PFF: Glacier National Park

 Thank you to our hostess Beth at The Best Hearts are Crunchy for hosting Postcard Friendship Friday.

For the next few National Park postcards, we are going to take a tour of the American West, as if you had plenty of time, money, and a good car. Today it’s north to Glacier National Park, then looping west to Washington and California, and ending up at the Grand Canyon.

Giving credit where credit is due:
The back of this card says:"Works Progress Administration (WPA) circa 1939, Artist Unknown. Between 1935 and 1943 the WPA's Federal Art Project printed over two million posters in 35,000 different designs to stir the public's imagination for education, theater, health, safety, and travel. Due to their fragile nature only two thousand posters have survived. The National Park image shown here is also available in the original poster format from many National Park bookstores." Published by Ranger Doug Enterprises. Seattle, WA.
Glacier National Park was designated our nation's 10th national park on May 11, 1910. (It’s their centennial!)

“By the late 1800s, influential leaders like George Bird Grinnell, pushed for the creation of a national park. In 1910, after 15 years of negotiations and debates, Grinnell and others saw their efforts rewarded when President Taft signed the bill establishing Glacier as the country’s 10th national park.”

Glacier National Park is in the extreme Northwest of the state of Montana.

Waterton Lakes National Park (see map below) in Canada borders the park, preserving many square miles of pristine wilderness. You can even take a beautiful boat ride on Upper Waterton Lake and pass from one country into another (no fences!) – this area is also an International Peace Park , a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and a Biosphere Reserve. Even with all this, you can get to this park by public transportation. Amtrak trains run to East and West Glacier, and there are shuttles to locations in the park.

Below: Photo collage from the Glacier website. The photo in the lower left corner should look familiar!

The rocks here are sedimentary, made of sediments deposited in long-ago seas.

The geology, from the park's web page:

"A mountain-building episode, known as the Laramide Orogeny, affected the Rocky mountains upward from Alaska to Mexico. The force of this pressure folded and uplifted rocks, and in the case of the Lewis Overthrust, pushed a giant slab of older (precambrian) Belt series rock (50 miles by 200 miles) over much younger Cretaceous Era formations. The pressure of colliding plates raised the land to great heights, well above the glacially-carved peaks remaining in the park. Glacial scouring and erosion has diminished the size of Glacier's mountains over time. Mt. Cleveland is the park's tallest peak, listed at 10,466 feet, and more than one hundred other summits rise above 8,000 feet. . . . The shapes of Glacier's peaks were carved relatively recently. Visible to the observer today are stunning amphitheater-like cirque basins and broad U-shaped valleys, formed initially through glacial activity dating to the last ice age, and knife-edged aretes and pyramid-shaped peaks shaped by more recent erosional forces."

The glaciers of Glacier National Park are quickly melting away. Not on a geological time scale, but in our lifetimes. The following two pictures of Grinnell Glacier were taken first, in 1940:

And from the same spot in 2004:
These two photos are from this article on Live Science. It is depressing, but instructive, to click through all the photo pairs.

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PFF: Geology of Montana

Nothing too creepy from me, but see Postcard Friendship Friday for more from our hostess Marie and other people playing along. I'll skip the catacombs of Paris, thank you.

Today, the big wonderful state of Montana. Haven't been to the Big Sky country? Please go, for it's really beautiful. Yellowstone is in that inside corner. Glacier National Park is not to be missed.

The legend shows igneous rocks in red and pink. Very old rocks (over 1,000,000,000 years old) are in deep orange. Lighter orange is a formation called the Belt Supergroup. This is a very thick layer of different sedimentary rocks, some with pretty coarse (boulder-sized) stream sediments. Big mountains had been uplifted nearby and were eroding in a hurry.

The blues and greens are younger, Cretaceous or the time of the dinosaurs. There are some famous fossil localities in the general area of Great Falls.

Much later, bits and pieces of the Western USA came crashing into the North American continent. In a previous post I had described mountain building as a process similar to a carpet on a hardwood floor rumpling. Here, the push was so hard and so sustained, the rocks broke along faults and slivers were pushed up on top of other pieces. Think of how you can bend a piece of wood, but if you keep bending it, it will break. The faults are shown as thin black lines, esp. in northern Montana.

The other thing to note is the white line with hash marks along it. This is the extent of continental glaciation at the height of the last Ice Age, a pretty recent event in geologic time.

Ok, enough geology, I can see your eyes glazing over. Remember, there's a quiz next Friday! ;-)

Montana Bureau of Mines and Geology (MBMG)

USGS links for Montana

Glacier National Park

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