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Exploring Glacier National Park's Jagged Peaks, Mountain Lakes, And Wild Goats Via The Gunsight Pass Trail

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Editor’s note: Michael Lanza, the Northwest editor for Backpacker Magazine, is one of the finer outdoor writers in the field these days. This story and accompanying photos are a guest post from his blog, The Big Outside. He writes more about this trip and Glacier National Park’s climate story in his book, Before They’re Gone: A Family’s Year-Long Quest to Explore America’s Most Endangered National Parks, from Beacon Press.

We’re just seconds beyond the sign at the start of the Gunsight Pass Trail that reads “Entering Grizzly Country” when Nate, who’s a month shy of his tenth birthday, begins aggressively making the case for why he should be armed.

“Why can’t I carry a pepper spray?” he asks me—again and again.

It’s an idyllic, late-summer afternoon in the Northern Rockies—the sun shining warmly, a gently cooling breeze rippling the air, not a white speck of moisture in the sky. We are heading out on a three-day family backpacking trip to Gunsight Pass in Montana’s Glacier National Park.

One of the logistically easiest and shortest multi-day hikes in the park, the 20-mile traverse from Gunsight Pass Trailhead to Lake McDonald Lodge—both of which are on the Going-to-the-Sun Road and served by the park’s free shuttle bus—takes in some of Glacier’s most spectacular scenery, including views of one of its largest rivers of ice (all of which are steadily shrinking), scores of waterfalls, and a backcountry campsite at Lake Ellen Wilson that is one of the prettiest in the park.

Unfortunately, I was not able to get a permit for the full traverse; it’s popular and backpacker numbers are restricted to avoid overuse and preserve a sense of solitude. So instead, we’ll spend two nights at Gunsight Lake, dayhike to Gunsight Pass, and then backtrack to the Gunsight Pass Trailhead on our last day.

Having hiked the traverse before, I knew Nate and our 7-year-old daughter, Alex, easily have the stamina for the three six-mile days we’ll do. The much bigger concern for my wife, Penny, and me was the preoccupying idea of backpacking in grizzly-bear country with our young kids. In fact, a year ago, I had a close encounter with a sow griz and her two cubs on the Gunsight Pass Trail.

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Michael Lanza took his kids, Alex and Nate, into the backcountry of Glacier National Park to experience the landscape before the park's glaciers are gone. Photo by Michael Lanza.

Although we know that such encounters are rare, we’ll have to be diligent about making sure the kids don’t inadvertently bring a pocketful of Jolly Ranchers into the tent for the night.

Thinking along similar lines, my hyper-focused son is consumed by the conviction that he should be armed with one of the pepper-spray canisters holstered to the hipbelts of Penny’s and my backpacks. When not distracted by throwing sticks into the raging creek at Deadwood Falls, or watching for moose in the boggy, partly forested flats of the St. Mary River, he persistently returns to his argument that he is just as capable as his mother or me of calmly deploying pepper spray at a charging grizzly.

I try, in vain, to convince him that an adult is better able to react to that inconceivably frightful circumstance—although I’m not really sure I believe that.

A Riveting And Wild Landscape

Glacier National Park covers a million acres straddling the Continental Divide hard against the Canadian border. More than a hundred peaks here in the northernmost U.S. Rockies rise above 8,000 feet, the highest over 10,000 feet. Meat-cleaver wedges of billion-year-old rock line up in rows stretching to far horizons, blades pointed upward.

The Blackfeet Indians called these mountains “the backbone of the world.” The description fits a place where the land vaults up so dramatically from the very edge of the Plains—and where Triple Divide Peak is one of only two North American mountains that funnel waters to three oceans: the Atlantic, Pacific, and Arctic.

George Bird Grinnell, a writer who began lobbying to create a national park here in the 1880s, called these mountains “the Crown of the Continent.” The Great Northern Railway, hoping to bring paying tourists in, dubbed the area “Little Switzerland.”

With just one road crossing the park—the Going-to-the-Sun Road, a 50-mile-long ribbon of pavement clinging to avalanche-prone mountainsides—Glacier is more than anything a backpacker’s park. More than 700 miles of trails crisscross it. While you can see quite a lot of world-class scenery on dayhikes, most of this vast, wild area is accessible only to people willing to carry on their backs everything they need to survive for days in the wilderness.

The Gunsight Pass Trail is a great choice for first-time Glacier backpackers and anyone who wants a short backcountry trip with easy transportation logistics. It’s also not crowded with dayhikers like trails around Many Glacier and Logan Pass—all good reasons for making it my kids’ first multi-day hike in Glacier.

