Glacier Institute steps in to offer snowshoe tours; moonlight tour coming up
Glacier Institute guide Emmy Sauer talks about the life cycle of the lodgepole pine during a snowshoe tour last week.
y CHRIS PETERSON
Hungry Horse News
Emmy Sauer stops along McDonald Creek and gives a quick lesson on the lodgepole pine tree in front of her.
The pine is built like a matchstick, skinny at the bottom with a thin bark and tight knit at the top, like a match head.
Adapted to wildfire, the trees in Glacier National Park largely have serotinous cones, meaning they’re sealed with resin that melts during a wildfire, which spreads the seeds and regenerates a woods quickly after a burn.
Sauer is a Glacier Institute guide. She makes numerous stops along the trail to talk about trees and wildlife, snowshoes clacking way, with about a half-dozen people behind her.
This winter the Institute, headquartered in Columbia Falls, has been heading up the snowshoe tours in the park, as the Park Service is short staffed due to coronavirus concerns.
“(The Park Service) asked us to help out,” Institute Director Anthony Nelson said last week. The non-profit has been leading classes in and around Glacier Park for decades now.
It was happy to help out the Park Service, Nelson noted.
“It’s exactly what our role is,” Nelson said.
The Institute has been guiding the popular tours several times a week — twice a day on weekend days and on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Discover Kalispell helped support the program with a $4,000 grant.
The tours in the park are easy walks, suitable for children who can snowshoe the 1.3 flat miles from Apgar Village to the Oxbow of lower McDonald Creek.
Adults are just $15, with an additional $5 to rent snowshoes.
Kids are free, Nelson noted.
The tours began in January and will run through the end of the month. Each tour takes about two hours, with plenty of stops along the way. On this tour, folks heard and saw a host of wintertime birds in the park. Lucky folks even spot beavers and sometimes river otters.
The Institute is also running cross country ski tours out of Essex. Those are a bit longer and are on Flathead National Forest land near the town.
Those guided tours are a bit longer at 2 to 4 miles.
For folks who like to snowshoe among the stars, a moonlight tour is planned for Feb. 15. Even on cloudy nights, there’s typically enough light to see by. But with any luck, the skies will be clear and folks will be able to go by moon or starlight (though headlamps will be available as well), Nelson noted.
With Glacier’s renowned night skies, it only takes a bit of starlight to hike with all the snow in the park.
To sign up for tour or to get more information, visit the Institute’s website at: https://glacierinstitute.org