Episode 50 | Whitefish, MT to Bonners Ferry, ID
Back to solo. The car was quiet in a different way than it had been before Denise and Becca arrived. Not bad quiet. Just the kind of quiet that takes a few miles to settle into.
I’d dropped them at the Kalispell airport, watched them disappear through the doors, and pointed the car south and west toward Idaho. I didn’t have a rigid plan, which after a week of coordinating around three people’s preferences felt like its own kind of luxury. I wanted to get to Bonners Ferry by evening. Everything between here and there was negotiable.
Whitefish
I hadn’t planned to stop in Whitefish. I just drove through it and immediately pulled over.
It’s one of those towns that announces itself without trying very hard. A main street with actual independent businesses, a lake just outside of town with houses tucked along the shoreline, and a general energy that suggested people who live there made a deliberate choice to do so. Everyone I saw looked like they spent a significant portion of their time outdoors. I’m making a generalization. I’m comfortable with it.
Whitefish Lake is about 3,300 acres, glacier-formed, and the water is the kind of clear that makes you briefly consider whether your life is set up correctly. There’s a city beach, some picnic tables, the mountains visible in most directions. I drove around as much of the lake as the road allowed and thought, not for the first time on this trip, that I could live here. Probably not in February, when it’s 11 degrees and feels like negative two and they’re expecting snow two out of the next five days. But in August, absolutely.
There’s also an Amtrak station in Whitefish on the Empire Builder line, which runs from Chicago to Seattle through the northern Rockies. I’ve been cataloging train routes I want to take someday on this trip, and that one went on the list.
Lake Koocanusa
From Whitefish I picked up Highway 37, which runs along the edge of Lake Koocanusa through the Kootenai National Forest, and spent the better part of an hour driving a road that I was not expecting to be that beautiful.
The name is a combination of Kootenai, Canada, and USA, which is straightforward enough once you know it and completely impenetrable before you do. The lake stretches about 90 miles along the Montana-British Columbia border, formed by the Libby Dam on the Kootenai River. The road hugs one side of it with the forest thick on the other, and on a clear August afternoon the water is that particular shade of deep blue-green that stops being a color and starts being a feeling.
I pulled over for a picnic somewhere along the stretch. There was nobody else there. Just the lake, the trees, the sound of nothing much happening. After the crowds of Yellowstone and Glacier, the sensation of being genuinely alone in a beautiful place felt almost startling.
I bored myself talking into the camera at one point and stopped. Sometimes the right response to a landscape is silence.
The North Side Bed and Breakfast, Bonners Ferry
A travel creator named Alice Ford, who I’d met at a conference earlier in the year, had recommended a bed and breakfast in Bonners Ferry housed in an old schoolhouse. That was enough for me.
The North Side Bed and Breakfast is exactly what it sounds like, which is to say it’s a former school building converted into guest rooms, each named after some aspect of its previous life. I stayed in the music room, which also happened to be the principal’s office. I sat in there that evening thinking about how many kids had sat across from that desk in some degree of trouble, and whether any of them had ever imagined a travel photographer from Florida would be sleeping there fifty years later.
The proprietor gave me a full tour when I checked in, a little of the history, a little of her family’s connection to the place, and a list of waterfalls in the area. That last part was the most useful thing anyone had told me all week. As someone who will detour significantly for a good waterfall, I went to bed with a plan.
A Note from the Principal’s Office
I want to say something that I recorded sitting in that room, because I think it deserves to land on the page.
Somewhere in the process of reviewing footage and editing these videos, you start to second-guess yourself. Did I capture enough? Did I tell the story right? Was I too focused on the camera when I should have just been present?
Traveling with Denise and Becca through Wyoming, Yellowstone, and Glacier was the best part of this whole season, maybe of this whole project. And I’m not sure I recorded enough of it to prove that. The photo that choked me up on Going-to-the-Sun Road, the birthday dinner in Jackson, the s’mores with bees crashing the party, the horseback ride I couldn’t film and didn’t need to. None of that fits neatly into a video.
But I’ll remember that month. I’ll remember it more clearly than most things I’ve done in my life with a camera in my hand, and that’s not a knock on the camera. It’s just the truth about what happens when the people you love are standing in front of something beautiful.
The footage is already there. It’s already in my head.
On to the waterfalls. On to Wallace. On to Idaho.
