Woman recognized for wilderness mapping effort in Glacier

By CHRIS PETERSON

Hungry Horse News

Jillian McKenna has been visiting national parks since her youth. Her parents are both geologists and national parks were a top spot to visit growing up.

In adult life, McKenna followed her family’s footsteps, obtaining a degree in earth science from Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, Canada.

That eventually led to a post as a GIS intern at Yosemite National Park and she also worked as a Wilderness Ranger in Olympic National Park.

The GIS (Graphical Information System) work she did in Yosemite led to a position in Glacier National Park where she became a Scientists-in-Parks Wilderness Character Intern and later as a Wilderness contractor in Glacier National Park in 2021. She helped monitor the park’s wilderness character, led development of the park’s Wilderness Character Baseline Assessment and produced a wilderness character map.

The effort was supported by funding from the Glacier National Park Conservancy.

The map, available online, shows the places where wilderness is at its most pristine in the park, and where it may be compromised.

Glacier doesn’t currently have designated wilderness, like the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex to the south, but it does have a little more than 927,000 acres of recommended wilderness, which is managed in the same manner.

Not all threats compromises to wilderness are immediately evident, McKenna noted in a recent interview.

A slope with invasive weeds, for example, is considered a wilderness threat. A trail with blowdown that’s seen a lot of human impacts like chainsaw work, is another example. Or an overused area that’s been trampled might be another.

On a larger scale, a wildfire that sees human intervention like firelines or burnouts would also be an impact to wilderness.

McKenna took all the information she could on the park’s wilderness and put it into the interactive map, working with Glacier National Park’s wilderness manager Brad Blickhan.

The map, available here: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/a984c5cb9af74c5ba51252736b84ddd9.

The map allows the user to zoom into areas of the park to see the impacts to wilderness.

The darker green areas are least impacted — the pink and purple, the most.

McKenna’s work brought praise from her peers.

Earlier this year she received the Wes Henry Excellence in Wilderness Stewardship Award. She continues to work on wilderness mapping, now as an employee at Glacier, with her data being used for a baseline “State of the Wilderness” report for Glacier.

Glacier has been good stewards of its lands, to date.

“I think our wilderness is in good condition and we’re protecting it well,” she said.

The future, she notes, will rely on good communication between the park’s management branches.

“We need to keep wilderness in the forefront,” she said. When doing projects, it’s often important to try to complete them in the least impactful way to wilderness.

She said the park continues to do wilderness research. One study is looking at whether backcountry pit toilets are having an impact on water quality (so far, they don’t appear to be). Another study is looking at mercury in dragonfly larvae, she noted. Yet another will look at soundscapes in Glacier’s campgrounds.

Her favorite wilderness trip?

“The Belly River in the winter,” she said. “It was the most magical place.”

McKenna said she’s currently pursuing graduate work in the wilderness field and hopes to some day eventually get a doctorate.

She enjoys working for the Park Service.

“It’s my dream job,” she said.