PHOTOBOMB: Chilling Out at Glacier National Park – Part Two

“Sure, when Mr. Freeze makes ice puns it’s peak comedy, but when I do it I’m iced out? That’s cold, dude.”

Hello, once again! It’s been a few, ahem, eventful weeks, yes, but I have finally returned with the long-promised PART TWO of the tale of my time at Glacier National Park, the recounting of which was initially supposed to be in brief but has now turned into something of an extravaganza, it would seem. Perhaps I am destined to be a travel writer, after all? It seems that that’s what gets me writin’ juices flowing the most these days, apparently. Whatever the hell that means.

Now, I don’t really remember what I last talked about in part one, and I’m not really going to go back in time to try and figure it out, but I know that I roughly split these posts up to cover the first three days of the trip in part one and the last three days of the trip in part two. And although this is part two, I feel it necessary to mention a few things that I had neglected to discuss in the first post regarding the first three days.

[Insert generic nature photo that could be from any day so as not to ruin the illusion of continuity here]

For one, we accidentally crashed someone’s wedding proposal at Grinnell Lake by taking too fucking long on the rocks, so there was that. For two, Cheyenne and I also got left behind by the boat back across the lake, twice, but still managed to get ourselves back to safety before we were hit by a torrential downpour that lasted all of a half an hour. And for three, that later evening after we had gone white-water rafting and horseback riding and shopping in the gift town (this was not just a simple giftshop, mind you, this was a whole fucking town dedicated to gifts; West Glacier has one export and it is huckleberry-flavored schlock and kitsch that of course I bought several of), we played uno and skipped stones on the lake and collected rocks and then went to a star-gazing interpretive program, hosted by people who worked for NASA. And it was kind of weird! Just because our guides may be brilliant astronomers does not necessarily make them skilled interpreters. Although I think my group would back me up on that, I still don’t want to throw too much shade at the National Park Service or the very friendly NASA volunteers who were definitely not holding us as laser-point. So let it be enough in saying that we attended a powerpoint presentation about ten ways the universe can kill us without warning and then immediately segued into staring at said universe, with little connection or direction or deflection between them. I was rather dumbfounded not just by the interpretational oddity of the whole thing, but also by how ball-bustingly existential this late-night family-friendly all-ages stargazing program was. Just thought I’d make a note of that. For posterity’s sake.

This could be straight out of the Smokies and you’d have no idea!

Although perhaps there is a reason for me to bring it up, because it segues rather nicely, as perhaps the stars did not, into my fourth point of return. The driving! The reason we did not stay late at the astronomy program wasn’t actually because of the not-quite-hostile powerpoint presentation we were treated to ahead of time, but actually the fact that, from where the stargazing program was, it was about an hour and a half drive back to our motel and Nick’s mattress on the floor. As you can probably guess, the stars only come out at night, the bastards, so it was already late, and these roads are slow and uncomfortable at the best of times. And it was that way everywhere we went! It was like an hour’s drive to get to anywhere in the fucking pack. Sometimes two or three hours, depending on where we were going. And the roads are windy, never more than sixty miles per hour (and that’s pushing it), and often drop off to steep cliff faces. Plus you have to worry about the wildlife, because bears can and will throw themselves at you like a speedy dodgeball. And they did! We genuinely had a bear not walk, not run, but leap across the road in front of us, while all concerned parties were traveling at reasonably high speeds. It was thrilling and also terrifying. These bears do not fuck around, and neither do the roads. At one point, I drove on what could best be described as loose rock that likely existed on a map somewhere in the annals of the department of transportation’s “to do” list, but in reality was just a death trap where the thin line between safety and untimely demise was demarcated by oversized orange cones. Mr. Paul, one of our traveling companions, presumably screamed the entire time. He was in the other car, though, so that’s their problem.

I have since forgotten the name of this lake, but you could probably call it “piss lake” and you’d be just as likely to guess the actual name. It’s probably Avalanche Lake or something, to be honest.

