Jackson Glacier Overlook

In a park named Glacier, this is the easiest glacier to see, and its overlook is just ahead on your right. If you pulled in, turn right to carry on down toward Saint Mary. If you want a walk after this, a small lot on your right, a little over two miles past this overlook, serves Saint Mary Falls, a double waterfall, one point two miles one way with the climb on the way back. Jackson Glacier sits in the saddle between Mount Jackson and Blackfoot Mountain, about five and a half miles off. Binoculars help. Most of the white you see from this road is snowfield, because the glaciers here hide in shadowy niches high along the Divide. Come back in late August or early September, when most of the winter's snow has melted away, and the ice itself will show. Jackson and Blackfoot used to be one glacier. A nineteen fourteen government photograph shows the single body. They pulled apart in the rapid retreat of the mid to late nineteen twenties, and only then did Jackson get a name of its own. From its peak size it has lost about three quarters of its area. This isn't leftover Ice Age ice. These glaciers likely formed in the last six to eight thousand years, peaking around eighteen fifty, when the park had about eighty. As of the two thousand fifteen survey, it had twenty-six named glaciers above twenty-five acres, and three of those measured twenty-six acres, one acre over the line. Models of World Heritage sites predict nearly all of this ice will be gone by the year twenty-one hundred, though shade, wind and ice thickness could move the date for any one glacier. Park photographers set up at this overlook, aim at that same saddle, and shoot it again years later. So take your picture. Keep it. It's a dated record of the ice, and it'll be worth more every year you keep it.