Answer the questions. Each one tells you why. Big and Little wrote them.
Park Quiz
Question 1 of 5
Glacier National Park is named for its ice. About how many glaciers were here at the coldest point of the Little Ice Age, around 1850?
USGS counted 80 glaciers larger than about 25 acres inside the park's boundary at the Little Ice Age peak. By 2005 there were 32 that size. USGS modeling now predicts nearly all of the park's glaciers will be gone by 2100.
The Blackfeet have a name for the mountain range that runs through this park. What is it?
NPS records that the Blackfeet called the Rocky Mountains "The Backbone of the World," and that this range is the western edge of their homeland. Blackfeet, Salish, Pend d'Oreille, and Kootenai people still tell their own history here every summer through the Native America Speaks program, which has run since 1982.
Beargrass is one of the plants people come to Glacier to see. Two things about its name are wrong. Which two?
NPS puts it this way: "Ironically beargrass is not a grass and bears don't particularly like it." It grows in the subalpine meadows along Going-to-the-Sun Road, sending up a tall stalk topped with a club of small cream-colored flowers.
Whitebark pine trees near the top of the mountains cannot drop their own seeds. So who plants the next generation of trees?
Clark's nutcrackers bury whitebark pine seeds to eat later, and the seeds they never come back for grow into trees. NPS calls the bird "the main seed dispersal source" for the pine. The tree feeds the bird, the bird plants the tree, and both are in trouble at the same time.
Where is the best place in the whole park to look for a harlequin duck?
NPS says Upper McDonald Creek "just might be the best place in the world to spot a harlequin duck." It is the only North American duck built for fast-moving water, and a quarter of all the harlequin ducklings born in Montana are raised in that one drainage.