PHOTOBOMB: Chilling Out at Glacier National Park – Part One

“HAH chilling out! I GET IT! *wheezes and cries*”

You knew this one would be coming, right? I mean, between last week or those other posts back in June, you knew this was gonna be next! So, did you guess it? Did you say to yourself, “hey, I remember that kid I know from high school/adult man-child I know from college/slightly larger adult man-child I know from blood relations is on a trip right now.” Did you, in passing, idly think about what next kind of maddening ravings I would spew forth from my alcove between the lakes, and perhaps glance upon the possibility that it would be more photographs from a trip to dog-knows what part of the country? Then if so, congratulations! You won another round of predicting the future based on past trends and available data. Your prize? An elongated Instagram post!

By now, I have almost entirely forsaken that Zuckerberg-fueled mind trap not because of some sort of ethical stance or conscientious objection, but more because I can’t be bothered to relearn it every six months when it updates the posting structure. I’ll stick with my blog instead, where I understand everything that happens and why. Except for when I can’t turn ads off of certain pages. That will confound me until the day I die, apparently.

But enough of that! Onto the trip itself! Or perhaps off of the trip itself, because I’m, you know, back off of it. I am no longer in the great state of Wyo- err, Montana. I have left Glacier National Park after spending seven days there, and the way things are going, it will just be “Big Fucking Rock” National Park by the next time I get there because all the glaciers are disappearing at an alarming rate! Because of climate change, of course. Why else? You don’t really think the sun is getting hotter, do you? Anyway, you might as well call it “Climate Change National Park” or “Monument to Our Sins National Park” or something else like that because we went specifically to see the glaciers before they are gone, and they are basically already nonexistent. Isn’t living in a pre-apocalyptic dystopia exciting?

Like I said, my mom picked this trip for us to go on specifically because we wanted to see the glaciers before they are totally gone. And they are almost totally gone by now. But here’s the problem; I don’t know what the fuck a glacier is. Like, yeah, I know that deep down they’re huge chunks of ice that can act more like landmasses than frozen water, and in that national park they live on top of mountains and carve out valleys shaped like the letter U, but I couldn’t have told you if I actually saw any of them. Because it all looks like snow to me! My biggest (and perhaps only) complaint with the park is that there are minimal signs or explanations about what is a glacier and what is just snow from last winter that hasn’t melted off yet. The only thing I learned on this trip is that a glacier has to be a pocket of packed snow and ice at least 25 acres, 100 feet deep, and moving to be considered a glacier. When all the everything is just “big white fucks,” fucking anything could be a glacier. If we’re talking just “big white fucks,” I could be a glacier. But I’m not! And the national park will not clarify that for you!

So did I actually see any glaciers in Glacier National Park? Fuck all if I could tell you. But it was pretty incredible, all the same. And yes, there is something heartbreaking and unsettling about visiting a park that is actively dying, something disappointing about seeing the last vestiges of once majestic forces as they crumble to nothing by our doing. There’s something truly eerie about driving a car through valleys that were once carved out by titans so powerful they could control the very mountains themselves, and yet those same mountains are now playing as the eternal tombs to those frostbitten giants. Not a trace of ice will be left at the height of summer in one hundred years in Glacier National Park. And once those glaciers are gone, I suspect it will be much, much drier in those lush mountain valleys. This was not a vacation. This was a death vigil.

Did I think about it all that much while I was there? Fuck no. I’ll admit, I did not actually consider the implications of what I was seeing while I was there. We discussed it, yes, but in passing. Maybe it’s willful ignorance. Maybe the magnitude of what I’m witnessing was too great to truly comprehend that close-up, like trying to sketch an elephant while your head is in its ass. Or maybe I just wanted to enjoy my vacation. And I did! I did, well and truly, enjoy my vacation, even though travel can be stressful at times. Especially at the collapse of empires both human and icicle.

It was a fun trip! My mom picked it out and put it together with a special surprise guest, a family friend of hers! Yes, the trip was my mom, Nick, Cheyenne (her first trip with my family! Despite our best efforts, she survived!), and myself, but we were also joined a small gaggle of family friends and companions, some of which I had not seen in five years, and another of which was new to me entirely. My family, back in the before times, would travel like a pack of wild dogs, in groups of ten, fifteen, twenty, sometimes more (that is not an exaggeration) and we would go on vacations and take up entire motels. For the first time in a while, we were joined by a group of people that we used to travel with. And it was fun! Although I have gotten a taste for solo travel or travel with just one or two, I do miss traveling with a posse.

Now, I am still wary of posting the faces and names of people I’m close-to-but-not-close-enough-to because of privacy concerns and whatnot, so most of the selections here will be avoiding both names and faces, but you’ll get the idea. Just imagine any set of pictures with five or six other people hovering around nearby, just out of frame. Probably bickering about who pees the most.

For our trip, we flew into Great Falls, Wyom- Montana, and rented a car to drive to East Glacier Park, a small town that we stayed in for the entirety of the trip. I was quite interested to learn that the entire eastern boundary of the park butts up to the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, while the entire northern boundary of the park butts up to Canada. I mean, let’s be real here, it’s all tribal land when you get down to the nitty-gritty, but it was still interesting to me as a geography nerd. We stayed in a little motel in town, though, and drove into the park from there every day. And we sure as hell made use of that drive every day.

