Roadside geology lesson

POLSON — First Lady Nancy Schweitzer and Montana Department of Transportation Director Jim Lynch met with 5th grade students from Polson Middle School and featured speakers Seth Makepeace, a Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribal hydrologist and Tony Incashola, Director of the Salish-Pend d’Oreille Culture Committee, last Tuesday at the Highway 93 pull-out on Polson Hill for the official unveiling of “The Beaver’s Dam” roadside geology marker and a day of learning in “Montana’s classroom.”

“It’s a great opportunity to get you out of the classroom and into this Montana classroom... the great outdoors,” Lynch said to the students.

One of 49 signs installed along Montana’s highways since 2006, the “Beaver’s Dam” geo-sign marks one of the best locations to view the impact glaciers had on the Flathead Valley. The sign’s written story of the “Beaver’s Dam” provides visitors to the site an opportunity to learn about the area’s cultural past.

“It’s more than just asphalt,” Lynch said.

According to Schweitzer, Montana’s colorful history includes the stories told through geology.

“Montana’s highways are the hallways to our outdoor classroom,” she said. “My father was a geologist and we used to travel all around learning about the Earth and we thought that other people might want to learn about it too.”

Each of the 49 interpretive signs describe geologic wonders of the Treasure State, share those stories and work to spark an interest in geology, a field Makepeace said is “one of the best careers.”

“You get to be out in the field,” he said, “and there is a great need for it.”

Makepeace presented a lesson to the students about the power of glaciers and the impact they had in molding the valley’s dramatic landscape.

“Everything you guys live and breathe is part of a glacial landscape,” he said.

As glacial periods represent only two percent of the Earth’s history, Makepeace said this is a very unique time in the Earth’s history.

Incashola recounted the Pend d’Oreille story of the White Beaver, who built a dam across the Flathead River to create an enormous body of water. The Wolf Brothers breached the dam, killed White Beaver and flooded the area, leaving Flathead Lake.

Another interesting feature of the geo-sign is that each is marked with precise Global Positioning System coordinates so visitors can plug them into a GPS before embarking on a trip.

“We’ve come a long way with how we mark our geological sites,” Steve Lozar, Tribal Councilman, said.

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About The Beaver’s Dam

About 15,000 years ago, a glacier pushed its way down the Rocky Mountain Trench into northern Montana. At the northern end of the Mission Mountains, the glacier broke into two branches. One branch scraped down the west side of the range until it reached this place, where it stopped and began to melt, leaving behind this gravel-laden hill, called a terminal moraine. The ice remaining north of this moraine eventually melted away, creating Flathead Lake, the largest freshwater lake in the western United States.

In the Salish language, this hill is called Sqlew Stqeps — the Beaver’s Dam. The name comes from a Pend d’Oreille creation story about White Beaver, a monster whose lodge was Wild Horse Island. The Wolf Brothers killed White Beaver, broke up his lodge, and breached the dam. The waters rushed out, leaving behind Flathead Lake.

This is one of many Salish and Pend d’Oreille creation stories bearing uncanny parallels with the geologic record of the last ice age. Other legends describe giant beaver and giant bison, great dams blocking the rivers, and the retreat of the bitter cold weather and establishment of the climate we know today. In these stories we can glimpse the collective memory of the most ancient reaches of the tribal past. These are the traces of the ancestors who first occupied the region after Coyote and others rid the land of the people-eaters.

The Pend d’Oreille band that lived in the Flathead Lake area was known as the People of the Broad Water, after the name of the lake, meaning Broad Water. The ethnographer James Teit wrote that the lake was “the earliest recognized main seat of the Pend d’Oreilles.” Anthropologist Carling Malouf wrote that “the density of occupation sites around Flathead Lake, and along the Flathead River indicates that this was, perhaps, the most important center of ancient life in Montana west of the Continental Divide.”

-courtesy of Sarah Elliot, governor’s office