole stalk and the flower. And I thought, mmm, that's kind of weird. And I just walked by it. And then there was another one. And then another one and another one, and I'm like, this is not natural. So I started picking them up and I had this huge bouquet of bear grass flower stalks in my arms. I don't know that I could have carried 150, but I had 100 on my bed in my arms. [laughter] Michael: Following the trail of beargrass flowers, Chuck found a Boy Scout troop at the nearby campground. Gaby: You've had the entire trail time to just get angrier and stew... Chuck: Every one I picked up. [laughter] Michael: A lot of work on trail crew is physical, but working with the public, keeping people in the park safe, can require a lot of empathy and patience. Chuck's known for his people skills today, but all skills take practice. Chuck: So I walked in there and I'm holding these things and I didn't handle it very well because I was taking it personally, which is a huge mistake when you're a law enforcement ranger. You cannot-I learned that this was a good lesson for me then. Don't take it personally. It's not about you. It's about, you know, education, and, you know, I've learned that. But then I'm like, does anybody know what these are? And this kid looks at me, he goes, yeah, that's bear grass. I said, yeah, and it used to be alive till all you guys killed it all. And I look over [someone says “uh-oh”] and this kid is got his jackknife out and he's carving his initials in the bench he was sitting on in the campground, and I'm like, can you knock it off? [laughter] Can you quit doing that? And he looks at his buddy and he goes, I don't think he likes us. [group erupts in laughter] Very astute. Michael: For ripping up 150 beargrass flowers, the troop leader got a $50 fine. Chuck's the first to say that he took that incident personally because he cares about the park and the Belly River.…

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Can Ranger Traditions Survive into the Future? Nov 21, 2023

Show notes

We meet a ranger who lives in one of the wildest corners of Glacier—a place where age-old tools and skills are still practiced daily. But do traditional skills, or this way of life, still have a place in a rapidly-evolving world? Headwaters is created by Daniel Lombardi, Michael Faist, Gaby Eseverri, and Peri Sasnett. Glacier Conservancy: https://glacier.org/headwaters Frank Waln music: https://www.instagram.com/frankwaln/ Stella Nall art: https://www.instagram.com/stella.nall/ ---TRANSCRIPT:--- Lacy Kowalski: Headwaters is brought to you by the Glacier National Park Conservancy. Peri Sasnett: Picture a National Park Service Ranger station. What does it look like? Maybe a big log cabin with a mossy pitched roof and a creaky screen door? Glacier does have plenty of those, but my office is in park headquarters, which has some strong mid-century middle school energy. And working here, I'm always happening upon obsolete relics of bygone eras. Handwritten memos, ink stamps, a fax machine... I haven't found a typewriter yet, but I wouldn't be surprised to find one lurking in a drawer. Only a few decades ago, people in this building used those things all the time. But like a lot of people, many rangers' jobs have changed pretty dramatically in the last 40 years. Mine definitely has. But in this episode, we're spending a day with a ranger whose office equipment and duties haven't changed much at all in 40—or even 100—years. Lora Funk: Can you drag this dead goat out of the waterfall? That's a weird one. The marmot's living in the toilet again! Peri: Meet Wilderness Ranger Lora Funk. She has long, sandy blonde braids and bright blue eyes. She wears the park uniform with a little mud on her boots, and she loves to laugh at the absurdities of life in the backcountry. I immediately want to be her friend. Lora: My laundry is a bucket with a metal plunger that people call an Alaska Maytag, and I think it gets the clothes cleaner... But I don't think people necessarily think my clothes are clean. [laughs] Peri: Alongside her colleagues, General and Tank—both horses—and Ellen the mule, Lora helps steward and patrol the Belly River Valley of the park. Lora: Yeah if someone were to say, like, picture a historic ranger station and a iconic valley... It's Belly River. Peri: One of her favorite things about the Belly is that there are no roads. So unlike the rest of Glacier's Ranger Stations, you can't drive here. Lora: The Belly River Ranger Station is located six miles into Glacier's wilderness. [sounds of horse footsteps in the background] You either have to hike in or ride a pony. Peri: I interviewed Lora in the ranger station, but also while she lugged gear around and rode a horse, who occasionally took an interest in my microphone. Lora: Would you like to be interviewed, General? Hello. Hello. [loud snuffling and sniffing sounds] He went for it! [another loud sniff] Is he going to eat it? Michael Faist: Just sniffin. Lora: We have two rangers, myself and Alison, the commission ranger. There's a trail crew which varies in size 2 to 4, and we have three had a stock, and that makes up our entire staff. Peri: The Belly River Ranger station is a brown log cabin—a Park Service specialty—with white window frames and a flagpole out front. It sits between a creek and a wide open meadow where the horses graze and its covered porch faces west towards steep sided, rocky peaks. It's a very traditional scene, and so is life out here. Lora: So I live off grid. I live in a one room cabin there with a propane stove. And we do get running water for a few months of the season. Otherwise, we have to haul our water from the creek. I do not have a bathroom connected to my house. I have to walk through the outhouse. Yeah I mean, you start to lose track of time and age and everything out here. Some of that kind of stuff