Glacial Lake Missoula

The road cut the panel points to, at the Ninemile exit, keeps time as well as count. Each band there is a stack of thin yearly layers laid down on the lake floor, capped by stream sand from the years the lake stood drained. Geologists count about forty bands, and the yearly layers in each run from about forty near the bottom to nine near the top, just under a thousand in all. Read that way, the lake refilled about forty times over roughly a thousand years, and each lake filled faster than the one before.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Ninemile Remount Depot — 6.5 mi
  The Forest Service's mule ranch, built because the fires of 1929 ran out of packers.
• Missoula Smokejumper Visitor Center — 21 mi
  The base of the crews descended from the first two men ever to parachute onto a forest fire.
• Fort Missoula — 25 mi
  An 1877 Army post that held Italian seamen and Japanese immigrant men behind its fence in World War II.
• Fort Fizzle — 25 mi
  A log barricade built to stop the Nimiipuu in 1877. They climbed the ridge behind it and walked around.

More markers nearby

• A Wonderful Piece of Engineering: The Big Side Cut — steps away
• The Natural Pier Bridge — 0.8 mi
• Flying High Across the Big Sky — 1.2 mi
• A Wonderful Piece of Engineering: The Big Side Cut — 12 mi