Visiting

EST GLACIER - 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.

By MICHAEL JAMISON of the Missoulian

Watch an aerial tour of Glacier National Park

WEST GLACIER - The tourists huddled in a shivering pack amid what should have been the heat of July, crowding around Laura Kloeck while she explained a bit about climate change.

“There is definitely a frightening side to global warming,” Kloeck told them, “but there is hope, too.”

By MICHAEL JAMISON of the Missoulian

WEST GLACIER - The trend lines look like graph-paper mountain ranges, high peaks crashing against deep valleys, all charting a rugged and difficult future.

Climbing Glacier National Park’s steep statistical slopes offers panoramic views of what’s going up - visitation, what’s going down - structural maintenance, and what’s leveled off on a wide and endless plateau - annual funding.

It is a fiscal landscape park managers hike into with considerable trepidation, here on the eve of Glacier’s second century.

By MICHAEL JAMISON of the Missoulian

WEST GLACIER - One hundred years ago, when Glacier National Park first became a park, grizzly bears roamed along the spine of the Rocky Mountains, north into Canada, south into Sun River country, west to the Cabinets and east onto lowland plains.

Wolves wandered, too, and wolverines and big bull elk.

They had no idea someone had drawn a new political boundary onto their landscape.

They still don't.

YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK - Who knew bacteria could be so beautiful? The heat-loving organisms in Grand Prismatic Spring get credit for making it the most colorful hot spring in Yellowstone National Park. From above, Grand Prismatic is a large oval splash of cornflower blue on the ash white landscape of Middle Geyser Basin, edged by flowing, arm-like strands of yellow, orange and red.

By BETSY COHEN of the Missoulian

Take a gorgeous summer evening, add in your favorite people, bring delicious picnic food, unfold the smorgasbord on the banks of the Clark Fork River at Caras Park and top it off with a free concert of classical music.

The result? Thousands of the happiest people you will ever find on a Sunday night in Missoula.

Almost 4,000 people - maybe more - turned out Sunday to enjoy the Missoula Symphony Orchestra's annual Symphony in the Park.

Conductor Darko Butorac scored a bit hit with the concert's Wild West theme.

By TIMOTHY ALEX AKIMOFF of the Missoulian

The alarm comes ripping through my dreams like a chain saw through pudding.

Bleary and confused, I reach for the source of such irritation and pound my clanging cell phone against the nightstand to no avail.

Normally, were it a school day, I’d roll out for my morning routine of showering, waking the kids, making breakfast and carting everybody off to school and work.

It sounds like a lot, but my wife works nights, so letting her sleep in has its advantages.

By BRIENNA BOYDSTUN for the Missoulian

In the shelter of the Anaconda Range, along Georgetown Lake, lies Camp Watanopa, steeped in 84 years of tradition and maintained by the loyal following of its campers.

The camp, owned by Camp Fire USA, was originally called Camp L.O. Evans after the woman who donated the land. It started in the summer of 1924 and was the first nonsecular camp for girls in Montana.

In the dark-but-getting-brighter recesses of the Carson and Barnes Circus big top, Isa the Asian elephant began to do her thing Thursday morning. Billy Jeffers ran for scoop shovel and garbage can. “I was prepared for the worse,” said Jeffers, a circus employee from Arkansas, after emerging from the tent and what turned out to be - ahem - a dry run.

By BETSY COHEN of the Missoulian

There's no glitzy banquet or star-studded gala that comes with the 100 Top-Rated Good Sam RV Parks 2008 Award of Excellence, but for the western Montana businesses that receive the honor, it's a bit like winning an Oscar.

The award is a certificate that arrives in the mail with little fanfare - but the recognition is worth more than gold.

For Jellystone Park in Missoula and Eagle Nest RV Park in Polson, the award means they are ranked best-of-the-best out of more than 1,650 such parks in the United States and Canada.