From the Sunday, August 17, 2008 online edition of the Missoulian . . .

These mountains have always been old, weighed heavy with age and rooted in deep time, the kind of place where you can heft a handful of early, early earth and wonder at the world before.

Rippled rock at 10,000 feet is sediment laid down 1.6 billion years ago, the oldest rock there is, Proterozoic history heaved up some 170 million years back when the Rocky Mountains pushed skyward. A sheet of stone three miles thick and 160 miles long crashed eastward then, advancing 50 miles and folding old rock over new, creating the block from which vast chisels of ice would carve what we now know as Glacier National Park.

“That’s what people have always come to see in the park,” Leigh Welling said. “They came to look into the past, to see something pristine. To me, the park’s first century was defined by a certain stability.”

Read the entire article . . .