A trail back in time

A walk up the M trail on a cloudy winter day in Missoula is more than a quick hike above the clouds; it’s a glimpse far back in time.

The same inversion that sometimes makes Missoula inhospitable for weeks at a time offers people above the clouds a chance to envision what the valley looked like at a much less hospitable time: the last ice age, when Glacial Lake Missoula lapped at the sides of Mount Sentinel just above the M, forming an ancient shoreline still visible today.

The tale of the ancient shorelines, along with that of the other incredible signs of the lake and its repeated floods, may soon be told to a much wider audience.

The story of the path of the great ice age floods, and the enormous area covered by the glacial lake that caused them, took a stride toward being told to the world on Nov. 16, 2005 when the U.S. Senate unanimously passed a bill to create a National Geologic Trail.

The bill, which must still pass in the House of Representatives, is the latest step in a process that began more than 13,000 years ago.

The trail, which would be managed within the National Parks System, would be an auto route from Garrison, 60 miles east of Missoula, through Idaho, Washington and Oregon to the Pacific Ocean.

Larry Lambert, vice president of the Ice Age Floods Institute and president of the Glacial Lake Missoula chapter of that organization, said that the trail would actually go some 70 or 100 miles out to sea, where the ancient mouth of the Columbia was located and where the majority of sediment from the floods was deposited.

Lambert said the NPS would be responsible for “telling the story” of the floods along the trail, and compared the trail to the Lewis and Clark Trail that loosely follows the explorers’ path across the country with interpretive centers along the way.

The first, and perhaps largest, center would be in Missoula, Lambert said.

The centers would be “funneling places,” he said, allowing travelers to get information and then go out and travel a portion of the trail.

Missoula is a logical location for the first major interpretive center because it sits in the middle of Glacial Lake Missoula and in the shadow of ancient shorelines on the hills above town.

Between 13,000 and 18,000 years ago, the Cordilleran Ice Sheet advanced down from Canada to block the Clark Fork River near today’s Lake Pend d’Oreille. The resulting lake held 500 cubic miles of water and had a depth of 2,000 feet. The lake filled the Clark Fork, Missoula, Bitterroot and Flathead valleys with the backed-up waters of the Clark Fork River.

Periodically during this ice age, the ice dam would fail and the ensuing flood would roar across eastern Washington and through the Columbia valley, shearing mountainsides and scouring the earth, carrying huge boulders and nutrient-rich topsoil hundreds of miles.

Floodwaters are thought to have raced to the ocean at up to 60 mph, emptying Glacial Lake Missoula in as little as 48 hours.

As the ice sheet continued its advance, this cycle occurred multiple times, each flood contributing to the area’s unique landscape of 400-foot gravel bars, giant dry waterfalls and the Columbia Gorge.

The floods were only discovered, however, when geologist J. Harlen Bretz published a paper in 1923 arguing that a catastrophic event was responsible for the unique features. His theories were widely regarded as ridiculous until the 1970s when new research in hydrology vindicated his theory. In 1979 he received the Penrose Medal, the highest award of the American Geological Society, for his work.

Dave Alt, a professor emeritus of geology at the University of Montana, said the signs of the floods and Glacial Lake Missoula are all around. These include the old shorelines crossing Mount Sentinel above UM, boulders strewn over the east side of Missoula from when the lake drained, the ragged south wall of Hellgate Canyon and, perhaps most hidden, the aquifer from which Missoula draws its water supply.

“It was the terrific currents out of Hellgate Canyon that deposited the Missoula aquifer,” Alt said.

The first time Glacial Lake Missoula filled, its shore reached an elevation of 4,250 feet, just above the M on Mount Sentinel. With each subsequent filling, the shoreline was lower. Alt said the Missoula valley filled with water 36 times during the last ice age.

Alt said he thinks the trail, and more specifically, an interpretive center in Missoula, is a good idea because “a lot of people seem to be interested, and interpretive center would be a focal point.”

For Alt, the interest in Glacial Lake Missoula started in 1965.

