Page 19 - Flathead Beacon // 4.8.15

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AMAZING!
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AMAZING.
AMAZING.
It’s an exhaustively used verb, uttered with such irreverent profusion that it has been relegated to the ranks of banality, its eye-popping significance diminished with each gratuitous application, whether we’re denoting a sale at a shopping mall, a sunset or the quality of a quiche.
A Google search of the word returns 1.6 billion results in 0.33 seconds, which, in itself, is actually pretty amazing.
But how do you hashtag a phenomenon that is so uniquely individual, subject to such a broad and diverse range of inter- pretations, no less profound now as when we were children, and vice-a-versa?
Those are questions we didn’t bother asking while re- searching our second annual “Amazing Issue” because, well, we didn’t have to.
Just because it’s impossible to linguistically quantify our astonishment in a single word or phrase or emoji does not cheapen the procession of breathtaking moments that pep- per our lives and characterizes the human experience.
That quiche, after all, was pretty darn good, the sunset especially brilliant, those heels a real steal of a deal.
We live on an amazing planet, populated with people who accomplish remarkable feats every day, on a landscape de- fined by geologic wonders carved out by time, alongside critters whose furry constitutionals defy reason. There are smells and tastes and touches. We divine powerful, immea- surable emotions based on how we relate to one another and through the stories and experiences we share.
The Flathead Valley’s streak of Herculean figures and as- tonishing features runs as deep as its glacier-hewn lakes, moraines and mountain valleys, as rich as its history and as resolute as its residents.
It is home to Glacier National Park and Flathead Lake, to tribes of super-athletes and super-moms, a place of unrivaled engineering feats like the Going-to-the-Sun Road, Hungry Horse Dam and the Great Northern Railway, the stomping ground for a suite of species whose members criss-cross the wild, untamed habitat much as they did centuries ago – climbing over mountains and traversing great wilderness expanses.
We live here and among them, we map and explore, we quantify and question. But at the end of the day, the missing puzzle-pieces and data gaps leave us mesmerized, yearning for more. Our capacity for astonishment is endless, our de- sire to push further quenchless.
These vignettes of amazing accomplishments provide a glimpse of the awe-inspiring wonders that surround us, cap- tured here not to offer a definitive catalog or to attempt to rank these facts, feats and figures nor to measure their importance, but to remind us that they’re boundless and ubiquitous.
A comet streaking across the night sky is never a lack- luster moment, and in this issue we follow a few of those stars as they make their way through our universe.
-TRISTAN SCOTT