Climate Interpretation with Diane Sine

03/05/24 • 52 min

A conversation with longtime interpretive ranger Diane Sine about a lifetime of watching change in Glacier. This episode was recorded in May of 2023.

Glacier Conservancy: https://glacier.org/headwaters Frank Waln music: https://www.instagram.com/frankwaln/ Stella Nall art: https://www.instagram.com/stella.nall/

Overview of the park’s glaciers: https://www.nps.gov/glac/learn/nature/glaciersoverview.htm

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TRANSCRIPT:

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Lacy Kowalski: Headwaters is brought to you by the Glacier National Park Conservancy.

Peri Sasnett: You're listening to Headwaters, a show about how Glacier National Park is connected to everything else. My name is Peri, and this episode is an interview that my co-host Daniel did with longtime park ranger and educator Diane Sine about telling stories about our glaciers to park visitors.

Peri: This is one in a series of conversations we've been having with a wide variety of climate change experts. They don't have to be listened to in any order. Each one stands on its own and they all focus on a particular aspect of the way the world is being altered by the burning of fossil fuels. Over the past century and a half, human activity has released enough greenhouse gases to warm the Earth's climate more than one degree Celsius, with only more warming on the way. Throughout 2023, Daniel sat down with experts to talk about how that warming is altering Glacier National Park, our lives, and our futures.

[Theme music fades in.]

Peri: This is one of my favorite interviews in a long time. Diane is an amazing person, a local legend, really. And I found her stories surprising and resonant. She's been visiting the park's glaciers for decades and has seen so much change firsthand. I think you'll really enjoy this conversation.

Daniel Lombardi: So, Diane Sine, welcome to the podcast, welcome back to the podcast.

Diane Sine: Thank you, Daniel.

Daniel: Will you remind people who you are, where you work, how long you've been doing it?

Diane: My name is Diane Signe and I work at Many Glacier. I'm the lead interpreter over there and I have been in the park for quite a while. I've been in interpretation pretty much all my adult life during the summers here and even before that, when I was a college student, I worked at the Many Glacier Hotel. So I've been hanging around Many Glacier since 1980.

Daniel: Wow. So maybe let's start with what is many glacier for someone who's, like, never been to Glacier. And then I am curious to hear about your first time visiting many Glacier.

Diane: So Many Glacier as a region of the park with a rather confusing name. Yes, we get the fact that it's improper English, "Many" is plural, "Glacier" is singular. So there's one of the first problems right there, but it's simply a region of the park. The Many Glacier Hotel is there. And the name came about in the early years of the park, simply referring to the fact that there were multiple glaciers at the head of the valleys, pretty much a glacier at the head of each one of the valleys.

Daniel: Yeah. Which is like four or five glaciers or something. It's not like many, many glaciers, right? A few, right? It's Many Glacier.

Diane: And it sort of sounds like "mini" glacier, as in "tiny glacier." So we get confusion about people thinking that it's "mini glacier." Sure. Hey, maybe that's an appropriate name in some ways.

[Music fades in and then concludes.]

Daniel: What is a glacier? What makes Grinnell Glacier actually a glacier?

Diane: Remember, I'm not a geologist. I'm an elementary teacher. So a glacier, whether we're talking about those massive ice age glaciers that were thousands of feet thick, that carved out these valleys in Glacier National Park, or whether we're talking about the comparatively small glaciers that were here. Well, are here today. And we're part of the Little Ice Age. Places such as Grinnell Glacier.

Diane: To have a glacier, you simply have to have a place where more snow falls every winter then can completely melt during the summers. So over the years, that snow builds up, it accumulates. It actually recrystallizes fairly quickly and it forms a dense ice. And once you have this thick, dense ice, you eventually get—and there are lots of variables—but say when it gets to 70 to 100 feet thick, there is so much mass or so much weight pressure that it actually starts to flow. And so the bottom of the glacier starts to flow and there's actually movement. So a glacier is a mass of a moving ice. And that confuses people sometimes. Sometimes they think, well, is it rolling down the valley? And in the case of all these glaciers in Glacier National Park, they're actually becoming smaller all the time. But there's movement within the mass of ice. There's more accumulation of ice at the upper elevation of the glacier, and then the ice flows through. So whether a...

A conversation with longtime interpretive ranger Diane Sine about a lifetime of watching change in Glacier. This episode was recorded in May of 2023.

Glacier Conservancy: https://glacier.org/headwaters Frank Waln music: https://www.instagram.com/frankwaln/ Stella Nall art: https://www.instagram.com/stella.nall/

Overview of the park’s glaciers: https://www.nps.gov/glac/learn/nature/glaciersoverview.htm

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TRANSCRIPT:

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Lacy Kowalski: Headwaters is brought to you by the Glacier National Park Conservancy.

