A young lodgepole forest lines the road along the foot of Lake McDonald, grown up after the fires of 1927 and 1929. Old cedar stumps survive among the thin trunks, and some of the lake views at small pullouts were cut on purpose in the 1950s.
Doghair lodgepole. That's the real name for the trees crowding this road, thin and straight and packed as close as the hairs on a dog. They're young, and fire is why they're here. Flames came through in nineteen twenty-seven and again in nineteen twenty-nine, when the Half Moon Fire alone burned more than a hundred thousand acres. Before that, this was old cedar and hemlock, so dense it hid Lake McDonald behind a wall of trunks. The old stumps are still out there, and a few seedlings are trying again. So when the water flashes through a gap, know that somebody may have cut it. Starting in nineteen fifty-one, Superintendent Emmert opened windows through the trees along this shore, often at the little parking spots on the curves. The views look found. They were made. Fire came back in two thousand three. The Robert Fire was running at Apgar Village, West Glacier and park headquarters, and crews answered it with more fire. Helicopters dropped incendiary ping-pong balls on Apgar Mountain to burn off the fuel in its path. It worked. People were here long before any of them. The park puts it at more than ten thousand years. And the tribes here often set fires themselves, to bring on plants and animals and to open the forest floor for travel and hunting. When white explorers first arrived, the Salish, Pend d'Oreille and Kootenai lived in these west-side forests, and the Blackfeet held the prairies on the east. This one road joins the two, cedar shade at one end and prairie wind at the other.
Photo: NPS / Glacier National Park · Public domain