The mountain stayed in the cloud
At the top of Going-to-the-Sun Road we could see the far edge of the parking lot and nothing past it. Cloud sat on Logan Pass the whole time we were up there, wet and moving, cold enough in August that we kept our hands inside our sleeves. Big had been waiting on this drive for a week. The high point of the road had nothing to give him but weather.
We got up there on seats that were not ours. The shuttle to Logan Pass is ticketed through Recreation.gov, and when we looked, every seat on it was gone. We went to the visitor center desk and asked anyway, on the theory that asking costs nothing. Nobody holding tickets for that run had turned up. We rode standby, four of us, on other people’s places. The van stayed down at the bottom, which on that road is its own small relief.
We rode back down through the same cloud. The mountains stayed where they were.
We had three nights at Fish Creek, on the west side, near the foot of Lake McDonald. It rained on the roof both of the first two days. We had come in from Portland by way of Lewiston rather than Spokane, which added a day to the drive, and the first two days of it ran 95 degrees and higher, so we slept where we could run the air conditioning. By Columbia Falls the evenings had started to cool. Then we reached the park and it simply rained.
These valleys are Séliš, Ql̓ispé and Ktunaxa country. The land over here reads wetter, dense and green and dripping, nothing like what we were about to drive into.
You read. You go out in it and come back in it. You look up at where the road goes and you cannot see where the road goes.
The third day the sky came off the mountains, and the road paid out everything it had held back.
It was the same drive we had already made. Every rock wall and hanging valley that had been ten feet of gray two days before was a range now, running north until it quit being visible.
Then every car stopped at once. A grizzly was out in a meadow at distance, working across the open ground, paying no attention to the line of vehicles that had quit moving on its account. Traffic stopped being traffic for a while, and then it started again. Closer to Many Glacier a bald eagle sat on a piece of dead wood just off the road, over a stream, staring down into the water and not at us.
This is Amskapi Pikuni country, the Blackfeet east side, and the mountains stop here all at once against the plains instead of easing down into them.
Many Glacier Road runs about twelve miles from the junction at Babb, on the reservation, in to the hotel. Long stretches of it are washed out down to deep holes, some of them wide enough to take a whole wheel. We crawled. We passed two cars pulled over with blown tires. Erika drove it slower than the road appeared to require, which turned out to be exactly what the road required, and the van came through both directions with all four of its own tires. Then we hunted the hotel lot for a spot until one opened up.
I keep thinking about the people who had reservations at the hotel and no reservation system on the road. Pay a premium, take twelve miles of holes to get there, take it again if you want to leave for the day, and lose your parking spot when you do.
Big and Little were not up for a long hike, so we let the glacier hikes go and put the day on the water instead: the boat across Swiftcurrent Lake and Lake Josephine, the short trail between them, then the boat back.
A moose stood in the shallows with its head under, feeding, coming up and going down again while we watched from the water. Farther along, a black bear cub picked its way across the rocks at the shoreline, unhurried, and then went back into the trees and was gone. We were just on the lake at the hour they were.
We spent what was left of the afternoon at the picnic tables on the lake side of the hotel. Big went down to the water. Little went down to the water. Neither of them came back up for a long time.
Dinner was at the Ptarmigan Dining Room, inside the hotel. We were near the front of the line and got a window table, which meant the carved peaks stayed in the window through the whole meal. The food was fine. What actually happened at that table was the straw. A finger over the top end holds the liquid inside, and you can lift the straw clear of the glass and carry the liquid around in it. Big found this out and then Little found it out, and after that neither of them was at dinner in any real sense. We asked for a pause long enough for four people to eat. We got the pause. Then it went back to straws. I do not know how many times a straw can come out of a glass before it stops being worth doing. We did not reach that number.
The next day was a slow one. We moved to a campground at St. Mary, set up, and rode the bikes on the east side. At the visitor center Little was sworn in as a Junior Ranger, with the badge to match her brother’s, which is the whole reason she wanted it.
Last dinner was at the Two Sisters Cafe, north of St. Mary on US Highway 89 at Babb. Bison chili. Bread pudding and ice cream after, four spoons in one dish.
Tonight the rig is packed down at St. Mary. The bikes are on the rack. The road south toward Helena is tomorrow, and the forecast is clear.