Hello, Beacon readers! I had the opportunity to climb Ahern Peak over the weekend, which involved a snack-break stop at Ahern Pass. While the weekend is long gone, I hope you’ll bear with me as I’m still thinking about the pass – an incredible cliff drop-off opening up to a green valley and the bright blue Helen Lake in the east, with glimpses of Elizabeth Lake further into the valley.

The sight itself is breathtaking, but what’s really mind boggling is to imagine riding horses up from the bottom of the valley to the pass – up nearly 2,000 feet of immediate vertical relief.

That’s exactly what Lieutenant George Patrick Ahern and a squad of Buffalo Soldiers did in an 1890 expedition, before Glacier National Park was established in 1910.

The passage came by way of instructions for Ahern and his regiment to find a way over the northern Rocky Mountains and map the area.

The cohort included two mountaineers, two prospectors, two Native American guides, and Professor G. E. Culver, a geologist from the University of Wisconsin whose preserved notes provide the most detailed accounting of the journey.

It also included a unit of Buffalo Soldiers, Black infantry who served in the U.S. Army in the West after the Civil War. They were among the first rangers in what eventually became the National Park Service (NPS).

“Upon reaching this pass the entire party worked for two days making a trail from the foot of the talus slope to the summit, completing the first of two known successful trips with pack stock over Ahern Pass,” a NPS webpage on park history reads. “They were not helped by the fact that most of the trip was accomplished in pouring rain.”

I’m Zoë Buhrmaster, here with a rewind of the tapes from our neighboring national park.

Today, those looking on All Trails or other climbing apps will find warnings of the steep cliffside below the pass. The NPS website gently calls out modern-day grumbling in comparison to the Ahern Expedition.

“The complaints of present day ‘dude’ parties about trail conditions seem silly in the face of the difficulties faced by these men who had to cut a route through a virgin forest and in many instances to build a trail in order to get their stock through,” the website reads. “To appreciate this fully, one would have to attempt taking loaded pack stock cross-country from Ahern Pass to Camas Creek today — a feat that modern packers would term practically impossible.”