Lake McDonald

Lake McDonald is right there on your left, and a pull-off is coming up, across the oncoming lane, so wait for a clear gap. If you pulled in, turn left to keep heading east. Lake McDonald runs nine point four miles long, a mile and a half wide and four hundred sixty-four feet deep. Now look across it. That long rise is Howe Ridge, and the one this road follows is Snyder Ridge. They're piles of glacial debris, shoved aside by ice and standing two thousand feet above the water. Add that to the depth of the lake, and you get ice more than two thousand feet thick, filling this valley about twenty thousand years ago. Walk down to the shore and pick up a stone. Reds, purples, greens and blues, and all of it comes down to iron. Where the old sea floor met the air, the iron rusted red. Where it stayed under water, with no oxygen, it turned green. The ice carried those stones down from the peaks and left them at your feet. Put a hand in the water while you're there. It's very cold. The lake was stocked for anglers from nineteen twelve to nineteen seventy-one, and the native fish have been losing ground to newcomers like kokanee salmon and lake trout. Those kokanee put on a show nobody planned. Planted in the Flathead drainage in nineteen sixteen, they were running to spawn at the foot of this lake by the mid nineteen thirties, and bald eagles found them. Thirty-seven were counted along the creek in nineteen thirty-nine, and in time more than five hundred crowded in at once. Then managers added tiny shrimp to lakes in the watershed, hoping for bigger salmon. The shrimp ate the salmon's food. By nineteen eighty-nine, Flathead Lake's kokanee were gone, and the eagles flew elsewhere. Around eighteen seventy-eight, the story goes, Duncan McDonald, son of a Hudson's Bay trader and a Nez Perce woman, came up this valley with Salish companions and camped here. He carved his name on a birch. People who saw the tree began calling this McDonald's Lake, and it stuck. He went on to become a tribal leader and historian on the Flathead Reservation. Tourism here began as an assignment. The Great Northern Railway's passenger agent told Doctor Lyman Sperry to stop off at Belton and see if he could find evidence of living glaciers. In eighteen ninety-four, Sperry asked a local man, Charlie Howe, if there were any. Howe's answer is the best sales pitch ever made in Montana. I do not know of any, he said, but, if desirable, they can be obtained, for a man can find anything he wants in this region. Hold on to Howe's line. There's real ice waiting past the top of this climb.