Iceberg Lake: Icebergs in August

A glacier carved Iceberg Lake by grinding in a circular motion at the base of a headwall until it had excavated a bowl. The technical name for this bowl is a cirque. The walls on three sides of Iceberg Lake are steep enough and close enough that direct sun reaches the water for only a few hours each day, even at the peak of summer. The result is a lake so cold that the headwall snowfield calves small icebergs into the water, and those icebergs float on the surface through August.

The hike from the Many Glacier trailhead is nine and a half miles round trip, gaining roughly eleven hundred feet of elevation. The trail passes through forest, then through the transition zone where the trees thin and the alpine meadows begin, then above treeline where the terrain opens and the peaks close in from three sides. The lake at the end of it looks like something a film production company would construct and then dismiss as implausible. The turquoise water, the floating ice, the cirque walls pressing in on three sides, the shock of cold air coming off the surface in August when the rest of Montana is hot.

Iceberg Lake is one of the features of the Many Glacier area that makes a strong case for the park's most dramatic concentration of scenery in a relatively compact area. Many Glacier itself, with Swiftcurrent Lake and the nineteen fifteen hotel on its shore, sits at the center of a valley ringed by peaks and overlooked by the Garden Wall. Iceberg Lake is one valley over, slightly higher, significantly colder, and noticeably more improbable.