But enough of that! What did we actually do for those last handful of days, besides collectively tighten our buttholes while going around 90-degree turns while listening to Paul Simon’s hallmark 1986 “Graceland” album on repeat? Well, we hiked a bit! That lake up there is one that we hiked to, and as the picture mentions, I don’t remember the name of it anymore. But it doesn’t matter, really, because it was a cool lake and a cool hike and did you know that the valleys between the mountains in Glacier actually constitute a temperate rainforest? I think that’s pretty neat! And did you also know that these trails are some of the most crowded fucking places around? You can’t spit on these trails without hitting someone in the back of the head. At one point we literally could not get enough of a break between other hikers to take a piss without being stepped on.

There’s a normal rule of thumb that if you go to a national park and get more than a mile from the parking lot, you’re liable to see about 90% fewer people. Not here. Nope. I’m sure the fact that since the park is so remote and just about the only thing to do is hike means that it attracts visitors of a certain more adventurous quality, compared to your average day-trippers or families with children at the Smokies or Acadia or what have you, but hot damn! I have never been in so remote a place and yet so surrounded by people. Every five minutes, you pass someone, they pass you, or you hit some poor schmuck going the other way. It’s great at keeping grizzly bears away, sure, because, once again, these bears do not fuck around, but you know what else it keeps away? Every other kind of animal. Wildlife was scarce on our trip. Except, ironically, for the sides of roads. Where, you know, two-ton metal cans on rubber wheels go zooming past with a sound of thunder. Because that makes sense. Say, mother bear, would you rather shit in the woods today, or on the side of this freeway? Well, good heavens, dear father bear, the freeway, of course. The forest is so last season.

It did let us con just about everyone into taking our photos for us, though. An endless supply of over-eager phototakers, just for us. *Mmmmm, tasty*.

But we did hike up to the lake, take a whole bunch of pictures, and then hike down to a short natural-history boardwalk, with signposts about the kinds of trees and what have you. I do remember the name of that one. It was called “Trail of the Cedars,” because I think everyone decided one day that every park west of the continental divide needs a natural history boardwalk named “Trail of the [insert generic plant here].” I swear, Olympic has one, Yellowstone has one, Yosemite probably has one, Glacier definitely has one, you see the picture here? Not that it’s a bad thing, of course, I’m an absolute sucker for boardwalk interpretive hikes. A short one-mile loop with facts about trees genuinely and unironically gets me more excited than most other things at this point in my life. But no one else seems to have a love for them like I do, because we never spend very much time on them. Ah, well, it is hard when you have to drive an hour just to get to the next activity.

The next activity this time being skipping rocks once more on the shores of Lake McDonald, and eating a fancy dinner in the fancy mountain lodge. I do want to stress how gorgeous the several lodges in the park are. I adore parkitecture, perhaps because on some deep level I want to be a rustic architect or some sort of woodsman, but these places are just next level pretty. Although I do have to wonder at the level of, ah, internalized culture appropriation on display. I mean, it doesn’t take an expert to look at this stuff with a critical eye and marvel at how the hell did they get away with this? The lodge literally wears its meaning on its sleeve. Yes, we have conquered the wilderness, turned its majesty into a commodity made for men, but just white men, because we also conveniently removed the indigenous peoples and turned their culture into a chandelier. I don’t think I could come up with a better symbol of the genocide of America’s indigenous peoples than these fucking lodges, and they are right in your face about it.

Perhaps there is some redeeming factor in knowing that what was once an exclusively wealthy, white, and predominantly male enterprise has now been overturned to the public in the form of the National Park Service. I think the liberation of these lodges from some sort of status of wealth into a slightly more equitable status of wealth is at least a step in the right direction. Has the parks service still got a way to go in making these things accessible to everyone? Yeah. But at least in the meantime, this lodge now plays the Mamma Mia! album on repeat in the banquet hall, so I guess we’re getting somewhere. Not, like the ABBA versions or anything. Just the movie versions. In case you were wondering.

But following that dinner we drove back to our motel, and on the way stopped at one of the only places with internet service in the park, one of the visitor centers near a park entrace. We did this because one of our travelers had homework for a class, one of us had to make business calls, and some of us wanted to play the lottery. Hey, this was that massive billion-dollar pot back then, and you can’t win if you don’t play. But we also sat and watched the birds, and were treated to a lovely display of a nesting osprey and a juvenile cowbird that apparently did not know how to eat seeds and instead got super friendly with us to trick us into giving him our precious beans. Nice try, bird, but I’m wise to your games already. Cheyenne and I got way too attached to this helpless, stupid, stupid bird, and we even left it some water and seeds I had collected from nearby grasses. Oh, we also saw a moose on the way, a buck with a full set of antlers, so that was crazy! Turns out the sphincter-clenching road was worth something, after all.