fades away because then you're like, is it 2020 or is it 1920? There's elk running around and there's a fence that looks just about the same... I'm reading books and hauling my water from the creek. Peri: When I tell my friends I work for the Park Service, I think this might be what they picture. But in a lot of ways, the agency is looking to the future—trying to modernize our infrastructure, lower our carbon emissions. And tell our stories differently. Parks have podcast now, for example. It seems like a vestige of the past to come to the Belly and see Lora still riding horses, packing gear on mules and living in the backcountry. And honestly, I wonder how long this way of life this type of ranger can last. But I know I want to experience it before it's too late. Music: [Headwaters theme begins playing; starting with mandolin, then a drumbeat, a flute line, and other instruments layer in before the music finishes] Peri: I'm Peri, and you're listening to Headwaters, a show about how Glacier National Park is connected to everything else. And today, I'm tagging along for a day in the life with the person who might have the coolest job in the park. Lora: All right. Today, we've got the horses, the mule, saddled, and we're going to head out. Take care of ranger business. Peri: Today's "ranger business" is going up toward Helen Lake to pick up and pack out some leftover supplies. Michael and I walk in front of the stock while Lora rides, since apparently they prefer to follow us. Lora: Come on, keep up with the humans. Keep up with the humans. Peri: Apparently, horses have abandonment issues. So even though we didn't really need both Tank and General, everyone came along for the ride. [drumbeat of music plays] Lora: [talking to the stock] All right. How does everyone feel today? [clinking of tack and gear] Okay. Good. Good. Yep. Peri: For most park staff, our ranger business is pretty specific: giving a campfire program, studying plants, managing the park's budget, making a podcast. But for Lora, almost anything could be her ranger business on a given day. Lora: I am, like, I'm a wilderness ranger and I am specially trained on the Wilderness Act and wilderness values and character. But in the end, my day to day is a lot of general ranger duties, whether it's bear management, EMS maintenance, pulling weeds. Peri: There are specialists for each of these things: bear biologists, search and rescue, trail crew, invasive plant crew. But Lora and other rangers like her pitch in to keep things going day to day. Lora: Well, it takes a whole team to manage Glacier. That's why we have the experts. And so I'll call them in if we have something major. I can fix a toilet, but if the whole outhouse goes down, I gotta call trail crew. [drumbeat playing] A lot of people talk about the quote, "Jack of all trades, master of none." But the full quote is "Jack of all trades, master of none. Better something than nothing done." And that's kind of what I live by out here. Peri: And this is much the same as the ranger business that rangers have been doing in the Belly River for decades. Take this entry from an old log book in 1994. Chuck Cameron: September 14th, 1994. Patrol with Bob on stock to Elizabeth Lake head to deliver additional gear and supplies to the trail crew. Dug out the firepit and replaced the campground map with an updated version. Also pulled another handful of hawkweed. Chuck Cameron. Peri: Every day when Lora gets back from the field, she writes down the day's activities and events In a big green government issued logbook. She and her predecessors have been doing this since the earliest days of the ranger station here. From Chuck 30 years ago to some of the earliest Belly River Rangers back to 1929. Joe Heims: June 5th, 1929. Station to Red Gab Pass and return. Distance 16 miles, mounted. Object: cleaning trail and looking over trail conditions. Game seen: one mountain goat, two deer, one elk. Weather clear. Temperature 41 degrees at 7 a.m. Joe Heims. Peri: But these days, this type of work is becoming more and more rare. Even this ranger station used to be staffed in the winter, but hasn't been for a long time. Lora: Spots like mine that are remote are, I think there's less and less these days. Peri: Glacier has only a handful of wilderness rangers, and just a single backcountry ranger station. And throughout the Park Service, these kinds of places, and the people with the skills to staff them, are disappearing. [drumbeat plays] Peri: In addition to all the odd jobs Lora does, a huge part of her job is talking to park visitors, most of whom are on multiday backpacking trips. As we hiked up the trail past Dawn Mist Falls, a scenic and loud waterfall, we ran into our first hiker of the day. Lora: [waterfall sound in the background] Hi there, how's it going? Backpacker: Good, how are you? Lora: Good. Where you coming from today? Backpacker: Lake Helen. Lora: How is it? Backpacker: Beautiful. Lora: Good! Backpacker: I think it's quite the best view out there. Lora: Yeah, a lot of people say that. Peri: She asks where they've been and where they're going. Lora: Cool. Do you have a permit I could take a look at. Backpacker: Oh, yeah. Lora: Helen, Glenns, Goat Haunt. Cool! What a great trip. Peri: And she'll chat about their trip, making sure they have what they need. Lora: Any questions about anything they covered in the permit office? Backpacker: No, I think I'm good. Hopefully this uh, the food gets lighter. Lora: Yeah. I mean, every pass will be easier. Backpacker: Yes. Yes. Yes. Lora: Yeah. Have fun on your trip! Belly River is my favorite place, but Goat Haunt's second, and you're going to both. So. Peri: And sometimes they have something more unusual to report. Lora: You know, maybe they saw a bear or a wolf or something really interesting that I can then report to the biologists or, you