Here’s another landscape from my trip to Glacier National Park in Montana, U.S.A. Actually, this photo was taken from the window of our hotel room in Kalispell, Montana, about an hour west by car from the entrance to Glacier National Park. Thick clouds had obscured the setting sun, allowing only enough indirect light to light the scene, but no direct light to create any particular highlights. The shadowed mass of the Swan Range along the eastern edge of the Flathead Valley had a vivid bluish purple huge in fairly stark silhouette. The hovering clouds and the deep green of the trees in the foreground, created a stark, yet peaceful scene.
The origin of the Swan Range, along with many of the mountain ranges in the area, was not nearly so peaceful, although it was a process that happened in super slow motion. As the North American continent moved slowly to the west from its location as part of the super continent of Pangaea, it came into contact with the Pacific plate which began to slide underneath it. This action resulted in the crumpling of the leading edge of North America, forming many mountain ranges, the Rocky Mountains not the least among these. As all of this was happening, massive slabs of the Earth’s crust 10 miles (16 km) thick and as large as 1,600 square miles (4,144 square kilometers), the size of Glacier National Park, were pushed up and over younger rock layers, creating the upside down geology found in much this part of North America.
This photo was taken with a Canon EF100 mm f/2.8 Macro USM lens on a Canon EOS 5D Mk III. The exposure was set to 1/125 sec at f/4.0 and ISO 1600.