Glacier National Park, Montana – My friend Thom told me I should check out a glacier before they’re all gone due to something he calls climate change. I looked it up and it turns out there are glaciers in the United States. So one of my editors gave me $25 for a bus ticket out here on the border with Canada on the condition that I mock Alberta during my visit. I just gave it the finger, British style, so that’s taken care of. Well, I don’t see what the BFD is. Majestic beauty, largest reservoirs of fresh water on the planet, blah blah blah. It’s a big hunk of ice and there are plenty of people who could, I don’t know, use fresh water that’s not stuck up on top of a mountain somewhere.
That’s another thing. I read in the Encyclopaedia Britannica that most glaciers are found on mountains. So you have to do a lot of stupid hiking through nature to get there. After you wear yourself out stumbling through wildflowers and other junk, the payoff is this big blue thing covered in dirt. That’s right, glaciers are dirty, just like the grubby nature lovers standing around gawking at them. And they’re too blue. Blue makes me angry.
Getting angry helped me prove another point. This one nature princess was going all Gaia Theory on me and wouldn’t shut up, so I kinda shoved her. Into a crevasse. Which brings up another point: you could die going to a glacier. They’re dangerous with all the crevasses in them and ice rivers flowing under them into hidden lakes. If there’s one thing I really hate it’s too many crevasses. I lost my beef jerky in one.
They’re also really cold. That’s another way to die; from cold. For instance, you could go scuba diving in those lakes I mentioned; but when I went, one guy got stuck, got that hypothermia thing, and died, all while I floated there watching him. I thought maybe all the thrashing he was doing would keep him warm, but it just ripped up that fancy thermal suit of his.
So, glaciers move, which is something else I read. They get warmed up by the sun and the ice melts and the water gets through all the cracks to the bottom of the glacier and it starts sliding around. Boring! Sometimes they flow into a lake or the sea, which is actually kind of cool because the ice makes a lot of noise and you can see the stupid thing falling apart right in front of your eyes. It’s sort of neat that glaciers move all those rocks and reshape the land. Then you get awesome-sounding topological features like moraines and drumlins. But when I think about it at the end of the day, there are better ways to move rocks around. I got one of those rock tumblers from Spencer’s Gifts which does it in two to three days.
The only good thing about my trip was the nacho stand near the Jackson Glacier. Except for the fact that I had to eat them in the freezing cold, and the melty Velveeta they used pretty much froze instantly, and the missing jalapenos on the top, it almost made up for coming out here in the first place. I thought of writing another book called Nachos of the National Parks, but when I got home I found out it was the only nacho stand in any of our national parks. That sucks, you know? The Department of the Interior should have a little more respect for one of our national foods.
