By Benjamin Long
Our tent shook and billowed, suffering from a tantrum of the weather as the brief, alpine autumn came crashing to a violent end against the Continental Divide. My wife and I were camped at timberline in Glacier National Park, just one more day's trek from our destination in Waterton Lakes National Park, Alberta. But as the weather soured, we wondered if we would beat the winter's first blizzard to Canada.
Backpacking that late in the season had been a gamble all along, but it had paid off in a jackpot of solitude and wildlife. With so few other hikers around, we'd thrilled to the wilderness spectacular. A southward parade of migrating golden eagles soared along the jagged spine of the Rockies. Mountain goats, dressed to survive the next Ice Age, peered over limestone cliffs. Bighorn rams posed like statues of machismo on a scree field near Granite Park. A bull moose sauntered past, his right antler shorn near the base from a seasonal battle. When a fuzzy, brown creature appeared in the trail on Swiftcurrent Mountain, we automatically thought grizzly cub! The reality was even more rare: a wolverine that glared briefly at us before bounding for the rimrock. Finally, we did see grizzlies as we cooked over our camp stove and three silvertips scrounged their own dinner from the tundra flank of Fifty Mountain.
The presence of such wildlife separates true wilderness from mere scenery, and Glacier's full theater of wildlife separates it from most national parks in the system. But the intact ecosystem of which Glacier is a part - with all of its large predatory animals - both benefits from and is challenged by the peculiar international dimension of its political geography.
Glacier National Park was founded in 1910, not long after the creation in 1895 of its northern sister, Alberta's Waterton Lakes National Park. At slightly more than one million acres, Glacier straddles both sides of the Continental Divide; Waterton, at 130,000 acres, falls on the eastern side of the divide. In the Pikuni (Blackfeet) language, this dramatic landscape where the Rockies meet the Great Plains is "Miistakis," or "The Backbone of the World." A century ago, conservationist George Bird Grinnell dubbed the region the "Crown of the Continent."
In 1932, at the lobbying of American and Canadian Rotary Clubs, the sister parks became Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park. This was the first international peace park on Earth-designed to celebrate friendship and improve cooperation between nations. The peace park is recognized globally as one of the most intact ecological areas anywhere: The United Nations ranks it as a World Heritage Site alongside the Great Barrier Reef and the Serengeti Plain.
But what seems like oceans of space to a human is cramped quarters for many animals. Glacier is 1,500 square miles, yet one local grizzly has a home range of 1,200 square miles. A moose may travel 50 miles between summer and winter range. Local wolves have roamed 300 miles in a single fit of wanderlust.
"We're learning that these animals roam the entire ecosystem," said Glacier Park biologist John Waller. "One bear may travel from one side of the ecosystem to another, from north to south and east to west. It's a function of the nature of the animal."
With the Crown of the Continent made up of two nations (the United States and Canada), two native tribal territories (the Kootenay and Pikuni), and two provinces and one state (British Columbia, Alberta, and Montana), it is managed by a hodgepodge of government agencies, corporations, and small landowners. This multifaceted ownership forces many challenging questions. Among the most vexing is this: How do we manage far-ranging creatures that disregard our borders?
Contradictions abound. A wolf in Montana is a protected endangered species. When that animal steps over the British Columbia border, it becomes a game animal, a trophy on legs during open season. Should the wolf cross the Continental Divide into Alberta, it becomes an agricultural pest, eligible to be shot anytime on private property. The Belly River wolf pack has safe haven in Waterton-Glacier, but was promptly exterminated on the prairies of Alberta. The second-leading cause of death for "endangered" wolves radio-collared in western Montana is perfectly legal bullets and traps in Canada.
Likewise, Montana's legendary Giefer grizzly was a threatened species but ended up a hunter's trophy in British Columbia. And it's not just about mammals. The splendid North Fork of the Flathead River, which forms Glacier's western border, has "wild and scenic" protection from the U.S. Congress, but in Canada the headwaters are open for development. Pollution from proposed Canadian coal mines has long frightened boaters and lakeshore homeowners downstream in Montana.
