The Swan Range rises immediately south of Glacier National Park in the northern Rocky Mountains and borders the Flathead Valley of northwestern Montana. Once the shore of prehistoric Lake Missoula, the mountains of the Swan Range dwarf us. They minimize our egos and offer perpetual challenge to our ambitions.
For more than 140 years we have come here because of them. Their beauty inspires our love, yet they are sublimely indifferent to us. We gaze at them, hike on them, hunt in them, ride over them, live and die in sight of them, on them.
We, like the original inhabitants of this region, offer them forms of worship.
They do not care.
On the morning of September 12, 2001, I drove over a pass and came on them as hundreds of times before. My mind and the radio was full of the aftermath of September 11.
The mountains lined the valley like an emblem of God, forever there. Their eternal presence comforted me, for mountains are as close to the eternal as I can comprehend. They chilled me with their indifference until I understood their message: The eternal exists. These mountains will withstand cataclysm.
They already have.
Looking through the Swan Range at Glacier Park