Fagre to give North Fork talk on glaciers

The North Fork Preservation Association will host their annual meeting on Saturday, Aug. 22 at the Sondreson Community Hall located eight miles north of Polebridge on the North Fork Road at Whale Creek Bridge. The public is invited to a potluck supper at 5:30 p.m. followed by a short business meeting at 6:45 p.m. and the main event with speaker Dan Fagre, retired U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) glaciologist, at 7:30 p.m.

This year’s annual meeting will focus on climate effects in Glacier National Park by welcoming Fagre, who was responsible for mapping the historic range of 146 of the park’s eponymous landforms. Today just 26 named glaciers remain in Glacier National Park, and those are fractions of their former size. He has dedicated his career to understanding and communicating science about the interactions between climate, mountain ecosystems and snow-glacier dynamics in Glacier National Park and across Western North America.

“A very special guest indeed, Dan will share exhibits from the USGS  Repeat Photography Project, a series of historic photos taken during the late 1800s and early 1900s that researchers replicated from the same vantage points starting in 1997. Fagre led the program during his time with the USGS Northern Rocky Mountain Science Center in West Glacier, constructing side-by-side visual comparisons of the images to measure glacial recession. We are looking forward to his presentation,” North Fork Preservation Association Board Chair Flannery Freund said.