[Theme music fades in.]

Daniel Lombardi: So, Diane Sine, welcome to the podcast, welcome back to the podcast.

Diane Sine: Thank you, Daniel.

Daniel: Will you remind people who you are, where you work, how long you've been doing it?

Daniel: Wow. So maybe let's start with what is many glacier for someone who's, like, never been to Glacier. And then I am curious to hear about your first time visiting many Glacier.

Daniel: Yeah. Which is like four or five glaciers or something. It's not like many, many glaciers, right? A few, right? It's Many Glacier.

Diane: And it sort of sounds like "mini" glacier, as in "tiny glacier." So we get confusion about people thinking that it's "mini glacier." Sure. Hey, maybe that's an appropriate name in some ways.

[Music fades in and then concludes.]

Daniel: What is a glacier? What makes Grinnell Glacier actually a glacier?

Previous Episode

Glacier’s Bats: A Story of Grief and Hope

The twin stories of bats facing white-nose syndrome in Glacier, and a volunteer who dedicated so much of his life to studying them. With disease and decline on the horizon for bats, what does the future look like?

This episode is in memory of Lewis Young.

Headwaters is created by Daniel Lombardi, Michael Faist, Gaby Eseverri, and Peri Sasnett

Glacier Conservancy: https://glacier.org/headwaters Frank Waln music: https://www.instagram.com/frankwaln/ Stella Nall art: https://www.instagram.com/stella.nall

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TRANSCRIPT:

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Lacy Kowalski: Headwaters is brought to you by the Glacier National Park Conservancy.

Gaby Eseverri: This spring and summer, park biologists were out all night trying to catch bats.

Lisa Bate: Tonight, we're trapping at roost. Our goal is 25. Yes. So what we're going to do is really we're going to catch 30 and then we're just anything after that, we're just going to we can look real quick and see if you see anything odd, if you do we'll collect it.

Lisa: We don't have Lewis with us. You guys are filling the shoes of Lewis.

Kaile Kimball: Nearly impossible shoes to fill.

Lisa: Big shoes to fill.

Gaby: They're catching these bats to do a swab test for white nose syndrome. A deadly disease that thus far hasn't been found in Glacier. But it's not too far away.

Gabby Eaton: Trapping went so well, I think that everyone worked together really hard and we had a good time.

Megan Potter: We're unbelievably efficient. We process a lot of bats. We saw no signs of white. We kept our bats very warm and very happy, very cozy.

Kaile: And how how were the bats? What you think?

Megan: Oh, they were amazing. Yeah, they were just the sweetest little things ever.

Gaby: And while I couldn't join them for the survey, I did catch up with them a few weeks later, when they texted me to run over to their office because the results of the tests were in.

Gaby [field]: I'm feeling nervous. I can't imagine how they're feeling.

Gaby: Lisa just texted us today that she just got the email, the email telling us if the bats here in Glacier National Park, if they have white nose or not.

[Footsteps and door creaking open.]

Mixed Voices: Okay. Hi. You actually been waiting? We haven't opened email yet. I want to be here for this. Please. Do you think he is? Really?

Gaby: Hey, Lisa.

Lisa: Hi. Did you guys hear? I got the results for white nose swabbing? Bat swabbing? Oh okay.

Gaby: When did you get the email?

Lisa: I've been in the field all week. And yesterday, when I got back, I noticed that it was in my inbox.

Lisa: Oh, I guess I'd better find it. I don't know... You can see how my emails reproduce in the inbox. Oh, it's from Emily. Maybe Emily. Yeah. Let's try this. There it is. It's from Emily. Oh, good. So I also took over Lewis Young, who passed away this year, and their house. They came back negative for PD. Hmm. Would you? They asked me to convey this information to Linda. And so I'll do that. Oh, maybe it's just that one, you guys. This is just at his house. Oh, sorry. False alarm guys.

Mixed Voices: Oh, okay. That's really good. Okay. So, yeah.

Gaby: False alarm. The results for the bats tested in Glacier aren't back yet. But it's still great news from another site in northwest Montana, the home of Lewis Young.

Gaby: Welcome to Headwaters, a show about how Glacier National Park is connected to everything else. I'm Gaby.

[Theme music fades in.]

Gaby: This episode is about bats. Disease and decline are on the horizon for Glacier's bats and their future seems uncertain. Lisa says it's not a matter of if, but when. This story is also about one man who loved bats, who dedicated so much of his life to conserving them.

[Theme music plays in full.]

Madeline Vinh: Act One: Dusk.

Gaby: Glacier's wildlife team hosts an event called "Going Batty" every summer. The public comes and gets to see bats up close. As the sun sets they welcome the attendees and give us all a short introduction. Their enthusiasm spreads throughout the entire crowd.