know, like I was saying, they often will report whether the food hang pole's damaged or the marmots living in the toilet again. [laughs] [drumbeat plays briefly] Peri: Most days, though, she patrols, checks the campgrounds, gives the pit toilet a once over, makes sure food is stored properly, and gives a helping hand where it's needed. Lora: So every once in a while I come across a food hang and it's not high enough. Peri: Most backcountry campgrounds have a food hang pole where you toss a rope over and then pull your food up, securing it ten feet off the ground, just high enough to keep it away from curious bears. Lora: [to camper] Oh, hi there! How's it going? Yeah, I just lifted your hang cause it wan't the ten feet. Camper Yeah. Sorry about that. That was my first bear hang, so. Lora: Oh, okay! Well... Camper Not the prettiest. Lora: It's okay! Just make sure, like, if you notice, I had it all the way to the top. Camper Do you actually mind showing me what knots you did. Lora: Yeah, I'll show you! Peri: Today, Lora uses her educational ranger charm to teach a camper the best knots for the job. Lora: So I use a form of a trucker hat. And so then what I do is I come through... [drumbeat plays] Peri: It's about six miles from the ranger station where the gear was stashed for us to pack out. So we had plenty of time to chat as we walked through the forest and along the choppy turquoise waters of Elizabeth Lake, with colorful Seward Peak and the sheer Ptarmigan Wall beyond. Lora: I'd never been to Montana before I got this job. I'd worked at Olympic as a wilderness ranger intern in college, and I always thought I was going to go back there. But then I got this job and I was like, "Oh, I guess Glacier's my place." Peri: [to Lora] So did you always think about being a backcountry ranger or working for the Park Service? Was that always something you were interested in? Lora: Definitely not. [laughs] I went to a liberal arts college and my major was American Studies, and I had a thesis that focused on public land history. But I took that summer internship at Olympic and realized, Wow, this is what I need to be doing. This is where I'm happy. Peri: And it makes perfect sense that someone who loves history but wants to work outside would end up working here and living in a log cabin. Lora: So if you're talking to me about Glacier or Belly River, I often go into the history part versus anything else. Peri: [to Lora] Is that part of what drew you to go to the Belly River? Lora: Definitely. The history and the legacy of Belly River. Um, having a mentor, Chuck Cameron, that worked here in the eighties and nineties. He got to share a lot of his experiences out here and the experiences of his mentor. So continuing on that legacy and preserving the Ranger Station, the institutional knowledge, passing that on... Is something that really drew me to Belly River. Peri: Chuck is one of the voices you've heard reading logbook entries from his time in the Belly River in the 1990s, along with one from Joe Heims in the 1920s. Both were rangers in Glacier for over 40 years. A long line of rangers connected by the tools they use, the horses and mules, and the way of life that makes up this job. Lora: It's definitely a connection to the past. We're using similar Decker saddles on the stock. That technology hasn't changed much. Yeah, we're using the same tools. I mean, literally some of the same tools that have been around for a long, long time. And yeah, we're patrolling the same trails. It's a different experience day to day, but they were doing patrol reports, we're still writing in the logbook every day what we got up to. [drumbeat plays] Chuck: September 22nd, 1992. Patrol to Stoney Indian bench today to pull the three plank bridges for the season. Went up there with a wrench and came back with a wrench, a Pulaski, old wire, a huge tarp, an empty Southern comfort bottle, an old 10 pound syrup can, and a fishing net. Quite a haul for one patrol. South winds, 67 degrees, at 1930 hours. Chuck Cameron. Peri: [in the field] And so, yeah, what are we packing out today? Lora: So today we are packing out old parts of an inverted U food hang. Peri: It's not a difficult hike to retrieve the old food hang pole. But all the same, I'm glad I'm not being asked to add a 25 pound chunk of metal to my pack. Lora: So the reason we're having the ponies do it is because this would be more awkward for a human, and we might take multiple humans to do what Ellen can do by herself. Peri: Glacier has a staff of packers who supply trail crews in the backcountry for eight day hitches or carry gear in for bat biologists or the fish crew. But for a few sections of metal pipe, Lora and Ellen can manage. Lora: So there's definitely a technique to mantying loads, and with practice people can become really quick and really neat with theirs. Michael: Like you? Lora: I would not say mine is the prettiest. [laughs] I've seen some very lovely loads come through. Peri: Packing loads on a mule is quite an art. Ever since horses and mules were domesticated thousands of years ago, people have been packing things on them. And Lora is quick to say she's no expert. Lora: I'm not a packer, I'm a ranger who happens to pack. I learned from other experienced rangers, I learned by going along with the packers over the years, learning from them and their different styles. But this spring I had the opportunity to go to the Nine Mile Wildlands Training Center in Missoula and attended their basic packing course. And I got the opportunity to attend this thanks to the help and funding of the Conservancy. Which I really appreciate. Peri: Mules are especially popular for packing because they're strong and sure footed. Their personalities vary, but Ellen is a keeper. Lora: But mules are fun. They've got r…

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