Glacier National Park Bingo

Scan the green avalanche chutes from a pullout. Humped shoulders, dished face. Stay 100 yards back, which is a football field.

You can tell a grizzly from a black bear by the hump of muscle over its shoulders and its long, straight claws, up to about 4 inches, built for digging, not climbing.

Find a white shape on a cliff at Logan Pass that should be too steep to stand on. Stay 75 feet back.

It is one of the best climbers on Earth. Each hoof has a hard rim around a soft, rubbery pad that grips rock like a climbing shoe, and the two toes can spread apart, so a mountain goat can stand on a ledge no wider than its foot and climb slopes far too steep for a person.

Ride the whole 50 miles across the Continental Divide. Count the waterfalls that land on the road.

The 50-mile road across the park, completed in 1932 and a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark since 1985.

It stands up outside its hole and squeaks at you. Chirp back and watch the whole meadow drop underground.

NPS puts it plainly: in the summer, most people find it difficult to visit Glacier and not see one of these rodents. Expect them in any open area, standing guard outside their dens, and squeaking at you loudly.

Call out loud before every blind corner and every noisy creek crossing. Surprised bears are the dangerous ones.

Stop when you hear a whistle, then find the fat gray animal on a rock. Early settlers called them whistle pigs.

It is nicknamed 'the whistler.' When a hoary marmot spots an eagle, coyote, or hiker, it gives a loud, sharp whistle that carries across the meadow to warn the other marmots, who dash for their burrows. A whole Canadian mountain, Whistler, is named for the sound.

Walk the boardwalk up from Logan Pass. Snow can still be lying across it in July.

A 2.7-mile round-trip from the Logan Pass Visitor Center at 6,646 feet, boardwalk for the first section then natural tread, with about 460 feet of gain.

Find the low bush with small purple berries. Half the bears in the park are eating these right now.

The Blackfeet name for huckleberry is Aapaawapsspi. NPS records that the berries were used widely by the Blackfeet and other tribes, dried by the fire and kept like raisins for winter.

Get up early enough for still water, then photograph a whole peak upside down in it.

Check the edges of the Logan Pass parking lot. Sheep come down to lick salt off the pavement.

A ram's two curled horns can weigh up to 30 pounds together, about as much as a big bag of dog food, and he carries them on his head his whole life.

A flat boardwalk loop under cedars over 500 years old. Put a hand on the stringy spiral bark.

Trail of the Cedars is a 0.9-mile boardwalk loop, fully accessible, running through old-growth western red cedar and black cottonwood at the easternmost edge of…

At Logan Pass, put one foot on each side. Rain landing here splits between two different oceans.

Sit still on a rock slope and listen for a squeak like a dog toy. Look for round ears and no tail.

A pika does not hibernate. Instead it spends all summer clipping plants and piling them under rocks to dry into haypiles, then eats from those piles all winter under the snow.

See the ice, and the new lake sitting where the ice used to be. Scientists rephotograph this spot every year.

One of the park's most-measured glaciers, above the Many Glacier valley in Amskapi Pikuni country.

Go to an evening program and hear Blackfeet, Salish, Pend d'Oreille, or Kootenai presenters tell their own history.

Walk out to Fishercap Lake in Many Glacier at breakfast time. Look for a dark shape with its head underwater.

The moose is the biggest deer on Earth. On Isle Royale a grown moose stands over six feet tall at the shoulder and weighs close to 1,000 pounds, the largest animal on the island.

Wade the shallow end of Lake McDonald and find red and green stones under the water.

A swim beach and shallow shoreline at the foot of the largest lake in the park, west side near the West Glacier entrance.

Photograph the red and green stones on the Lake McDonald shore. The color is minerals in the rock, not algae.

A straighter nose and no shoulder hump. Watch the forest edges and berry patches before the sun is fully up.

Great Smoky Mountains National Park has about two black bears per square mile, roughly 1,900 bears, one of the thickest black-bear populations anywhere.

Find the one small island in St. Mary Lake from the roadside pullout. Best light is early.

The second-largest lake in the park, on the east side at the Blackfeet (Amskapi Pikuni) border.

Score this one when you hear an animal before you see it: a marmot whistle, a squirrel chirp, a raven croak.

A tall stalk with a fat cream-white flower club on top. It is not a grass and bears mostly ignore it.

Despite the name it is not a grass at all. It is a member of the lily family, with a tall stalk of hundreds of tiny creamy flowers.

Photograph a glacier, then find the old USGS photo of the same spot and see how far the ice moved.

Pick up the booklet at a visitor center, finish the pages, and get sworn in by a ranger.