Glacier National Park - Alpine Heights

From a distance, it seems that nothing grows at the very top of the peaks, which are alternately drenched in bright sunlight and cast in shadow by twilight and clouds. But in crevices, behind boulders, and between shards of fractured rock grow an amazing collection of hardy plants -- an inches-high forest of flowers that survives intense sunlight, continual drying winds, and summer-long cycles of freeze and thaw.

The stems of the alpine pasqueflower, for instance, are thickly covered with soft hairs that protect them from being damaged by the sun. The matlike growth form of such plants as moss campion keeps them low and out of the wind while at the same trapping precious grains of soil upon which they can build. Dryads -- these roselike blossoms are named for the mythical wood nymphs -- and others have evergreen leaves, which means they can photosynthesize just as soon as the snow around them has melted. The succulent-leaved stonecrop hoards water during the brief, wind-parched summer. Alpine buttercups burst into bloom while still in the snow, their waxy yellow petals helping to hurry the melt by capturing solar heat.

The only birds that remain on this alpine tundra year round are white-tailed ptarmigan, grouselike residents that grow new, differently colored feathers as the seasons change; so perfect is the chameleon trick that the ptarmigan might easily be mistaken for snow in winter or mottled brown rock in summer. Instead of flying south in autumn, female ptarmigan simply move down the mountain to the thickets of the scrub forest; the males remain high up despite fierce winds and blinding snows. During blizzard days they huddle together in snow dens, emerging after the storm to feed on wind-cleared slopes and doze in the meager warmth of the faint winter sun.

A plaintive bleat is sometimes heard in the thin, icy air -- the voice of the pika, a small, tailless relative of the rabbit, scampering somewhere in sheltered tunnels beneath the snow. The provident pika sustains itself on miniature haystacks it has built under the rocks. Because it does not hibernate during the long alpine winter, it spends every waking hour of the growing season collecting and storing plants so that it will have enough to eat. Eventually a single individual may harvest a bushel or more of food -- supplies with which to face the lean months ahead.

Glacier is in its essence a winter park. The summer gardens, brilliant but evanescent, are a flush of color and warmth in a land belonging to ice and snow. When winter overtakes the high canyons, the wind howls a victory from every crevice, and snow plumes swirl off cornices like clouds. Here the mountain goat, fearing little in this bleak, forbidding world, reigns supreme. With its specially designed hooves open for traction around nonslip pads, this marvelous animal moves as if weightless across spindle-thin ledges that seem far too steep and narrow to be traveled. Then it halts. Standing motionless, surrounded by an immensity of cold emptiness, its white, shaggy fur and long beard streaming in the wind, the mountain goat seems more a ghost from the Ice Age of long ago than a living, breathing mammal of our modern times. Perhaps its descendants will witness an awakening of the glaciers, a colder time when those thundering monsters will once again move across the land snuffing out flowers, felling forests, deepening meadows, and grinding mountains into valleys and peaks. Glaciers overran this land before, and they will do so again.