Glacier National Park is one of the chief natural landscapes in all of America. Located on the Canadian border in Montana, it is widely known for its pristine setting. The park as a whole stretches over 1 million acres of land, as is typically referred to as the ‘Crown of the Continent’.

There is such a large range of beautiful features about this national park, including mountains, lakes, and forests. It is appropriately named as the mountain formations were carved from glaciers over 20,000 years ago, although they can be dated back around 170 million years. This makes it a fantastic place for scientists to do research and people to learn about geology! There are two mountain ranges here, Lewis and Livingston. There are also more than 760 vividly colored lakes, the biggest being Lake McDonald, and a large encompassing forest area.

There’s also a wide variety of rare animals that makes it a focal point for scientific analysis. The wildlife here remains pretty much untouched, a unique characteristic for a natural feature such as this one. Almost every single animal that inhabited this national park when it was first discovered is still present today, including wolverines, grizzly bears, mountain goats, moose, elk, coyotes, over 260 species of birds, and 23 species of fish.

Now for fun facts. The first fun fact is that there can actually be some pretty extreme weather in the park due to a clash in Pacific and Arctic airs. This makes it so that the temperature can very suddenly and drastically drop or rise. Secondly, not all the glaciers are gone away, and there are 26 remaining. However, the effects of global warming are causing them to shrink. And lastly, there are 700 miles of hiking trails, so there’s much that can be explored for adventurers out there.

Evidence of humans in Glacier National Park goes back over 10,000 years, where it was inhabited by three different Indigenous tribes: the Blackfeet, Pend d'Oreille, Salish, and Kootenai peoples. Europeans then came in, first searching for beavers, next trying to mine, and third trying to settle. Resources were depleted and the tribes became essentially forced to sign treaties that confined them to reservations and made them dependent on the United States government. The Blackfeet Indian Reservation and Flathead Indian Reservation (consisting of the Salish and Kootenai tribes) are still present today.

Glacier National Park is truly a wonderful place with so much fascinating history and science to be learned about.

Sources: National Park Service, USGS, U.S. Department of the Interior