There was only one thing to do — break out the peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, part of my plan to supplement her trip with important American culinary experiences. Even before we got to the park, there had been two: a peach purchase at a roadside farmstand (I correctly suspected she would be blown away by her first perfectly ripened peach) and a required pre-park barbecue meal at the Back Room in Columbia Falls, where we split a plentiful $22.25 smoked rib sampler.

Seeing Glacier through the eyes of a scientist was also intriguing, though it did slow things down. Cris took plenty of pictures of mountains and ice and just about every plant we passed (“for future presentations”) but also continuously photographed posted fishing guidelines and mountain lion safety fliers. I was particularly amused when she stalled our hike around gorgeous Bowman Lake, mountains rising beyond, to take pictures, from multiple angles, of “FOR STAFF ONLY” signs. (“It’s infrastructure,” she explained.)

She also couldn’t get enough of the gift shops in every visitors center and just outside the park. I looked at all those teddy bears, key chains, tote bags, birding guides and huckleberry gummy bears and saw commercialism. True enough, she said, but it served another purpose: effectively extending people’s visit by giving them an ongoing connection with the glacier, and, by extension, to the natural world, when they return home. She showed me a picture in her camera of a gift she had previously seen: a notebook with a precise sketch of chipmunk footprints on the cover, labeled as such. “It provides information, a place to take notes, and a souvenir — three functions within one simple thing,” she said.

“We produce a lot of technical scientific knowledge in Brazil,” she said, “but we don’t know what to do with it, how to get it to the public, to transform their vision of the world and the relationship they have with the environment, with life, with the future.”

I was curious about what she would have to say about the campsites — not the primitive, backcountry campsites that are also available, but our drive-up, restroom-included campsites. All reservable slots at Yellowstone and Yosemite were long gone by the time we planned this trip, though most sites at Glacier, unusually, are first come, first serve (one reason we chose the park). To me, it looked like any other drive-up campground, though it’s hard for me to get over the feeling that bringing a car to a campsite is cheating. Her issue was not so much with the cars, but that the individual sites were bunched quite close together — not all that conducive to a wilderness experience. “In Brazil, this would become more of a party environment than a contemplative one,” she said.