Wolves wandered, too, and wolverines and big bull elk.
They had no idea someone had drawn a new political boundary onto their landscape.
“These critters move,” said park biologist Steve Gniadek. “It's critical they be able to cross in and out of the park.”
But often they can't, and Gniadek has come to see Glacier as something of an island, an increasingly isolated refugium surrounded by a growing moat of development.
“Every direction you look,” he said, “there's something to worry about.”
Especially as the climate changes, because if Glacier's island becomes uninhabitable, and the moat too vast to cross, “some of these species, I believe, with enough time, could just blink out.”
Will Hammerquist's finger traces across the map, drawing a slow, counterclockwise circle around Glacier.
“You have Highway 3 to the north,” he says, “coal mines and coalbed methane drilling.”
Along the western edge, “backcountry sprawl and habitat fragmentation are eating up your winter range.” Plans to pave rustic dirt tracks there, and new homes up every draw.
To the south, U.S. Highway 2 and an increasing Flathead Valley population, trains and the railroaders who want to launch explosives into the park to bring down avalanches.
Oil and gas developers press up to the east, where the Badger-Two Medicine country on the Rocky Mountain Front provides a conservation battleground.
Similar energy development already has industrialized Alberta's front range, on Glacier's northeast corner.
“You can go to every jurisdiction, right around the park, and you'll find that kind of push on the boundaries,” Hammerquist said.
He works for the National Parks Conservation Association, and is “constantly fighting these fires on the borders.”
“The critters don't have passports,” he said, “and they don't pay attention to park boundaries.”
Inside Glacier Park, “the whitebark pine is essentially gone as a food source for grizzly bears,” said carnivore ecologist John Waller. “The salmon is essentially gone. Today, the berries drive the bears.”
Huckleberries. Serviceberries. Buffaloberries.
“If something happens to those berries,” Waller said, “I'm not sure what the bears have left to fall back on.”
But why would anything happen to those berries?
“Have you ever heard of sudden oak death?”
Not long ago, down in California, a new pathogen popped up and wiped out the scrub oaks. These aren't the big oak trees of the East. These are bushy plants, not far removed from the Vaccinium genus, which includes none other than the Montana huckleberry.
So what, exactly, enabled the pathogen responsible for sudden oak death? No one's sure, but a changing climate is on the short list of suspects.
“The interaction between climate and pathogens is sort of a crapshoot,” Waller said. “They interact in ways that are hard to predict.”
And grizzlies, already robbed of so many key food sources, can't afford a crapshoot.
So everyone, it seems, is talking about wildlife corridors, paths from here to there, links that ensure genetic variation and, perhaps, an escape from the heat.
Park scientists are talking corridors. So are community leaders. So are the governors of several Western states.
“That's because we still have the potential to preserve some of these linkages,” said Leigh Welling. “Connectivity is absolutely critical, and we have this natural north-south pathway called the Rocky Mountains.”
Welling used to be head of the science and education center in Glacier Park. Now, she heads the climate program for the National Park Service.
Both plants and animals, she said, are being pushed by the changing climate. Glacier's lucky, though. Critters here can move up as well as out.
Still, their historic ranges are shrinking, and when they try to move “they hit all these disruptions on the landscape.”
Those are the roads and mines and rails and subdivisions Hammerquist mapped, the moat around Gniadek's protected island.
“What we're going to need in the future,” Welling predicted, “is unprecedented levels of cooperation between jurisdictions.”
Between Canada and the United States and the provinces and the states and the first nations and the land management agencies and the local governments and the folk who just happen to live here.
“We'll need to work together and coordinate like never before,” Welling said.
Waller isn't really all that worried about his grizzlies, sudden oak death or not.
The bears, he said, are generalists, and likely will adapt and travel huge distances if that's where the food is.
“The real concern,” he said, “are the species that live in narrow niches.”
Canadian lynx. Wolverine. Animals that like persistent snow cover.
“If that snow disappears inside the park,” Waller said, “those species may not exist here anymore.”
In the past century, Glacier Park's year-round snow and ice coverage has shrunk by an estimated 90 percent. Recently, the meltdown has accelerated; by 1998, Jackson Glacier already had receded to a size not expected until 2010.
“You start melting those places away and you can see how wolverine range contracts,” Waller said. “They could be gone in just a few years once the snow goes.”
Scientists, he said, tend to be a conservative lot, constantly challenging one another's positions and demanding better evidence.
“So when the scientific consensus is one of alarm, that should tell you something,” Waller said.
One thing it might tell us is the need for connections.
If Gniadek thinks of Glacier as an island, Hammerquist thinks of it as a hub. It's the center of a vast mountain ecosystem, with spokes leading out into nearby wildlands. The Canadian Rockies, for instance, or the Whitefish Divide, or the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex.
But he, like Gniadek, sees the moat growing and the outside pressures squeezing in.
He cites some successes. In 30 years of trying, he said, Canadian mining companies have not been able to develop lands adjacent to the park. Talk of power lines and hydroelectric dams in the park has ceased.
West-side neighbors have resisted the push to pave, and have zoned their rustic neighborhood for 20-acre minimum lot sizes.
Park brass recently ruled that railroaders could not bomb the backcountry, and east-side oil and gas development has been on hold for more than two decades now.
In Canada, the country's largest-ever conservation deal has protected ranchland habitat along the mountain front, and politicians south of the border just signed the largest conservation package here, too, setting aside some 300,000 acres of timberland habitat.
“We all love seeing these critters,” Hammerquist said. “That's one reason we go to parks. I think allowing the wildlife room to roam is a goal that every Montanan and every Glacier Park visitor shares - we all want our children and grandchildren to enjoy the wildlife that we enjoy.”
The way Waller sees it, future wildlife watching requires that today's land stewards do one of two things: either cool the climate, or protect the corridors that bridge the development moat.
“And I don't think it's likely we can make it colder any time soon,” he said.
What are the chances, he wonders, of a river otter successfully crossing the Flathead Valley, what with all the cars and dogs and subdivisions? Already, genetic clumps are emerging, separated by highways and other development.
“Every little area of connectivity is becoming more and more important all the time,” he said. Like that strip north of Whitefish, which connects the park with wildlands near Eureka; or the north shore of Flathead Lake, which links the Jewel Basin with Blacktail Mountain.
“These outside pressures absolutely affect what the park will look like in 100 years,” Waller predicted. “We're chipping away at the available habitat. For now, Glacier is big enough that species are persisting, but climate change is making it smaller.”
Gniadek agrees.
“We should always be thinking about outside threats to the park,” he said. “But in a time of abrupt climate change, we should also be having a very serious conversation about how those threats might interact with other stressors to change Glacier Park forever.”
Reach reporter Michael Jamison at 1-800-366-7186 or by e-mail at mjamison@missoulian.com.
|
 |
 |
Add your comment now! Write your comment in the form below.
(Email address is for verification only. If you'd like to email a story, look for the link above)