Glacier's 'sister' park in Mongolia has many similarities to Montana
A goat herder talks on his cell phone outside a ger (yurt) in Mongolia. The photo was taken by Glacier National Park liasons on a tour of the country while strengthening ties with the organization's sister, Gorkhi-Terelj National Park. (Richard Menicke/Glacier National Park Geographer)
Glacier National Park has a sister, a half world away.
Recently Richard Menicke, geographer, and Mary Riddle, Chief of Planning and Environmental Compliance at Glacier Park, visited Gorkhi-Terelj National Park in Mongolia to strengthen ties between the two organizations.
Gorkhi-Terelj National Park, known for possibly being the birth and burial place of Genghis Khan, is an area roughly half the size of Glacier near the country’s northern Russian border, and shares many similarities to the flora and fauna of Glacier. Menicke and Riddle saw familiar mountain goats, sheep, and grizzly bears, although the region uniquely boasts of the elusive snow leopard. The area exhibited similar pine and spruce species, and the region was alight with the golden needles of larch, a relative of Montana’s species. A Gorkhi-Terelj staffer even offered them huckleberry jam made from berries in the region.
The parks compared management issues they faced. Gorkhi-Terelj had several issues like illegal logging and frequent poaching that Glacier doesn’t typically face, Riddle and Menicke noted in a brown bag talk at the Montana House recently.
There were other shared similarities. While there, Menicke and Riddle witnessed a bear relocation, the only difference being instead of baiting the trap and waiting for the bear to be caught, staffers actively lassoed it and wrangled it into the cage. Similar to the visitor services in Glacier, Gorkhi-Terelj has encampments of canvas-sided gers, or yurts, to service its growing number of tourists. A prime concern of theirs is cultivating a contract system with these visitor services, learning from Glacier’s approach with its concessionaires.
In addition to showing Menicke and Riddle around Gorkhi-Terelj, the hosts gave them a tour of multiple parks around the country. They first trekked southwest to the Gobi Gurvan Saikhan National Park, a 12-hour journey through wide open, windswept country devoid of fences or power lines and dotted with herds of wild sheep, horses and camels, said Riddle. They went on to visit Bogd Khan Uul Biosphere Reserve, the oldest protected area in the world, set aside in the 1700s, and Hustai National Park, which is home to herds of the least domesticated horses on the planet.
The people they met around the country of Mongolia were happy, innovative and prideful of their heritage, said Menicke. When asked about the country’s flag, thought to exhibit a yin yang symbol, the hosts explained it is actually a fish with two eyes, ever vigilant of potential aggression, an interesting point given its status as an independent democracy geographically sandwiched between China and Russia.
The sister parks program has arisen with the realization that parks around the globe are not isolated entities. Many parks literally share the same resource — for example, in animal migrations, the health of which can have a drastic impact on both regions’ ecosystems. The relationship between Gorkhi-Terelj and Glacier is largely one of shared pride in similar stunning natural resources. It’s also one of collaboration on how to address sharing these geographically small, but precious landscapes to an ever-increasing global human population, Menicke and Riddle noted.