Distinctly Montana Magazine

D I S T I N C T LY M O N TA N A • W I N T E R 2 0 1 6 22 In one ice patch, Lee recovered a piece of plaited leather more than 1500-years-old. e leather was partially covered with the bark of a chokecherry tree, which was used for ornamenta- tion by Native Americans. Some of the artifacts re- covered from ice patches are much younger. At one site north of Yellowstone, Lee recovered part of a wooden shaft about four inches long. is weapon fragment was left behind just before Lewis and Clark embarked on their quest to find a waterway to the Pacific Ocean — a journey during which they write of their many encounters with Native Americans. Lee's findings are something of a miracle requiring as much luck as it does hard work. It is part of a story whose first chapter begins with a long ago hunter or traveler who perhaps loses an arrow while hunting a bighorn sheep standing on an ice patch. ousands of years later, Lee visits the ice patch at just the right time of year, when the snow conditions expose the artifact, but not so much that it is left unpro- tected. If the ice patch melts too fast or before an archaeologist can survey it, the arrow will decompose and be lost forever. "We don't really understand how long it takes for these artifacts to decompose once they melt out from the ice, " says Lee, "but it is only a matter of years and the longer these artifacts lay exposed to the sun and wind, the less we can learn from them." Because of warming temperatures, a great many artifacts may have already been lost. Perhaps nowhere is cli- mate change more evident than in Glacier National Park. In 1910, there were as many as 150 glaciers and today there are only 26. Dr. Robert Kelly, a professor of archaeology at the University of Wyo- ming, and Lee recently finished a three-year project surveying 46 of Glacier's ice patches. We may not think of Glacier's rugged moun- tains as inhabitable, but humans have had a deep connection with high elevation areas in Glacier for thousands of years. Glacier's mountains are important vision questing sites and home to powerful Blackfeet spirits like Wind Maker, Cold Maker, un- der, and Snow Shrinker (Chinook winds). Chief Mountain holds particular significance to Native Americans whose ancestral lands included the Park. RACHEL RECKIN CRAIG LEE Shaft at edge of ice patch in the Beartooths

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