Lisa: The main focus is just to give people a chance to see bats up close and learn about the amazing role they play in our ecosystems and some of the risks and threats they face and what people can do to help bats. And there's an old saying that you kill what you fear and you fear what you don't understand. So we take this as an opportunity to help people understand bats.

Gaby: That's Lisa Bate. She's a wildlife biologist with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of energy. She's in perpetual motion, and her staff, who are half her age, have trouble keeping up with her. She studies the park's birds, and if those 250 plus species weren't enough to keep track of, she added ten species of bats to that list as well....

Next Episode

Climate and Community with Mike Durglo, Jr.

A conversation with Mike Durglo, Jr., climate coordinator and head of Historic Preservation for the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes. This episode was recorded in September of 2023.

Glacier Conservancy: https://glacier.org/headwaters Frank Waln music: https://www.instagram.com/frankwaln/ Stella Nall art: https://www.instagram.com/stella.nall/

CSKT Climate Resiliency: http://csktclimate.org/

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TRANSCRIPT:

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Lacy Kowalski: Headwaters is supported by the Glacier National Park Conservancy.

Peri Sasnett: Welcome to Headwaters, a show from Glacier National Park, which is the traditional homelands of many Indigenous groups that still live in this area today. This episode is an interview we did with Mike Durglo Jr, who's a climate leader at the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes. We talked about how Native American tribes can lead the way through the climate crisis. This episode is part of a series of conversations we've been having with a wide variety of climate change experts. These episodes don't have to be listened to in any order; each one stands on its own. And they all focus on a particular aspect of the way the world is being altered by the burning of fossil fuels over the past century and a half, human activity has released enough greenhouse gases to warm the Earth's climate over one degree Celsius, with only more warming on the way. [subtle beat begins to play] Throughout 2023, Daniel sat down with experts to talk about how that warming is altering Glacier National Park, our lives and our futures. It's critical to remember that Glacier has been a home for people since time immemorial. This has never been an empty landscape. It has been loved and cared for by people for thousands of years. And to find our way through the next century, we'll need to have a lot more conversations like this one. [synth beat contines to play, then resolves]

Mike Durglo, Jr: I call myself a seed planter because just giving people hope.

Daniel Lombardi: Thanks for joining us, and can you introduce yourself?

Mike: Thank you. [Introduces himself in Salish] Good morning, everybody. My name is Standing Grizzly Bear. That's my given name. My English name or my [speaks Salish] name is Mike Durglo. Currently, I'm the department head for the Tribal Historic Preservation Department for the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes. Working for the tribes for, it was 40 years.

Daniel: Wow. Yeah. Congrats. That's pretty amazing. And so that's just down west, southwest of the park, so one of the park's neighbors. Yeah, well, yeah. Give. Give me an overview, then, of what are the climate change impacts that you're seeing on the Flathead reservation, what you're seeing in this area.

Mike: You know, you think about the air quality and what's what's been happening, and even even this year, earlier smoke. I mean, it was early. A few years ago I was driving to my office to work, and there was so much smoke that I couldn't even see the mountains. I live right there, you know, at the base of of the mountains at McDonald Peak, and my office was only like eight miles from my house. But I'm thinking, my grandson had doubles this morning, football practice, double practices. And I'm thinking, I hope that those kids are not outside playing, you know, practicing for football right now in this.

Daniel: Because the air is so toxic.

Mike: Right. And, you know, it was not just the kids, but the elders, and the people that are most vulnerable to the all the smoke. And so we had I don't remember if it was the the Earth Day event that you came to, but it was one of our gatherings where Dr. Lori Byron and her husband attended that. Anyway, I talked about that. I told I shared that story and I shared my concern for the people being out in that smoke. And a few months later, Dr. Byron calls me and says, Mike, would you be interested in putting up some Purple Air monitors? I said, Heck yeah. I didn't really, you know, I was like, So what do we do? And I don't know if you're familiar with them, but they're only about this big, they're inexpensive and they measure PM 2.5 air quality, and they give you real time data. So she sent me seven monitors. We're putting them up around the reservation at seven schools. They have a what's called a flag program that you can, the kids can put out a flag. So if it's a bad air day, they can put out a red flag. If it's a good day, it's the green flag. And there's all these different ones in the middle. And just this year we're putting up I don't remember how many, 14 more? We're going to put them in, inside and outside.

Daniel: So that's great. Yeah. And so that's a kind of climate adaptation, the dealing with air quality, which can be degraded by just burning fossil fuels and cars and stuff. Around here, it's often caused by wildfire, which itself is exacerbated and expanded by climate change.

Mi...