Climate Interpretation with Diane Sine

A conversation with longtime interpretive ranger Diane Sine about a lifetime of watching change in Glacier. This episode was recorded in May of 2023.

Glacier Conservancy: https://glacier.org/headwaters Frank Waln music: https://www.instagram.com/frankwaln/ Stella Nall art: https://www.instagram.com/stella.nall/

Overview of the park’s glaciers: https://www.nps.gov/glac/learn/nature/glaciersoverview.htm

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TRANSCRIPT:

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Lacy Kowalski: Headwaters is brought to you by the Glacier National Park Conservancy.

Peri Sasnett: You're listening to Headwaters, a show about how Glacier National Park is connected to everything else. My name is Peri, and this episode is an interview that my co-host Daniel did with longtime park ranger and educator Diane Sine about telling stories about our glaciers to park visitors.

Peri: This is one in a series of conversations we've been having with a wide variety of climate change experts. They don't have to be listened to in any order. Each one stands on its own and they all focus on a particular aspect of the way the world is being altered by the burning of fossil fuels. Over the past century and a half, human activity has released enough greenhouse gases to warm the Earth's climate more than one degree Celsius, with only more warming on the way. Throughout 2023, Daniel sat down with experts to talk about how that warming is altering Glacier National Park, our lives, and our futures.

[Theme music fades in.]

Peri: This is one of my favorite interviews in a long time. Diane is an amazing person, a local legend, really. And I found her stories surprising and resonant. She's been visiting the park's glaciers for decades and has seen so much change firsthand. I think you'll really enjoy this conversation.

Daniel Lombardi: So, Diane Sine, welcome to the podcast, welcome back to the podcast.

Diane Sine: Thank you, Daniel.

Daniel: Will you remind people who you are, where you work, how long you've been doing it?

Diane: My name is Diane Signe and I work at Many Glacier. I'm the lead interpreter over there and I have been in the park for quite a while. I've been in interpretation pretty much all my adult life during the summers here and even before that, when I was a college student, I worked at the Many Glacier Hotel. So I've been hanging around Many Glacier since 1980.

Daniel: Wow. So maybe let's start with what is many glacier for someone who's, like, never been to Glacier. And then I am curious to hear about your first time visiting many Glacier.

Diane: So Many Glacier as a region of the park with a rather confusing name. Yes, we get the fact that it's improper English, "Many" is plural, "Glacier" is singular. So there's one of the first problems right there, but it's simply a region of the park. The Many Glacier Hotel is there. And the name came about in the early years of the park, simply referring to the fact that there were multiple glaciers at the head of the valleys, pretty much a glacier at the head of each one of the valleys.

Daniel: Yeah. Which is like four or five glaciers or something. It's not like many, many glaciers, right? A few, right? It's Many Glacier.

Diane: And it sort of sounds like "mini" glacier, as in "tiny glacier." So we get confusion about people thinking that it's "mini glacier." Sure. Hey, maybe that's an appropriate name in some ways.

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Daniel: What is a glacier? What makes Grinnell Glacier actually a glacier?

Diane: Remember, I'm not a geologist. I'm an elementary teacher. So a glacier, whether we're talking about those massive ice age glaciers that were thousands of feet thick, that carved out these valleys in Glacier National Park, or whether we're talking about the comparatively small glaciers that were here. Well, are here today. And we're part of the Little Ice Age. Places such as Grinnell Glacier.

Diane: To have a glacier, you simply have to have a place where more snow falls every winter then can completely melt during the summers. So over the years, that snow builds up, it accumulates. It actually recrystallizes fairly quickly and it forms a dense ice. And once you have this thick, dense ice, you eventually get—and there are lots of variables—but say when it gets to 70 to 100 feet thick, there is so much mass or so much weight pressure that it actually starts to flow. And so the bottom of the glacier starts to flow and there's actually movement. So a glacier is a mass of a moving ice. And that confuses people sometimes. Sometimes they think, well, is it rolling down the valley? And in the case of all these glaciers in Glacier National Park, they're actually becoming smaller all the time. But there's movement within the mass of ice. There's more accumulation of ice at the upper elevation of the glacier, and then the ice flows through. So whether a glacier is growing or receding is simply a matter of economics. Is there is there more snow and ice being added to that mass every year or is there more melting happening? And the reality here is there's more melting happening.