There was a baby up there, and it did shit over the side, which was the highlight of the evening for me. Also, he says: “PEEEEEEEEEP”

RIP this bird. Nature selects for survival, you idiot. *Learn to eat*. *sobs*

You can’t really tell that this is a moose, but I promise you, watching it was quite amoosing.

The following day was kind of a low-key one, after our days of busting our asses hiking, rafting, horsing, and, uh, shopping. We stopped in East Glacier Park, the town our hotel is in, and got some coffee and were politely told to fuck off by a nearby sign. We pet the street dogs, one of the principal attractions of the gas station across the train tracks from our motel. We also stopped in Browning, one of the largest towns on that side of the park and one of the largest towns in the Blackfeet Tribal Reservation, and poked around in some shops with the intention of supporting local businesses. Take that how you will. We tried our best. We also spent part of the morning at the Museum of the Plains Indian, which is just kind of a… weird place. I don’t have any pictures of the museum or the stuff in it because, you know, I would feel a tad bit uncomfortable displaying what may or may not be stolen cultural artifacts, but even then, it’s just kind of… bizarre? Like, there is a clear line in the museum where you can tell the difference between what’s been updated by the modern curator (who is an enrolled member of the tribe) and what hasn’t been touched since the 1940’s when the place opened. I don’t know how the Blackfeet feel about the place, and I don’t know how I feel about it, either, but hey, the modern exhibits are pretty neat!

The operative sign here is the bottom one. I’ll let you figure out why.

You’ve seen street sharks, now try… STREET DOGS!

The rest of the day was spent relaxing on Lake McDonald once again, a place that kind of became our go-to spot, it had seemed. We shopped, wandered around the gift town, and more excitingly, paddle-boarded around on the lake. The view was spectacular, of course, being able to see up the lake into this massive mountain valley, and the water was so clear and blue from the glaciers that I saw a fish and was able to follow it but never get quite close enough to catch it with my hands. You could see probably thirty feet straight down into the water, which was slightly terrifying but not really because the largest thing in that lake is Gary from room 213 of the Lake McDonald lodge. We even managed to get some pictures of us on the lake!

Those mountains are like twenty miles away, too. It’s crazy.

I knocked her in the water a few times, and stole her boat, because I am a menace to society.

Now, if you will, a second story in pictures:

For once, it was not me who was the menace, but Nick.

They really had us in the first half, not gonna lie.

My toes were just as confused as I was. Also significantly flatter after that.

The bigger they are, the harder they falafel.

So we finished up paddleboarding, eventually, and followed it up by more shopping and eating some of the best food I’ve genuinely ever had. For whatever reason, the two hotels just outside of West Glacier Park have some amazing chefs, and I got this fancy tortellini dish that was just incredible. Nick got a salad with spirals made of vegetables. Cheyenne had an apple salad that was probably a whole apple they had just shredded before serving. It was wild. We also played mini golf, sneaking in for the last round right before the place closed. None of us are any good at mini golf, and although we kept score, we were all pretty embarrassed by our scores at the end, and that was with the cheating. We cheated a lot. Well, technically, Nick and I cheated a lot on behalf of everyone else, including ourselves, and it was still pretty rough. But Nick did get a whole in one on the second, entirely unrelated coked-out bear in the town, and earned himself a free scoop of huckleberry ice cream in the process. Which we never got to claim because the place closed right before we got there. Typical.

Barn owl has to say “AAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH”

We are connoissuers of mini golf, and have never quite had a chance to play in a place so grand.

I can still hear it. Laughing at me. Mocking me. *It haunts me*, from afar, this second coked-out bear. Its murmuring never ceases.

Of course, the street dogs were back, too.

