Glacier National Park is ripe with wilderness, and we’re catching it just at the end of the season when the roads are empty but the sun still shines bright and warm. This rugged landscape immediately stole a little piece of my heart and I was giddy like a kid in a candy shop, trying to take photos from the car as we bounced down a bumpy unpaved road for almost thirty miles to get to our remote campground for the first night of our visit.
The National Park System has made an impressive effort to give Glacier’s rich cultural heritage a leg to stand on as the jagged mountains and crystal clear, deep blue glacial rivers and lakes battle in a competition for your attention. Luckily, the story of this World Heritage Site is as enthralling as its skyline, and that’s what I’d like to share with you.
Historically, Glacier’s passes and trails were well known routes to Native Americans, who used to traverse what they called, “The Backbone of the World” to get from one hunting ground to another. The Natives, among them Blackfeet, Kalispell, Crow, Sioux and Assiniboine people, believed that spiritual beings and values exist in every element of the land. Their stories are rich with animals, anthropomorphized with human characteristics like a chatty raven or a wise Grizzly bear that are embodiments of spirits who can teach important life lessons to humans. One Blackfoot elder has said that, “Everything under the sky has a voice to speak with and knowledge to tell.”
According to many regional tribes’ philosophies, humans are but a single instrument in an ongoing orchestra of life and are themselves responsible for keeping in tune and playing correctly in time with the magical production that is life on earth.
I was really moved by this fundamental aspect of Native philosophy and the harmonic picture it paints of days of yore when humans thrived alongside nature. Setting off on this journey around the country, I wanted to visit as many national parks as possible in an attempt to regain a certain level of appreciation for the earth that in daily life is too often paved over and landscaped between city blocks. I got the feeling sometimes working a nine to five that I’m walking on a concrete shell instead of the earth itself and it left me hankering for something else, something wilder, maybe something more human than what civilization has built.
Spending so much time immersed in natural landscape makes me think that somewhere down the line, humans as a species had broken off and started our own band and that our beat no longer matches that of the greater orchestra, that we can’t even hear it anymore over the din of our city streets and factory pumps. Today’s society doesn’t offer its young the opportunity to venture off into the wilderness like Glacier’s Chief Mountain for a rite of passage or a vision quest, our life trajectories have become disentangled from the rest of the wild and we’ve lost touch with our place in the natural world.
Maybe what this movement for sustainability needs is a sibling uprising, a call to return back to nature and to rediscover our roots. The media plays a big part in driving the movement with fear, of rising seas, record temperatures and the threat of global epidemics. But, maybe what we need is not another reason to be afraid, but instead to simply fall back in love with our habitat and to come to want to live benignly out of kindness and respect for our land and our peers in the animal kingdom.
Last year, I traveled all the way to Patagonia to experience a wilderness that exists quite comparably in my very backyard. Every day that I travel on this journey and simply sit in beautiful little nooks and crannies of this country, I’m stunned to silence by the extraordinary splendor of our home, and the need to make conscious, responsible daily choices is internalized more and more. So, although the season is almost over, I urge you to go outside and get even one more taste of the warm summer sun on a tall mountaintop. Soak it up! Fall in love again.
I don’t think anything can move people to do such incredible things and complete seemingly insurmountable tasks as love, and maybe that’s what each of us needs to help us get back to our roots, to pick up our instruments and play again, in tune with the orchestra of life.
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