Best of all, though, the views really are among the finest in the park. On our first afternoon, we walk past an overlook of the Blackfoot Glacier, one of the park’s largest, which sprawls across the cirque at the head of the St. Mary River. A little while later, we stroll into camp at Gunsight Lake, a long, blue-green gem embraced by an arc of rugged mountains, including Mt. Jackson, one of just a half-dozen in the park that rise above 10,000 feet.

Driftwood Boats And Bear Spray

After Nate and Alex play by the lakeshore for a while, launching driftwood boats and bombing them with rocks, I accede to giving them a lesson in using the pepper spray—and letting Nate carry one canister, but only in camp, where there are at least 15 other backpackers spread among several sites under the pines, a substantial human presence to deter ursine visits.

For the remainder of our time in this camp, tonight, tomorrow, and on our last morning, Nate will assume the role of the world’s smallest bodyguard, escorting Penny, Alex, and me around the campground with the canister hanging from a belt loop on his shorts, looking like a mortar shell against his skinny thigh.

Alex glances over her shoulder at me with a look that says, “Soooo, what now?” On our second morning, the four of us have stopped high up the Gunsight Pass Trail. Cliffs rise steeply up to a small glacier on our left, and drop off precipitously on our right a thousand feet down to the clear, emerald waters of Gunsight Lake. We’re dayhiking from our campsite on the lake to Gunsight Pass. And the critter obstructing us brings authenticity to the phrase “goat path.”

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Mountain goats are common along Gunsight Pass. Photo by Michael Lanza.

A young mountain goat, as white as fresh snow, with sharp, straight horns and coal-black eyes, stands in the trail, occasionally lifting its head from nibbling on plants to return Alex’s quizzical glance.

I meet Alex’s look, smile, and shrug. We wait. When the goat finally relinquishes the trail to us, scrambling nimbly down the cliff below us, we peer over the brink to see where it went.

Alex mutters in awe, “I can’t believe it went down there.”

Continuing upward, we look out over a deep cirque carved out by ancient ice that has mostly disappeared. Waterfalls too numerous to count pour hundreds of feet down cliffs. Snowfields and a lobe of the Harrison Glacier dapple the mountainsides above us.

Some three hours after leaving our campsite, we reach wind-hammered Gunsight Pass, 6,900 feet above sea level and three miles and 2,000 feet above Gunsight Lake. We sit and eat lunch on big, flat-topped rocks, perched on the rim of a vast stone bathtub—the high basin embracing Lake Ellen Wilson, where more waterfalls plunge over cliffs and their streams pour into the emerald lake.

It was just a couple of miles beyond this lake, at Lincoln Pass, where a friend and I ran into a grizzly sow and her cubs almost a year ago. We won’t walk that far today, but those bears and others are wandering around out there somewhere, perhaps even within the considerable expanse of sub-alpine meadows, boulder fields, and scattered copses of conifer trees that we can see from here.

After our lunch break, we turn around to retrace the trail back to our camp on Gunsight Lake. Once there, the kids play more at the edge of the lake, Penny holes up in the tent with her book, and I lay on the sun-warmed stones of the beach.

I wanted to bring Nate and Alex to this iconic park in part to see its glaciers before they all melt away completely, a fate that U.S. Geological Survey researchers here predict may occur by 2020—when my kids are barely young adults.

The Changing Climate

It seems incomprehensible that climate change could so rapidly remove ice that has inhabited this landscape for at least 7,000 years. But with average temperatures climbing steadily higher, and the health of glacial ice so inextricably tied to temperature, there is no disagreement among scientists that this park will lose the very natural feature for which it was named.

The far-reaching impacts of this transformation on streams, vegetation, and wildlife remain largely unpredictable. Of course, for our kids, other things will leave a more lasting impression than melting glaciers: playing on the shore of Gunsight Lake, seeing a mountain goat up close—and for Nate, feeling the cold power of a canister of Counter Assault pepper spray in his hands.

But I think they will also take away some subtle but ultimately more valuable gifts from Glacier National Park.

On our last morning, we pack up camp beneath battleship-gray skies. Just as we hit the trail to hike back to our car, the first raindrops start falling. We plod through four hours of steady rain that slowly soaks our boots and pants, giving my kids a valuable lesson in hardship that they endure with patience beyond their years. They even surprise me with how positive and unruffled they remain throughout our long, wet, raw walk—affirming my belief that, even at their age, they draw knowledge and self-confidence from our wilderness adventures that they will carry with them always.

