My thighs burned on the Highline Trail. I climbed an 18 mile variation of this trail through Glacier National Park, taking me past the most picturesque panoramas of the Continental Divide. I had gotten up at 5 a.m. to be on the trailhead at Logan Pass by 7 a.m. Logan Pass is special because it is the one notch in the Garden Wall, a massive stone wall separating the east and west portions of the national park. At 7 a.m. the sun had barely poked over the ridge and left the trail shrouded in darkness.
No matter where one looked on this trail, you were bound to see the best that nature had to offer. I had met two grandparents who were hiking the trail and telling me about their life story. Avid hikers, even they were impressed by the views we had seen! Luckily the start of this hike was relatively flat, allowing for some amazing views of the snow capped mountains.
Below you could hear car’s whizzing by on Going-to-the-Sun road, the famous 1932 roadway that takes visitors across the many overlooks. At mile 7, there was a 2 mile roundtrip detour that climbed several hundred feet to an overlook. It was the Grinnell Glacier overlook.
Grinnell Glacier is one of the 25 remaining glaciers in the park. At the end of the Ice Age there were 150, by 1968 there were 50, and by 2030 there will be none if the current rate of global warming persists. At this current rate our children will never get to see this.
Global warming. What can we do to address the great challenge of our time? Some say electrify everything, bring renewables online, and hope everything works. Or crack the materials science key to energy storage for commercial and utility applications. Or perhaps, the hardest...change human behavior. We could stop driving cars, become vegetarian, and get rid of our air conditioning systems. But who will do so? A recent Science Magazine article talked about what we could do to reduce our carbon emissions. The picture to the right summarizes the points. It has been 10 years since Al Gore's movie An Inconvenient Truth brought this issue to the international stage and this week An Inconvenient Sequel hopes to return our attention to the topic.
I thought about this a lot on my hike past Granite Outlook to the Swiftcurrent Mountain Lookout. By simply visiting these parks... am I not contributing to the problem? Does mere existence lead to the demise of beauty? And what is beauty without existence, for isn't beauty in the eye of the beholder? A conundrum indeed. Much of this reminds me of the Story of Four. There once was a group of four called Everybody, Somebody, Anybody, and Nobody. There was an important problem that needed to be solved. Everybody was sure that Somebody would do it. Anybody could have done it, but Nobody did it. Somebody got angry because it was Everybody’s job. Everybody thought Anybody could do it. Nobody realized that it was Everybody’s job. Everybody wouldn’t do it. It ended up that Everybody blamed Somebody when Nobody did what Anybody could have done.
After my hike was over, I returned to Jackson Glacier overlook. This is the largest glacier in the entire park and in the 85 degree summer heat was probably melting just like I was. I caught one last glimpse and headed back. How do we keep the beautiful things?
