Montana’s hoary marmot record is, more than anything, a Glacier National Park record. The park accounts for 676 of the state’s 773 reports, and Flathead and Glacier counties, the two that wrap around it, tower over every other county. That isn’t proof the marmots are thickest inside the park boundary. It’s proof that millions of hikers walk those alpine trails every summer, and the big, whistling marmots sunning on rockfields are hard to miss.
Beyond the park, the scattered reports map the marmot’s real Montana range: the wilderness high country of the western ranges, including the Selway-Bitterroot, Anaconda Pintler, Rattlesnake, Scapegoat, and Cabinet Mountains wilderness areas, all places where talus slopes sit next to summer meadows. NatureServe ranks the species vulnerable in the state, so the blank spaces on the eastern plains are real, but the thin coverage in remote western ranges is mostly about boot traffic.
The calendar is the hibernator’s own. Reports surge in June and July, hold strong through August, and nearly vanish from October to May, when the marmots are deep in their burrows under the snow. A hoary marmot earns its entire year in roughly four months of alpine summer.
Full species profile
