Glacier National Park, MT
There is no place like home
We crossed the border into the United States at the Roosville Border Crossing. Some goats (?) were feeding on the side of the road while we were waiting for our turn to enter the country. The officer was surprised that we were from so far from home and asked whether we had any oranges or tomatoes with us. No explanation for why those specific items. So it was that we had our oranges from California — purchased in Canada — confiscated.
Nothing much was different on this side of the border. Yes, the mileage and speed limits and flags in poles were different, but the wide expanses and tall mountains were familiar.
We arrived at the Apgar Campground in Glacier National Park. After a quick bite, N. and I spent time skipping rocks on the shore of Lake MacDonald.
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We planned to drive the long way around to make it to the section of the Going-to-the-Sun Road that began at St. Mary’s. Today was a trial run for about 35 miles of it: would it be an easy drive?
There were some views; there were some steep scary sections. For a day of work and writing, we stopped by a wide parking area with river access; I thought it was the Goat Lick Viewpoint indicated on my NPS map, but found later that there was nothing “goat-y” about it; it was just the area used by locals for staging and prepping their boats and canoes for a ride in the river. And so, by sheer serendipity, we learned that the process entailed quite a bit of time and dedication on the part of those who wanted to get in the water.
A family of 3 — dad, mom, and daughter — along with their dog arrived in two cars. After unloading two canoes and one inflatable kayak, mom and daughter disappeared with both cars. The dog kept the dad company while he — the dad, not the dog — pumped air into the kayak, sorted all the necessary gear, and began to get dressed. While he was busy, the dog just took care of himself. He just lay patiently and dozed off and, from time to time, got up, walked around, took care of his business and once even went down to the river’s edge to get a drink of water. He then came back to his nap spot.
Mom and daughter soon came back with one car. Our best guess was that they left one car downriver, so they could drive themselves back to this spot. They put the dog into the car, and by the time the family got into the river with their boats, more than an hour had passed. Off they went.
It wasn’t until several hours later that we noticed that the river family had come back, with the canoes on the back of their pickup truck. They let the dog out — who again walked himself — got all their gear sorted, put the dog in the truck, and, I imagine, drove home.
So did we.
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After another late start — at this rate we would soon be waking up for lunch — we drove to the town of Columbia Falls, approximately 20 minutes away. We needed cell signal, and a grocery store there had a humongous parking lot and full bars of 5G.
It was while picking up supplies at the grocery store that I was finally able to put words to one of the things I found frustrating about life on the road: I was an expert on my grocery store back home; I knew where every item was; I felt confident and competent in my home store. Traveling around the country to grocery stores — each of which was a brand new experience — I often felt lost, having to walk every aisle, ask questions, retrace my steps. Perhaps I should view each store as a new adventure.
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A conversation with a park ranger at the visitor center at Glacier National Park had revealed that about 10 miles of the Going-to-the-Sun Road around Lake MacDonald — closest to our campground— was open but under construction. A more unvarnished comment on my trails app indicated, “After the rain today, there is a stupid amount of potholes.” (Upon arrival, we drove through a 20-foot long stretch, and it had holes the size and depth of stock pots.) Around the campground, we could see evidence from the souls who had braved that pothole-y road: between the on-and-off rains in the area and the dust being kicked up in the unpaved, graveled road, cars came back to the campground looking as if they had been sand-blasted. We followed the suggestion of the camp host who recommended that we drive around the park’s boundaries — through US 2 and US 89 — to reach the area of Many Glacier. It would take double the miles as far as distance, but he promised it was not a bad drive.
After we reached the town of Browning on Route 2, we turned north into Route 464 into territory of the Blackfeet Indian Reservation. That was when I understood why Montana called itself “Big Sky Country.” We were in the plains right before the Rocky Mountains. There were soft undulating hills, covered in brush and stands of trees here and there, dotted with lakes and brown and black cattle. But the thing that made the most impression on me was the sky, seemingly limitless, visible almost to the low horizon, encompassing, at any point in the drive, a 360-degree view. I had never seen so much sky at once; it was almost disorienting. And just gorgeous.
