Holland Lake – July 15
Holland Lake Lodge is a handful of cabins and a main building (with a dinning room, bar and seating area) on a Lake Holland. It is very peaceful out here in the early morning.
This was our cabin. Very cozy and comfortable. This is really two cabins together. Each room has its own private bath. The water heater was a little small though – no problem when you know that. Everyone then took shorter showers and we had hot water for all.
There was a lot of bird activity around the lake. There were tons of swallows. They had built some nests in the eves of the main building. No shortage of bugs out her for them! Laura poses in front of some snow capped mountains.
Chris Bryant came and gave us a presentation on the TNC projects in the Glacier area. A centerpiece of TNC’s Montana work is a huge, $500M land acquisition aimed at protecting one of the last intact ecosystems in the world. The assortment of wildlife seen today is identical to that described by Lewis and Clark. Much of the land acquisition focused on fixing a private/public land checkerboard pattern created by railroad land grants. In 1864 President Lincoln gave the railroads every other square mile to help finance the railroads. (The checkerboard pattern was intended to help raise the value of the land across the board.) The railroads could use the wood for tracks (or sell it). Eventually logging came in and added roads, and locals gained access to hunting and recreation deep into the forest lands.
Then private buyers started coming in and putting up gates and fences. Development was starting to carve up the space into smaller chunks. Suddenly, access to prime hunting, fishing and recreational areas was blocked off. While TNC wants to protect land, they also want to keep the lands open to use. It’s taken some time to gain the trust, but TNC was finally able to bring together the local partners required to pull off this gigantic land purchase. There will be a small amount of restoration work and then parcels will be turned over to state and federal protection for future generations.
For being good listeners we were rewarded with a lunch hike to a local lake!
We stopped on the way to the lake to look at an area that TNC recently took ownership of.
Lake Hike
The hike to the lake was just beautiful! There were flowers everywhere and lots of water. We crossed over the river a few times on the way to the lake.
There was a pair of loons on the lake.
This shore of the lake was full of logs. When you looked around the lake you could see evidence of avalanches – cleared sections of forest down to the lake.
This was a perfect spot to enjoy our picnic lunches.
We came back to Holland Lake with the afternoon to just hang out. Some people took out the canoes on the lake. While that sounded nice I was starting to feel the hike we did yesterday and just wanted to veg. I grabbed my book, an ice tea, and went out to the lake to relax. This is a peaceful place with some nice options for being active or not.
Just before dinner Dr. Steve Running came to give us a presentation. He’s a Montana chapter Trustee and member of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Steve’s work includes taking a huge concept, like global warming, and running the numbers on a local level, like Montana. We had all noticed the large patches of dead trees in the area. This is from the bark beetles. They are a normal part of the life cycle of a healthy forest. His team discovered that while average temperatures have only shifted up a little, the number of days that hit -40° has dropped significantly. This is important – temperatures below -40° kill the bark beetle larvae and keep the population under control. This is something you can see and measure on a local level. Suddenly global warming is a lot easier to understand. I’m hoping that this kind of “ah ha” moment might help people get more involved and work to do their part to save the planet.
The conversation was continued when he joined us for dinner.
This was just awesome!
Like most good things this trip must come to an end! We are heading out tomorrow. Allen will drop us all off at the airport and get back to his job saving all the great places in Montana (isn’t that a cool mission?). He was an excellent guide and I hope that he enjoyed our company as much as we enjoyed his. A large part of his job is showing people what’s worth saving out here – and I think he does a good job of that.