Episode 48 | Glacier National Park, MT
I woke up before everyone else, which was becoming a pattern, and walked down the hill to the edge of the property. The fog had settled into the fields below the cabin overnight and the sky above it was doing something with color that I had no business complaining about. Cotton candy pastels, the kind of light that photographers set alarms for and then miss anyway because the alarm doesn’t go off. I got lucky. I stood there for a while with the audio recorder, then remembered there was highway noise just over the ridge and put it away.
Some mornings you just watch. Today was going to be a big one.
Going-to-the-Sun Road
I’m not going to oversell this. The name does enough of the work on its own.
Going-to-the-Sun Road is the single paved road that crosses Glacier National Park east to west over Logan Pass. It’s open only a couple of months a year, the window determined by how long it takes the snowplows to clear it, and you need a reservation to drive it during peak season. We had one. I’d been looking forward to it since I put it on the itinerary.
What I wasn’t prepared for was how consistently spectacular it would be for the entire length of the drive. There’s no warm-up section. It doesn’t ease you into the scenery. You enter the park and it’s immediately doing everything it has. The road climbs along the edge of the mountain with the valley dropping away below you and the peaks rising above, waterfalls coming off the rock face, wildflowers at the roadside, mountain goats occasionally just standing on the shoulder like they pay rent up there.
I had action cameras running most of the drive. I was also just looking out the window. Both felt necessary and neither felt sufficient.
We stopped for lunch somewhere along the road, pulled out the cooler, found a spot with a view that would have made a reasonable person cry. I asked Denise and Becca, somewhere in the middle of sandwiches, whether they’d thought about the fact that we were eating lunch in grizzly bear country. They had not. The plan, as established, was to walk away from the table and let him have the lunch. Solid strategy. We kept eating.
The Photo That Got Me
There was a moment I want to try to describe, though I’m not sure I can do it justice.
I had my camera up and I caught Becca in the foreground taking a photo through the car window, and Denise out of the car doing the same with her phone. Both of them completely absorbed in what they were seeing, completely present in a place I’d brought them to, on a trip that started as my own solo project and turned into something else entirely.
I’m not an emotional person in the conventional sense. But that one got me. I sat with it for a minute before I said anything to anyone.
Denise has also been quietly taking some really good shots on her iPhone, which I say with genuine respect and only a small amount of professional embarrassment.
Lake McDonald and the Antique Store
We came down off the pass and stopped at Lake McDonald, which sits at the western end of the park and is the kind of clear, cold, glacier-fed lake that makes you want to sit on a rock and do nothing productive for several hours. The water is famous for its colorful rounded stones on the bottom, blues and greens and reds visible through the clarity.
Denise and Becca went into an antique store called, appropriately, Antiques A Lot and More. I stayed in the parking lot reviewing footage from the action cameras and discovered that watching Going-to-the-Sun Road on a phone screen in a parking lot while the right music is playing is genuinely moving. I’ll figure out what to do with that for the video.
Inside the antique store: a bag of fresh huckleberries for $94. For reference, that is ninety-four dollars. For huckleberries. We did not buy the huckleberries. We bought the huckleberry jam.
Becca’s Thrift Haul
I should mention that Becca had been doing reconnaissance at consignment shops since Bozeman, and this episode gave her the floor to present her findings. She knew what she was looking for. She had a methodology. She talked about single-stitch versus double-stitch construction on vintage t-shirts, which apparently indicates actual age, and I learned something. She bought western pants, a Phoebe Buffet vest, vintage Montana greeting cards, and a small tea set intended primarily as a dish for her cat Wendy’s treats. I bought Huckleberry jam. I also briefly wanted a hammer but couldn’t find one I liked.
We are different people.
Dinner, Twice
Back at the Pioneer Cabin we grilled out on the patio. Steaks, hot dogs, the whole production. It was going well until the bees returned, apparently with a grudge from the Bozeman picnic incident, and relocated us inside. We waited them out. We returned outside. We made s’mores over the grill and argued constructively about the correct roasting technique. The train that runs through the valley below added atmosphere. Nobody burned anything beyond the edges of a marshmallow.
It was a good day. One of the best of the whole trip.
