Hobbies And Interests
Rocky Mountain Front
Among the most dramatic topographic frontiers on the continent, the Rocky Mountain Front marks the meeting ground of the northern Great Plains and the Rockies in Montana and Alberta. One of the defining landmarks here is Chief Mountain on the eastern edge of Glacier National Park, an outlier of the Lewis Overthrust formations that define the high-mountain scenery just west. Ecologically, the region is significant because of the abrupt transition from shortgrass prairie to montane ecosystems. It is among the few places remaining in North America where grizzly bears range out onto the Great Plains, primarily along the gallery forests and shrub thickets of the river bottoms; the great bears historically utilized such habitats across most of the western plains, as prominently noted by the Lewis and Clark expedition in the early 1800s.
Glacial Landforms
Glacial landforms in the Blackfoot territory include both ice-sculpted mountains and stretches of prairie shaped by Ice Age continental glaciers. Glacier National Park in northwestern Montana, contiguous at the international border with Canada's Waterton Lakes National Park, protects an impressive swath of high country carved by mountain glaciers of the Pleistocene epoch -- as well as several dozen small modern glaciers. Pyramidal horns, amphitheater-like cirques and knife-edge ridges are just a few of the mountain landforms owing their dramatic beauty to the erosive power of these great ice masses. On the prairies, numerous pothole lakes -- so important to migratory waterfowl -- stem from the big lowland glaciers of thousands of years ago, some resulting from chunks of relic ice melting at the fringe of the glacial retreat.
The Great Plains
The rolling steppe of Montana, Alberta and Saskatchewan marks the northerly frontier of the Great Plains, that enormous swath of grasslands sprawling southward into Texas. These shortgrass prairies are higher and drier than the tallgrass country of the Central Lowlands to the east, and formerly supported massive herds of bison, elk and pronghorn. The rolling terrain derives from sediments laid down by inland seaways, glacial lakes and depositions off the Rockies.
Isolated Ranges
Isolated mountain uplifts rise from this section of the interior plains in the shadow of the Rockies to the west. Near the Milk River Valley along the Montana-Alberta border, a place of great significance to the Blackfoot people, the Sweetgrass Hills and Bear Paw Mountains are significant uplifts on the U.S. side. The Sweetgrass Hills are striking high buttes marking an igneous intrusion. They are prominent from the Writing-On-Stone Provincial Park, or Áísínai'pi, just over the border in Alberta, which is a World Heritage Site nomination containing sandstone hoodoos and dramatic rock art within the traditional range of the Blackfoot.