Meanwhile, misguided fisheries management in Montana's waters has damaged the cutthroat and bull trout fishing upstream in Canada's portion of the Flathead Drainage. (Exotic fish are the major threat to native life in Glacier's streams and lakes.) And forest fires that restore the ecosystem of Glacier make foresters and loggers in British Columbia worry, at the same time a fungus inadvertently imported to a British Columbia tree nursery has all but wiped out Glacier's white pine and whitebark pine trees, an important food source for grizzlies.
The natural world nearly shouts this fact: Political borders mean nothing. If we want to protect rare, wide-ranging, and persecuted species like grizzlies and wolves, the best thing we can do is protect wilderness habitat. In this case, that is particularly along the international border in the North Fork of the Flathead - an area The New York Times has called "the wildest valley in America."
John Weaver, a large mammal biologist for the Wildlife Conservation Society, has identified the North Fork of the Flathead as perhaps the most important habitat in the Rocky Mountains for rare, beautiful, and precious forest carnivores. The British Columbia Flathead includes a dozen "at risk" species identified by Canada's version of the Endangered Species List. Kenton Miller, of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, calls the British Columbia portion a "missing link in the overall integrity of this internationally designated site." (Last fall, NPCA released an assessment of Glacier and Waterton Lakes national parks that addresses some of these contradictions. Click here to read the full State of the Parks® report.)
More and more, efforts to ensure the future protection of this area have focused on the need to expand the Waterton part of the ecosystem. "It has always been obvious to anyone who has visited Waterton-Glacier that there is a missing piece," says Harvey Locke, vice president for conservation in the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Association. "Glacier includes both sides of the Continental Divide, but Waterton does not. It just doesn't make any sense. Over history, it has bothered a lot of people. There have been attempts to fix this in the 1930s and again in the 1970s, but it has never been fixed. It's high time to get it fixed."
Conservationists, business leaders, and Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien are now pushing to double the size of Waterton by lining up its western border with the western edge of Glacier National Park. Aside from doubling this wilderness area, the move would protect much of the headwaters of the North Fork of the Flathead River.
The North Fork happens to be the richest grizzly bear habitat in the entire Rockies, from Yellowstone to the Yukon. Perched precariously on the top of the food chain, big meat eaters are the first to disappear when human activities place stress on an ecosystem. Grizzlies, for example, once roamed Mount Rainier, Yosemite, Zion, and Grand Canyon national parks, among others, but those parks proved too small to support grizzly populations alone. If Waterton-Glacier's grizzlies are to remain viable in the long term, they will be most secure if the parklands remain connected to surrounding wild lands, both to the north and south. Cut off those connections, isolate the parks, and large carnivores are gradually doomed.
Though Americans tend to think of Canada as a vast reservoir of wildlife habitat, in the Crown of the Continent, that's an illusion. In the land surrounding Waterton, sprawling clearcuts dice up the western, forested side of the park. Road and gas line development along Alberta's Rocky Mountain Front give poachers easier opportunities to kill wildlife. Alberta researcher Gord Stenhouse was stunned to discover just how many bears were being gunned down near Jasper National Park, in backwoods versions of drive-by shootings. After discovering 26 bullet-ridden grizzly carcasses over four years, he told the Canadian Broadcast Service, "At this rate, the species just can't survive." Although Stenhouse's research was done north of the Crown of the Continent, there's no reason to believe much is different farther south in Alberta.
Calgary, Alberta, the largest city near Waterton-Glacier, has a population larger than all Montana's. Throughout the Crown of the Continent, people flock to enjoy this beautiful landscape, and not just as seasonal visitors. Towns like Whitefish, Montana, and Fernie, British Columbia, are growing exponentially and, too often, haphazardly.
Biologist John Waller puts it this way: "We're seeing increased habitat fragmentation due to subdivisions and just more and more people. More people mean higher mortality rates for wildlife. We're worried that we will basically fracture the spine of the Continental Divide."
Savoring the rare pleasure of our wildlife experience along the divide, my wife and I broke our frigid camp at dawn and hiked out wearing parkas, gloves, and stocking caps. Switchbacks dropped us out of the alpine and into the forests above the Waterton River where banks of clouds shrouded Mount Cleveland. Stretching out ten miles before us was Waterton Lake, which Blackfeet nicknamed "Lake Cut-in-Half" after the border was established that divides it. As we crossed the border into Canada on a shuttle boat, storms over the mountains brewed over this Land Cut-in-Half; with human wisdom, we can guarantee safe passage.