I could have driven for hours with those views, but eventually we reached Many Glacier, an area in the east of the national park. (Mysteriously, two miles from the road turn off until the actual park gate, the road was unpaved gravel. Was this supposed to be some sort of test of endurance? Would only those who persevered through this crappy road be allowed to enter the park gates? It was annoying.) We parked behind the Many Glacier Lodge (yes, “glacier” was singular. Sigh.) and N. and I promptly lost each other.
Yes, the view from behind the lodge was considered iconic for a reason: snow-capped mountains sat behind the green waters of Swiftcurrent Lake. I knew that N. would feel it imperative to stop and snap a couple of photos. Still, I assumed that he would keep an eye on me and follow along to the trailhead.
I could not see him. A few minutes passed by. I walked back to the hotel, thinking that I would find him distractedly taking photos of the view. Nope. I went to the back of the hotel, by the lakefront. No sight of him. I hiked back to our car, in case he had forgotten a camera battery or something. Nada. I walked back to the trailhead. Not there. I walked back to the rocky pathway from the parking lot to the trailhead. By this time, I was fuming and mildly panicky: had he just dropped to his knees in a heart attack?
I found him coming out of the hotel’s front door, with an irritated look on his face. He claimed — since I’m writing this, I get to put my spin on things — that I was walking so fast that by the time he finished snapping a picture of the mountains, I had disappeared. Bah. He also had walked around the hotel, gone back to the car, re-traced his steps. Despite the beautiful scenery, it took about 1.5 miles for our irritation to melt away and for us to begin talking again. (N. claimed that he both called and texted me, but he had failed to notice that there was no cell signal in this area.)
The trail to Grinnell Lake (out-and-back, 7 miles) was, thankfully, fairly flat. From Swiftcurrent Lake (green), the trail went through the woods around Josephine Lake (brighter green), and then a slight uphill with a swinging bridge to Grinnell Lake (brightest green).
At Grinnell Lake, about 10 feet from shore was a little rock “island”. Since the water was low enough, I was quick to remove shoes and socks and, before thinking too hard about it, plunged in — only to regret it instantly: we were in a place called Glacier National Park, after all. And a careful observation around me would have indicated the lines of melting snow coming down the mountain to feed the lake. By the time I got to the little rock island, my legs were frozen. To prove to the lake goddess that my intentions were good ones, I made a little rock cairn — and did not have to wonder why there weren’t others around. Walking out to the island was a choice; walking back was not; I did it as quickly as I could.
This time, I drove back the 2 hours to our campground at Apgar, but because we had to drive through Big Sky Country, I didn’t mind at all.
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Yesterday’s massive commute from our campground to the hike on the other side of Glacier National Park — 2 hours each way — made it imperative that we have a rest day. We had learned to alternate days full of activities, hikes, and driving with days in which we took care of grocery shopping, boring accounting, future itineraries, and personal care. So, here was today’s very typical “Business Day” in our van:
Because we spend so much time in national parks, where cell signal is usually nonexistent, we usually pay attention where the signal is strong outside national park boundaries (we learned that lesson in Joshua Tree NP, where cell signal was strongest right by the official park sign, before we entered park boundaries). Today, we drove to Columbia Falls, about 20 minutes away, and parked in the parking lot of a grocery store because it provided full bars of 5G. In this magical location, I checked on dates for other campground stays in the area; made reservations for a future stay in a Montana State Park; spoke with my mother who gave me an update on her orchids and complained that her texting app button had disappeared from her home screen; synced the entries in my journals; edited our website.
The beauty of choosing a grocery store parking for the cell signal was that it also allowed me to shop for items we needed today: berries, green onions, milk, chocolate. Oh, and I found Diet Dr Pepper (that was one of the ways I knew we were no longer in Canada.)
