Geography

Glacier National Park is surrounded by other parks and natural lands.

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Geography Details

Glacier National Park is surrounded by other parks and natural lands. It's bordered on the north by Waterton Lakes National Park in Alberta and the Flathead Provincial Forest and Akamina-Kishinena Provincial Park in British Columbia, Canada. To the west, the north fork of the Flathead River forms the park's western boundary, while its middle fork is part of the southern boundary. The Blackfeet Indian Reservation provides most of the eastern boundary, and the Lewis and Clark and Flathead National Forests form the southern and western boundaries of the park. The remote Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex is located in the two forests immediately to the south. Within Glacier, there are a dozen large lakes and 700 smaller ones, with only 131 lakes having names. Lake McDonald on the western side of the park is the longest at 9.4 miles, the largest at 6,823 acres, and the deepest at 464 feet. There are a number of smaller lakes as well, called tarns, which are located in cirques formed by glacial erosion. Some of these lakes, like Avalanche Lake and Cracker Lake, are colored an opaque turquoise by suspended glacial silt, which also causes a number of streams to run milky white. Glacier lakes remain cold and clear year-round. In addition to the lakes, 200 waterfalls are scattered throughout the park, although they're reduced to a trickle during drier times of the year. The largest falls include those in the Two Medicine region, McDonald Falls in the McDonald Valley and Swiftcurrent Falls in the Many Glacier area.

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