A Tale of Two Talks

So I was at Glacier a couple of weekends ago. Steph and I stayed in two different campgrounds: Fish Creek, on the banks of Lake McDonald, the first night, and Two Medicine, on Two Medicine Lake, the second night. At most of the campgrounds there they have a campfire or amphitheater area where park rangers give talks on various subjects.

At the first campground we walked over to the amphitheater where a bunch of people were sitting on benches waiting for the ranger to start talking. The first thing that struck us was that it was a multimedia presentation! He had a microphone on and his voice was coming over speakers and there was a large screen in front of the seats with a projected computer screen on it.

Well, the talk started out about the park and how the glaciers were all shrinking at fairly rapid rates. I began feeling a little trepidation as I sensed where the talk might be going.

Basically I had been expecting a talk on the eco-system of the park, or something about the plants or wildlife, or something like that. But no, we were all given an environmental talk about global warming and how horrible our culture is for helping kill the planet and ruining our national park. He loosely tied the talk with the park by mentioning the rapidly melting glaciers but mainly it was about the contast between weather (local) and climate (global) and how the climate is warming more rapidly than it should and all sorts of things are going wrong.

I suppose my mind set was helped by my more conservative point of view on the subject but when I went to the talk I was expecting animals and plants in the park, not seals covered with oil from the Exxon Valdez; or mountains and glaciers moving and forming, not CO2 counts and alternative energy solutions. One guy even asked in the middle of the presentation "When are you going to relate this to the park?" and the ranger replied with a laugh "This relates to the park and the whole world." Ugh. The guy got up and left. We stayed politely for the whole talk. I suppose it was alright, but he didn't say one thing I hadn't heard before and I'm just not sure that it was appropriate for the setting. When we talks about telling politicians to change the energy policy and makes the blanket claim that we're all part of a "grassroots" effort, I really had to question the whole thing.

So that was that. On the second night, at Two Medicine, we got to the talk a little late--we were very hungry and decided to make our second box of Velveeta noodles and cheese before leaving for the talk. The man speaking was the same ranger that Steph got to listen to when she went to Glacier the year before, who she said was very entertaining.

He was all dressed up as a mountain goat and gave a talk from the perspective of a male mountain goat about growing up and living in the moutains as a goat. It was very informative and very entertaining. We learned about what they eat, how they interact with other goats, how their hooves work to help with climbing the crazy terrain they climb, and how they relate to other animals in the park.In other words, this was exactly the kind of talk I was expecting and hoping for in a national park. It was so much different and such a different atmosphere than the night before. Steph and I thoroughly enjoyed ourselves, along with everyone else there.