One of the glories of taking Amtrak's Empire Builder from the northwest eastbound is your first morning on the train. Boarding in Portland, for example, is in the late afternoon, and by the time you've gotten yourself situated and had dinner, night is already falling as the train makes its way through the Columbia Gorge. The first night on any train trip is usually a trial, but the Empire Builder is especially challenging since it stops at about 2 a.m. in Spokane, and adds several cars (including a full dining car), leading to a lot of noise and quite a bit of jostling. But even a sleepless night is quickly forgotten when the sun rises on the spectacular beauty of Montana and Glacier National Park. Eating a wonderful breakfast in an old fashioned train dining car while the gurgling streams, pristine snowpack and even occasional wildlife dart by your window is an experience which isn't easily forgotten. Of course even more amazing is taking the time to actually stop and visit Glacier, which I've also had the pleasure of doing several times. The natural beauty of the park is a completely different experience than its geographically nearby siblings Yellowstone and the Tetons. It came as more than a bit of a shock, therefore, as I watched this disturbing National Geographic special about Glacier, part of NatGeo's National Parks series, to find out chances are quite good that within ten or twenty years, there will be few if any glaciers left in the region. While politicians and pundits debate the supposed "reality" of climate change, a handful of scientists are getting up close and personal with the absolutely alarming and indisputable fact that Glacier's eponymous ice floes are, to put it simply, disappearing.
How big was this glacier last year?
After an introduction to the wonders of the park, Glacier gets sobering rather quickly, as we join Dan Fagre, a scientist who is exploring the diminution of all the park's icepack, specifically the park's largest glacier, Blackfoot. Blackfoot suffered a devastating calamity a couple of years ago, where huge chunks of its mass simply broke off, literally thousands of tons of ice which went cascading down hillsides and eventually melted. Twenty five acres of the glacier are now lost to posterity, as incredible as that may seem. Getting up close and personal with a glacier is hard in any instance, but the fact is Glacier National Park only provides a few weeks of summery weather every year (that in itself is already changing), and Fagre and his team have an extremely limited window of opportunity to get to the glacier and take measurements. Fagre also compares archival photographs with the current state of affairs, and the conclusions are not very comforting. Glacier's glaciers are going the way of the dinosaur.
While the emphasis in Glacier is on the impending ecological sea change that the park is undergoing, there are a number of interesting sidebars which are explored as the special takes us on an intimate trek of this million acre wilderness, which is 50 miles from side to side. We see a somewhat comical, yet troubling, examination of didymo, known more commonly by its colloquial name of "rock snot," which once was a rare commodity in Glacier's pristine streams, but which now coats several riverbeds like a slimy shag carpet. Chances are very good this coating will choke out fish life within just a few years. Then there's Marc, an intrepid civilian who has made it his life's quest to personally jump into all of Glacier's 168 lakes, an ambition which takes him into largely uncharted territory a lot of the time. Marc has already achieved two-thirds or so of his goal, and has set up a charitable foundation to raise money to help combat cancer in children as his exploits have become better known. Also very entertaining is a segment on bears utilizing trees to scratch their backs. Anyone who's seen the old Disney True Life Adventure series knows that this activity was a regular feature of those old documentaries, but in Glacier, the behavior is studied for a number of reasons, including taking DNA samples from the bears to help scientists understand if the species will be able to literally weather the changes which are coming to the region.
There are also informative segments on wolverines, which may indeed perish once the park becomes significantly warmer, and a little known rodent called the pika, which manages to chew through an investigator's pant leg in about a nanosecond in its attempt to forage for perspiration salt, which it finds appetizing. These lesser known species help to make Glacier entertaining, but also serve as a stark reminder of what exactly may be lost as global warming continues unmitigated, wreaking slow (and sometimes not so slow) and deliberate havoc on the region.
The glaciers may indeed all be gone as soon as 2030. That's within the lifetimes of most of you reading this review. Suddenly Glacier National Park will no longer have any of the features which have lasted for millennia and which gave the park its name. What new wonders will be revealed by the ice's retreat remains a tantalizing mystery, and one which is actually embraced by most of these scientists, but there can't help but be an enormous sense of loss that one of our nation's crown jewels is literally melting away.
Glacier National Park sports a generally very sharp image courtesy of an AVC encoded 1080i transfer in 1.78:1. Contrast is exceptional in this special, which makes the whites of the glaciers bristle nicely without ever blooming. Several of the water shots are absolutely gorgeous, with wonderful detail and some lovely saturation in a variety of blues and greens. Depth of field is also exceptional, though the director pulls some Hitchock Vertigo moves at times with zooms and dollying which may leave some viewers feeling, well, vertiginous. Detail on some of the animals is also first rate, with every hair on the pika's head virtually countable. There is some occasional shimmer on some hillsides, indicative of the interlaced source video, but otherwise this is a sharp and breathtaking look at a region undergoing immense change.
As is typical, NatGeo provides us a lossy surround mix and a lossless stereo mix. Choosing between the Dolby Digital 5.1 and the LPCM 2.0 is a toss up, frankly. While the 5.1 has some great ambient immersion, especially in the water sounds which gurgle nicely through the surrounds, the LPCM 2.0 is noticeably more robust on both the low and high ends. Either choice, though, really gets the job done, with the narration and onscreen talking heads always clear and easy to understand. The edge may go just slightly to the 5.1 mix, though, for some fun sonic moments with some animals and such segments as ice tumbling down a hillside, which pans nicely.
This Blu-ray comes with a supplemental CD-ROM which has a very cool 3D interactive map application, allowing you to explore the nooks and crannies of Glacier yourself.
This is one of the more troubling of recent National Geographic efforts, one which brings the realities of climate change home. Who can argue with scenes of a glacier literally melting before our very eyes? Tempering the sadness are some hopeful elements in this enjoyable special, which comes recommended.
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