We try to avoid amassing any souvenirs, but what little we do end up with gets regularly mailed to our daughter who has complained — jokingly, I think — that she’s becoming a storage unit. I headed to the ever trusty USPS to mail her yet another box.
N. felt a haircut was overdue, so he chose a place close by. He came back from his appointment full of tidbits about life in a small Montana town: the 2 ladies running the place were full of comments about their kids and their cats; another customer mentioned that it was going to be a dry summer.
N. popped into the used bookstore next to the barber shop and got a copy of “A River Runs Through It” by Norman MacLean.
Because we used half a tank of gas on our ‘commute’ yesterday, N. also filled up the tank.
A day in the life.
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According to the travel gods, the one thing a visitor to Glacier National Park must do — if she did nothing else — was drive the Going-to-the-Sun Road. This was the same Going-to-the-Sun Road that led to our campground in Apgar and the very same that ran — pitted, rocky and unpaved — the length of McDonald Lake, all nine miles of it.
So, in the interests of the health and safety of our little home, we took the long way around, US Route 2 south and east, around the boundary of the national park into the Blackfeet Indian Reservation — not a hardship since we knew we would get full bars of 5G cell signal around the town of Browning and big sky views. And then, Route 89 north to Saint Mary and the east entrance of Glacier National Park.
The drive on the Going-to-the-Sun Road began with the road following the western edge of Saint Mary Lake, flanked by snow-covered peaks. We stopped by a few lookout points that allowed for different views of the lake-mountain combinations. Another stop gave us views of the Wild Goose Island, a tiny rocky outcropping that looked like a baby mountain growing — with greenery and trees — in the middle of the lake.
Around Sun Point, we got out of the van and hiked first into the rocky outcropping and then to the Baring Falls and the Sunrift Gorge Overlook. New and more interesting to us were the trees that had burned during a wildfire a couple of decades ago: the dead trees looked almost as if they were made of silver metal, gray and shiny and sleek, in contrast to the new growth, vibrant and green.
Soon we left Saint Mary Lake behind and continued on the Going-to-the-Sun Road. An interpretive plaque by the National Park Services by Jackson Glacier — the only one in the park that can be viewed from the road — informed visitors the depressing news that Glacier National Park now had only 26 named glaciers, from a high of 80 in 1850.
The road continued to Logan Pass, the highest point in the park reachable by car and situated along the Continental Divide. While I went to the Visitor’s Center to stamp my journal, N. wandered around to take photos and ended up witnessing a merry band of big horned sheep entertaining the delighted crowds in the parking lot. As I driving out of the parking lot, one even seemed to be posing for N. and his camera. We had just another 20 miles or so to go on this sunny road. Then, the plan was to turn around, retrace our steps to the entrance at Saint Mary, and drive around the boundaries of the park to Apgar. We had sunlight until about 9:30 pm, so there was plenty of time.
Like Jekyll and Hyde, though, the Going-to-the-Sun Road suddenly transformed into a different beast. Whereas the eastern portion had been all calm-lakes-with-mountain-views, the western portion from Logan Pass became a steep, tortuous beast of a road. (Several signs and notices warned visitors that vehicles longer than 21-feet or taller than 10 feet were prohibited between Logan Pass and Avalanche Creek.) The fact that the speed limit was 25 mph was an ominous sign. In our direction, the road went downhill — to our right was the rocky mountainside, so close that we flipped our right side mirror in so that I wouldn’t scrape and lose it, like an eraser rubbed against a rock; to our left was the eastbound, uphill-going cars. Beyond that, just sheer drops to everyone’s death.
By the time we got to Avalanche Creek, we had abandoned our plan to retrace our steps — there was absolutely no way I was driving on that road again, on the right side of the mountain with nothing but a few rocks to prevent rolling the van into the abyss.
We drove slowly through the pitted, rocky and unpaved portion of the road along McDonald Lake — all nine miles of it, which weren’t as bad as we feared — and counted our lucky stars for being alive to tell the tale.
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