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Email: timberwolfinfonetwork@gmail.com

MT: Scientists, citizens and students discuss a changing North Fork valley

Laura Lundquist

POLEBRIDGE — Remote areas of Montana can appear timeless. But ironically, some are undergoing more change than developed areas. It’s a matter of knowing what to look for.

There’s no better place to look than Glacier National Park and the valley of the North Fork of the Flathead River. Following the western edge of the park, the North Fork valley is still wild enough to host almost all the wildlife species that dwelled in the area at the time of Lewis and Clark.

The region has the richest biodiversity of the lower 48 states, said University of Montana geography professor Rick Graetz. Graetz thinks that is partly why the North Fork Watershed Protection Act was passed about a year ago to ban future mining and drilling on more than 383,000 acres.

“The Crown of the Continent — depending on how you rank a natural system — ranks within either the top 24 intact, pristine natural systems or the top 12,” Graetz said. “For the most part, the human imprint is small.”

The human imprint includes the hardy locals who have chosen the North Fork for its beauty and rustic lifestyle, which includes living with eight predator species.

“When I first came up here to do photography, I photographed a cabin that had spikes sticking out of the door this far,” said Graetz’s wife, Suzy, holding her hands a few feet apart. “I thought, ‘Whoa. If that’s what you need to keep animals out, I don’t know if I could do that.’”

But despite its outward appearance, the region is changing rapidly because of the sometimes-clashing influences of climate change, conservation efforts and encroaching civilization. Will Hammerquist, owner of the 102-year-old Polebridge Mercantile, said his new solar panels should provide 90 percent of the store’s power. He now even sells merchandise online.

Several renowned scientists live around the area because it serves as a laboratory to observe such transformation. It’s also a prime spot for young adults to learn that few situations are as simple as a sound bite.

That’s why last week, Graetz took 18 UM seniors from diverse disciplines to Polebridge for six days of what’s called “experiential learning.” Hobnobbing with scientists, citizens and land managers, they were exposed to a wide array of North Fork issues they’d never learn in a classroom, from glaciology to living off the grid to collaborative land management.

“That’s the real world,” geography graduate student Lauren Mackey said. “You graduate college, you get a job, and chances are you aren’t going to work solely in your major. You need to be able to make connections between topics and understand how things are related to each other and why that’s important to other people in other disciplines.”

UM biologist Diane Boyd told the students she was recently startled by an unfamiliar sight while skiing in the North Fork where she’s lived off and on for 35 years.

“I saw a fox. In all the years I’ve been here, I’d never seen a fox,” Boyd said.

Foxes are returning to the area thanks to Boyd’s focus of study, the wolf.

After being eradicated in the 1930s, wolves began finding their way to northwest Montana in the late 1970s and early ’80s. Since then, they’ve driven out large numbers of coyotes, which are a competitor.

During the wolves’ absence, growing packs of coyotes had eliminated the foxes. Now, with fewer coyotes, foxes can again return because they don’t compete directly with wolves.

That’s just one of the ecological changes Boyd has noticed since the first Minnesota wolf found her way to the North Fork in 1979.

Back then, the 24-year-old Boyd knew wolves were around because she saw their tracks as she trekked along hundreds of miles of the park’s western slope. But without the modern conveniences of GPS collars, navigation aids and inexpensive two-way radios, she rarely saw her research subjects. Emerging biologists don’t know how much easier wildlife research is now, Boyd said.

From one wolf, Montana’s population has grown to more than 1,650 wolves in 282 packs, according to the 2015 Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks count. Five packs surround the North Fork Valley, and Boyd took the students into the lower meadows of Glacier National Park to find wolf tracks. But to no avail.

“The snow higher up is usually deeper in January. Deer would come here, and the wolves would follow. But there’s not enough snow,” Boyd said.

The snow is low partly because the climate is heating up.

On Jan. 20, NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced that the average global temperature for 2015 was not only the hottest on record but the temperature jump was far more than any previous increase.

Dan Fagre, climate change research coordinator for the U.S. Geological Survey, told the students things are worse in western Montana. So if they visit the park 20 years from now, it will be a different place.

“We’re on a grim trend. We’ve gone 1.8 times faster than the rest of the globe in temperature increases,” Fagre said. “But what really whacks an ecosystem is the extremes. This year, in West Glacier, we had our first 100-degree day. It hit in June, five weeks before our typical hot point of the summer.”