Daniel: Right. Is there is your summer more intense? Or your winter more intense? And that that balance has shifted.

Diane: So one of the fascinating things you mentioned, the moraine, and of course, that's the end of the maintain trail today. And it's a very impressive mass of accumulation of unsorted material. We call it glacial, glacial till. So there are large rocks and boulders in there. And there also is a lot of just very small, almost sand and gravel. But it's it's fascinating to my brain to try to imagine how long the edge of Grinnell Glacier sat at one place for that amount of moraine material to pile up on top of itself in that one location. And the glacier still moves that moraine material. There's still there's still rocks and boulders and gravel and sand within the layers of the ice and being scraped from beneath and become part of the mass of moving ice. But throughout my lifetime, the glacier has been receding so quickly that the modern, quote, marine material is just sort of smeared across the limestone ledges up there. There's no accumulation compared to what created that moraine. That was the edge of the ice when George Bird Grinnell was up there.

Daniel: So it's a mass of ice that moves.

Diane: That's right. The ice within the glacier moves.

Daniel: How did Grinnell Glacier get its name?

Diane: Grinnell Glacier is named for a guy named George Bird Grinnell and George Bird Grinnell was a well-to-do Easterner. He was very interested in the West. He was interested in conservation issues, really. He came from the background of sort of a gentleman hunter. So at that point, George Bird Grinnell was editor of Forest and Stream Magazine, which was kind of the the big outdoorsman journal of that time. And so in that role, he got to know James Willard Schultz. He read Schultz's writings about this area and became interested in exploring it. So Grinnell first came into this area in 1885, and on that trip he got up up into the Swift Current Valley and could could see Grinnell Glacier from a distance and was interested in it. But then he came back in 1887 with a group of other guys, and they actually hiked up to Grinnell Glacier. And it was on that trip that the friends that he was with basically named the big old chunk of ice that they got to for him for Grinnell.

Daniel: So Grinnell didn't name the glacier after himself. His buddies named it for him.

Diane: Right. It appears that his his buddies named it for him, although it also appears from his writings that he probably was very agreeable to having something named after him, would be my guess.

Daniel: And he did then name a ton of mountains and lakes and everything all around the park. He he was throwing out names pretty easily.

Diane: George Bird Grinnell did name all sorts of features in the park. I think it's it's, it's interesting because if you think about it, any noticeable feature, any real obvious kind of feature would have had multiple names already. It's not like there hadn't been people on this landscape for as long as time goes back. So, you know, the Blackfeet, the Kootenai, everybody would have had names for all of these obvious features, but those names hadn't been written down. Some of the names that George Bird Grinnell applied to features in what is today Glacier National Park, very much reflect the kind of trip that he was on in the 1880s. If you go into the Saint Mary Valley, we have names that he gave such as Gunsight Pass, Fusillade Mountain, Single Shot Mountain. And all of those names came from the fact that George Bird Grinnell was on a hunting trip and was thinking a lot about hunting.

Daniel: Yeah.

Diane: So Single Shot Mountain is actually where he did it. In fact, shoot a bighorn sheep with a single shot.

Daniel: Okay. All right, George. So his friends name this glacier for him. He went back many, many times, from my understanding, to Grinnell Glacier and and saw it over the course of his whole adult life, was making trips up to the ice. And I'm curious if you know anything about kind of his how he saw the glacier and how that might have changed over time, because I think early on he made predictions that, you know, this glacier is going to disappear soon.

Diane: Right. In a way, we're really fortunate that George Bird Grinnell, was a writer, and so he very much left evidence of how he thought and his impressions. And even that very first trip up to Grinnell Glacier is well documented because he wrote the whole story in various installments so that he could publish them in Forest and Stream Magazine. So we know th