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Comments

Michael, that is a GREAT story. Your kids are certainly lucky that they are not going to be among those who never have this kind of experience.

Many years ago -- early 1960's -- I had the great privilege of spending parts of two summers as one of a crew of young geology students surveying Blackfoot Glacier. When I returned to the park a couple of years ago, I was amazed and appalled to see the tiny fragment remaining of what was once a mass of ice eleven miles wide and eight miles long. It has now broken into two pathetic remnants are are not far from deteriorating from being glaciers to simply permanent snow fields.

It's really hard to understand anyone who believes the warming is all a hoax.


For perhaps another perspective on this, George Bird Grinnell "discovered" the glacier that now bears his name in 1886. On his last trip to the glacier in 1926, he noted in his diary:

"the glacier is melting very fast and the amount of water coming from it is great. All these glaciers are receding rapidly and after a time will disappear"


Lee-- can you explain to those of us not very geologically inclined the difference between a glacier and a permanent snow field?


A glacier is thick enough that its lower layers are compressed into ice under such great pressure from its own weight that it becomes plastic. Sort of like toothpaste in a tube. It then "flows" downward toward its terminus where it melts or, as in the case of a coastal glacier, calves into icebergs. The thickness required to cause movement varies depending mainly upon the slope on which it lies. Normally that thickness is at least 100 feet. A permanent snow field does not have the thickness necessary to produce movement.

Our surveys indicated that the Blackfoot Glacier was moving about two to three feet a day. There were wide differences in the amount of ablation (melting) and accretion (new ice accumulations) from year to year. At that time (1961 and '62 when I was up there) the glacier seemed to be holding steady overall. Even at that time, there was widespread belief that glaciers in the Rocky Mountains were all melting rapidly. Our work indicated that it might not have been as bad as many people feared. But at the time I was there, they study was only about five years old.

George Bird Grinnell actually visited Grinnell Glacier only one or two times. I don't believe he ever visited Blackfoot. Most of his other trips to what is now Glacier NP were to other areas of the park. When he made the trip as an elderly man in 1926, it was a year in which there was an unusually hot summer and warmer than usual previous winter. His observation then concerned the amount of water flowing into a lake and probably included water from several sources and not just the glacier. Worldwide, glaciers tend to be quite sensitive to local conditions. 1924 through 1926 were years of high ablation in most of the Rocky Mountains but were within the normal range at the time. The difference now is that most glaciers worldwide have been in a state of continual ablation for nearly thirty years. The greatest concern seems to be with the arctic ice pack, however.

This was the crevasse field midway down Blackfoot.

Looking up toward the cirque from below. The distance from the bottom of the photo to the cirque which is out of sight at the top is about four miles.

My photos above were taken from about the area of the dates printed on these two photos.


Great story and photos! Thanks for sharing with us.


The before and after photo of blackfoot and jackson glaciers are even less now than what is shown in this 2001 photo.


Great story! In 2007, my husband and brother in law hiked this same route, camping down at Lake Ellen Wilson and then rendez-vousing, with our 16 year old son and I at Sperry Chalet the next day. As I hiked down to Deadwood Falls with them (as you know it's not very far), the large leaves of plants were hanging over the trail. After taking some pictures and saying our good byes I turned around and went back up to the trailhead. The mist that we had experienced earlier had stopped so I tied my rain jacket around my waist but for whatever reason, I had forgotten to bring MY bear spray (my husband and brother in law had THEIRS) so I was paranoid as I hiked back to the trail head.

With each passing step, my ears heard this rustling sound. When I stopped, the noise stopped! My overactive imagination began replaying the scene from "Jurrasic Park"; the one where a single file formation of people are crossing a field and one by one, the Velociraptors are snatching them! I was singing and talking loudly but I continued to hear a rustling sound so I stopped. As I stopped, I felt something brush against my leg that scared the living daylights out of me and I took off running as fast as my legs would go. I hadn't gotten very far when suddenly I had clarity of thought! The noise I had been hearing was the nylon of my rain jacket and when I stopped, the sleeve had brushed against my leg. I began laughing hysterically when I realized what was going on!

My husband teases me that he can't believe I would admit to any of this! It makes for a good hiking story but it also taught me a valuable lesson to ALWAYS have my bear spray on my person. Just a few steps from the road and you truly are in the wilderness!


Connie, that is a wonderful story. But maybe hysterical laughter might make a bear reluctant to attack.

Can't you imagine the poor Ursa wondering, "If I attack that crazy person, what might she do to me?"


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