“I got interested the first week I got here,” he said. “If you walk onto campus and you see those shorelines on Mount Sentinel, holy cow!”

Lambert said he believes an interpretive center would act not only as a destination tourism draw, with people coming to Montana just for the trail, but would also lure travelers to stay an extra day in Missoula instead of taking a trip to Bozeman or Great Falls.

He also said he believes it would push travelers through places like Sanders County on Highway 200 instead of traveling primarily the I-90 corridor.

Lambert said the bill that was passed by the Senate was not the first attempt to establish a trail. The first such bill was on the desk at a Senate subcommittee in 2001, only to be turned down later that year.

This year the bill was initially turned down by a Senate subcommittee, then accepted after revisions and brought before the whole Senate, where it passed unanimously.

“Everything is going as expected,” Lambert said, acknowledging that the government process was never anticipated to be speedy.

The trail received unanimous support from the Senate, but it did meet resistance from the group that would be charged with administering the trail.

Donald W. Murphy, the deputy director of the National Parks Service, testified before a Senate committee in June saying that the establishment of the trail would divert resources away from the maintenance backlog at existing parks system sites.

Murphy testified that even though the NPS conducted a study in 2001 in which they recommended a trail such as the one being proposed, he now suggested that the bill be amended to provide for expansion of an existing

NPS site in central Washington at the Lake Roosevelt National Recreation Area, which already interprets the flood in smaller degrees.

Grand Coulee Dam, which forms Lake Roosevelt, was built on the Grand Coulee, a feature created by the floods.

The site already has a visitors’ center, which could be expanded to interpret the floods without having to create a new entity inside the NPS, said Holly Bundock, an information officer at the NPS Pacific West regional office.

Bundock said the maintenance backlog that the NPS is prioritizing includes improving facilities, roads, trails and visitors services at many of the 338 NPS installations nationwide.

Murphy suggested that Montana, Idaho, Washington and Oregon could work together on the state level or through tourism bureaus in each state to establish a cohesive interpretation, and specifically mentioned the Ice Age

Floods Institute as a major player in that development.

“It’s kind of disheartening in a way,” said Norm Smyers, a retired geologist with the Lolo and Custer National Forests and a founding member of the Ice Age Floods Institute.

Smyers said he understood the Parks Service’s stance because of budget issues.

“I think they did what they think they have to do,” he said.

The institute will also function as a communicator once a trail is established, he said.

The whole idea of the geologic trail has always been a four-state thing, Smyers said, and once the trail begins to take shape, the institute will help all four states communicate so things run smoothly.

While an interpretive center in Missoula is still in the concept phase, a location has pretty well been settled, he said.

Smyers envisions a visitors’ center in the McCormick Park area near the Montana Natural History Center and the Ice Age Floods Institute headquarters.

One of the key things Smyers said the group liked about the area was the large parking lot next to the baseball fields that is mostly empty during the day and close to downtown.

“People come to Missoula and there’s no place to park, especially with RVs,” he said. “Once you’ve parked, you go downtown and spend money. It’s an economic stimulus.”

Smyers said there was plenty of support for the visitors’ center, and the trail in general. One of the biggest supporters has been Sen. Conrad Burns, R-Mont., he said.

The bill that is waiting to pass in the House has no money attached to it, Smyers said, and the reason for that is so it will pass more easily.

Furthermore, according to Smyers, “Senator Burns is one of the best pork renders there is.”

He said he thinks, once approved, that “2 or 3 million” could be appropriated for Missoula to develop a center, along with cooperation from other agencies like the Highway Department and Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks.

Smyers said there are plenty of other visitors’ centers along the trail that already exist at places across Washington and at The Dalles, Ore., and would only need to be updated to more fully interpret the flood.

“But Missoula has nothing at this point in time,” he said.

Smyers said that nothing now doesn’t mean nothing in the future. He believes the story is one that needs to be told, and one that is already known in these parts.

“The local community is very committed,” Smyers said. “I have never met a fourth-grader on up who doesn’t know this story.”