Alternatively, park scientists found tree-ring evidence showing the park’s annual snowfall trend has decreased over the past 50 years.

Increasing heat and decreasing snowpack have whittled the park’s 150 glaciers down to 25 and the loss is accelerating in most cases. This September, Grinnell Glacier lost 13 acres of ice in one event, Fagre said.

But rising temperatures are doing more than melting glaciers and each change affects other animals and aspects of the park.

Trees are beginning to grow above the current treeline where the conditions used to be too harsh. Eventually, as mountain passes such as Logan Pass fill with trees, mountain lions will move in and cause mountain goats to stop using the passes for migration, Fagre said.

The loss of snowpack and meltwater from glaciers is reducing streamflow and habitat for native fish such as endangered bull trout and insects such as the western glacier stonefly, which is found only in the park. It also leads to water shortages downstream.

“People had to portage rafts on the Middle Fork near West Glacier for the first time this year,” Fagre said.

One of the most dramatic symptoms of climate change is wildfire.

“There are very few firefighters who don’t agree there’s climate change,” said U.S. Forest Service fire expert Mitch Burgard, who worked for the park until 2009.

Over the past century, fires have burned much of the west side of Glacier Park, which gets more moisture and grows more trees than the east.

After a spate of fires around the 1920s including the 1910 fire, the mid-1900s experienced a relative lull when the climate was cooler and wetter. During that time, the attitude of how, where and when to fight fires changed based upon science and safety.

As climate change accelerated in the 1990s, fires became more frequent, leading to the big fire year of 2003 when wildfires burned 1 out of every 3 acres that could burn in the park, Burgard said.

Since then, wildfires have been fairly common, and they burn later into the fall. The bright side of frequent fires is that the fire danger is significantly lower than 20 years ago, Burgard said.

Burgard skied with the students to the area of the 1988 Red Bench Fire, which almost destroyed Polebridge and the North Fork Ranger Station. There, animal tracks, many belonging to snowshoe hares, led through thick stands of young trees among the charred snags of almost 30 years ago.

“I would argue that lynx are fire-dependent. When young trees fill in a burn, the hares come in and then the lynx come in. About 18 years after the Red Bench Fire, we started seeing lynx,” Burgard said.

The Red Bench also burned in 1926, showing that fire is a regular visitor.

Fire frequency underscores the fact that the area has cycled between roughly 40 years of cool, wet weather and 40 years of hot and dry, Burgard said. It should be time for a cool, wet period, but cool isn’t as cold as it used to be.

“There is no analogue to the past when we’re dealing with climate change,” Burgard said.

The students had a lot to absorb. But seeing some changes firsthand and being able to pepper scientists with questions helped much of it sink in and even changed a few opinions.

“I feel like when I come on a trip like this, it changes my whole perspective of life a little bit,” said social work major Emily Kaplan who hales from New York. “We’ve heard that the community of the North Fork comes from different backgrounds and with different political views. But everyone comes together when it comes to the preservation of the land and the ecology, which I think is beautiful. It’s rare, this type of knowledge and awareness of the importance of preservation.”

History major Meghan Erdmann said she had heard mostly negative views of wolves while working summers in Cooke City.

“I didn’t know how I felt about the reintroduction of the wolves. But after hearing (Boyd) and everything she’s done and everything she’s put into it – it really changed my mind on the whole subject,” Erdmann said.

While much of the week touched on climate change, it was nothing new to students who’ve grown up hearing about it. They face an uncertain future, but most seemed pragmatic about it.

“Things have happened, the climate’s changed. And it’s going to keep changing — I don’t think for the better — but that doesn’t mean we can’t still help the Earth or maybe reverse part of it,” said psychology major Jackson Thiebes.

This is the ninth year Graetz has offered the North Fork course, and he’s heard similar comments before, which pleases him.

“We as professors cannot take our opinion and say, ‘This is the way it is.’ We’ve got to give kids the chance to understand other sides so they can make their own decisions,” Graetz said. “When they leave here, they’ll have a good understanding about what this country is all about and who passed by before they did. Then when they drive by mountains and forests, it’s not just trees and rocks to them.”

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