Opinion: Oh, Crickets!

So we were hiking down the trail in Glacier the other day and we came upon some coyote poop and there were these crickets eating it. Glacier is home to big green crickets and when I say big, I mean big, like the size of your pinky big, which I know is small in the greater scheme of things, but pretty big, you know, for a bug.

The coyote poop wasn’t being eaten by just green crickets, however, it was also being munched on by big brown crickets. They were together, munching away.

Based on size and shape, I surmised that the brown ones might be the same species as the green ones, perhaps just a difference in sex. But I could also be completely wrong.

I tried to do some research on them, but came to a dead end rather quickly. I could find no easy references online, but I did find that there’s a field guide to crickets and grasshoppers, which I could own for the low, low, price of $48.

Glacier has a nice library that’s open o the public and full of history and writings and research, perhaps somewhere in the depths someone has written a little paper on the crickets of Glacier National Park.

I know a fella a few years back that did a paper on the mosquitoes of Glacier, and he found that there’s something on the order of 31 different species of mosquitoes in the park.

If I find anything, I’ll let you know.

In the meantime, I think I’ll hold off on eating crickets for supper, which some have suggested are good for you. I’m not so sure that’s the case anymore, now that I’ve seen them with my own two eyes eating something more than just grass.

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Got a call from an alert reader who said the Glacier is considering opening the Inside North Fork Road from Camas Creek to Logging Creek. The road has been closed to vehicles for years due to washouts. I think it should stay that way for a lot of reasons, namely to give North Fork wildlife a break.

Look at the numbers. The North Fork is seeing visitation already that it can’t really handle and that is bad for the overall landscape. Opening a road isn’t going to make it any better.

Glacier has a history of closing roads. There used to be roads to the Belly River, Howe Lake, The Flathead Ranger Station and well up the Red Eagle Lake drainage.

They’ve all been closed over the years.

Let’s keep the Inside Road from Logging to Camas open for hikers and bikers and administrative and emergency use. But opening it to vehicles is just going to make crowding in the North Fork worse, not better.