One of the first things we did at Glacier was take a Red Bus tour up and down the Going to the Sun road, a road which is neither going anywhere nor the sun. These big red buses have supposedly been operated unfalteringly since the 1930’s to take tourists around the park’s most scenic (and accessible) locales, but I have my doubts that they operated between 1941 and 1945. They have open tops and large windows so that you can get the best view of the park possible, and they even stop from time to time so you can get out to take pictures, gawk at the scenery, and offend the local wildlife. It’s a pleasant experience, overall.

Along the Going to the Sun Road and for reasons I am unclear on, my favorite parts where the Bird Woman Falls and The Loop. Bird Woman Falls is not the most picturesque location in the park (though it is very picturesque anyway), nor is it the easiest to photograph. And yet, I was drawn to it each time we drove past it. I don’t know why. I think the symmetry and distinct layering of the mountains appeals to me in some way. But The Loop is an easy reason; we kept seeing mountain goats there the whole time. Big white fucks, they are. But not glaciers.

The Hemorrhoid-Red buses also brought us to and from several of the Glacier lodges. They’re all a cross between an enormous mountain resort and swiss chalet, they’re all breathtakingly beautiful (if you’re into European architecture), and they all give off a The Shining vibe. Because how could they not? Look at that shit and tell me it doesn’t scream at night. They’re also rented out about thirteen months in advance, so we never even had a chance to get a room in any of them. Oh, well. I didn’t want to be murdered by Jack Nicholson anyway.

Anyway, I see you!

Traveling by vehicle for the large majority of this trip did give me an ample amount of time to fine-tune my binocular skills, and hopefully get better photos of wildlife. The downside of this is that, as a child, I refused to play sports and tried to eat my hands and therefore never actually developed the fine motor control necessary for holding binoculars still for any length of time. The upshot of this being that a) I can never be an Army sniper like David Boreanaz, and b) binoculars become useless unless whatever I’m looking at holds very very still. Great for landscapes! Not so good for moving targets.

That bear up there is, in fact, a black bear, by the way. You can tell because of the way it is.

We also did some hiking! Not nearly as much as I would have liked, of course, but enough to whet my palette and make me want to come back for more. Of the 734 miles of trails in Glacier Naitonal Park, we did approximately…. ten of them? Fifteen? Do you count going back down the same trail as a new trail or is it just the same one again? If I had my way, I would have had us lugging all our earthly possessions and great-grandpa’s ashen remains over the peaks and under the valleys until we reached enlightenment on the other side, but it’s for the best we didn’t go all the far. Because, let’s be honest here, COVID has not been kind to my figure. I gained quite a bit more than the “COVID 19” these last few years.

For the first part of the trip, we hiked up to Grinnell glacier, or at least we hiked as far as we could before the trail was too covered in snow to continue. Yes, the trails still have snow in late July. Yes, it seems counter-intuitive that the glaciers are melting but there’s still snow all over the place like some sort of dandruff off God’s scalp. Yes, climate change is still real. Facts don’t care about your feelings.

The hike was definitely a tad more grueling than the “mildly strenuous” description in my mother’s guide book made it out to be, but it was pretty damn worth it to get a view of the glacial lake backed by the mountains and the waterfalls. Of course, we did not actually see the glacier itself because the angle of viewing made it impossible to see from anywhere except right fucking in front of it, but who’s mad about that? Me? No, I’m not mad. You’re mad. Mad the stupid fucking mountain was in the way. Piece of shit rocks. Fuck that. What the fuck’s a glacier?

And now a brief intermission for a story in still images:

We now return to our regularly scheduled nonsense. Thank you for taking the time out of your day to participate in this voluntary exercise as part of your compulsory programs.

The chaos of this next photo gets better the longer you stare at it:

We had time for other extracurricular activities, of course. Like eating! We ate a lot on this trip. Like, a ton. I gained probably three pounds over the course of this vacation to the rugged, hardy mountains of Wy- Montana. That’s not supposed to happen! “That’s not possible!” I say to my stomach. “Why not, you stupid bastard?” it says in return. Although riding horses through several stages of successional coniferous forest is a great study in ecosystem evolution over time, and while some light white water rafting and associated water-based trust exercises are more than enough to get your blood pumping, they don’t exactly shave off the pounds. But that’s not what vacation is about! It’s about fun. And being thin enough to still ride the horses without them giving out on their stupid little stick legs. I may have been gifted the largest horse they had, but hey, a win’s a win.

Shopping doesn’t take the pounds off, either, unless you do an excessive amount of it. Unfortunately, we did not do an excessive amount of shopping, but we did enough to legally consider ourselves as “consumers,” for legal purposes. We fulfilled our mandatory American Consumer’s Index quota for the time being, is what I’m saying. We supported capitalism and helped frighten away the commies for long enough that Xi Jinping is mildly sweating somewhere. We supported our local corporated-owned businesses and the stray National Park Foundation store. And we did it all under the watchful eye of this coked-out grizzly bear statue standing intimidatingly beyond the storefront. Birds are government surveillance drones, you say? Nah, man. Bears are where it’s at.

But, alasalad, all good things must come to an end. Sort of! The good news is that the trip isn’t over yet, I’ve still got one whole post’s worth of photos to squirt out onto my keyboard. The bad news is that it’s eleven PM and I have work tomorrow morning, and I no longer have the brain function of an alert owl and have instead downgraded to disappointing robin. So, good evening to you all, and thanks for reading about what I did at Glacier National Park over these first three-or-so days of our trip. There’s so much to do in the park, I don’t want to say we did it all, but we did a lot. And I’ve still got more to share. Hopefully, it’s worth reading! And hopefully, my readers are not just the CCP.

Thanks for reading, and see you next week with Part Two!