Speaking of huckleberries, that shit was all over the place. Everything had a huckleberry flavoring. There was huckleberry soda, huckleberry ice cream, huckleberry pie, huckleberry candles, huckleberry hand soap, huckleberry honey, huckleberry syrup, huckleberry licorice, huckleberry this that and the other, you can probably find huckleberry lube if you looked hard enough. Literally anything that can be flavored or scented, a huckleberry version of it exists, I can almost guarantee it. I don’t even understand why! Like, it’s a nice flavor, very sweet and fruity, but it isn’t that unique of a flavor. I like it! But it isn’t my favorite thing in the world. Maybe it’s the novelty of it that’s so attractive, because, even though huckleberries can grow all over the place (at least that’s what Mark Twain wants me to believe, I guess), you only really find them in the northwestern part of the US. And they’re rare, too, some lady was telling us that she bought a gallon of them for eighty dollars to make a pie. EIGHTY DOLLARS! Fuck, these bears don’t know what they’re doing, eating that kind of a profit. But either way, it is my conjecture that huckleberries make up the primary business venture for half of Wyo-, I mean Montana. There was a store that only sold huckleberry-related things in West Glacier. And I mean that literally. I don’t think I saw an actual single, living huckleberry the entire damn time we were there. Just things flavored with them.

The final day of our journey was made up of a trek into one of the northernmost portion of the park, the north fork roads, or something like that. I don’t remember the name, to be honest with you. But by trek, I don’t mean we hiked up there. I mean more that we drove up there, going around the entire park because it was still somehow faster than driving through it, and then taking dusty, dirt roads into what you can call a “town” but really is more of a general store, hotel, and collection fo houses. That’s right, we got up into Polebridge! I don’t know if that means anything to anyone, but we got a real Polebridge Bear Claw, which is some sort of pastry (HUCKLEBERRY PASTRY, of course) and not a bizarro kind of new slang for a sexual position. Though if it were, it would exist on Urban Dictionary. I learned what an Alaskan Firedragon was far younger than I needed to browsing that website. Good times…

Anyway, I just wanted to briefly point out how shockingly similar these pictures are.

It is uncanny.

Anyway, while in Polebridge, we shopped (again), ate (some more), and drove (along roads). The main draw up there is, I think, the fact that it’s noticeably less crowded than the main part of the park. See, when visiting Glacier, you need a driving permit or campground reservations to get onto the Going To The Sun Road, which is, like 75% of the roads in the park. You need a different permit to get to the North Fork roads, which is, like, 20% of the rest of the roads. The remaining 5% are parking lots around the visitor centers that you can access from the state highways. Most people don’t want to bother with getting a second permit for their car, because they already had to get a driving permit, and a national park pass, and had to find a spot for the hiking trail, and had to get lunch, and someone has to pee, and STOP POKING YOUR SISTER OR I’LL TURN THIS CAR AROUND, DAMN IT! So Polebridge is a little less frequently visited. That all being said, it was still pretty damn busy, We drove down a one-lane gravel road through trees up and over a ridge, and three cars came at us coming down the road, and we got to the end and, ope, it’s just a regular old campsite. A bunch of regular people out of Whitefish, Wyntana just got off work on Friday and decided to drive up to fucking Glacier National Park for their relaxing weekend campout. A cool three hours from their houses, as my mom pointed out. You know what’s three hours from my mom’s house in Chicago? Corn. Peoria. Decatur. World’s Largest Fiberglass Statue of Abraham Lincoln. I mean, if you go north you can get to Devil’s Lake or Lake Michigan, but these people get to go on their weekend campouts to Glacier. Life just ain’t nothing but a kick in the head, huh?

Cheyenne got to pet another horse! We didn’t sit on this one!

You know what they say, the view only changes if you’re the front dog. Otherwise it’s asses all the way down. Or… or something like that.

Alright, it is pretty amazing, that’s for sure.

I can confirm that those are, in fact, mountains.

In a funny turn of events, I was going to post this cairn before last week’s cairn, but they got flip-flopped. And now it looks even more suspicious, but I swear I DID NOT BUIILD THESE. I just found them. Don’t sue me.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, but the biggest draw of Glacier is its hiking trails, and if you aren’t doing that, there’s really only so much sightseeing you can do before you stop being able to reach it by car. We kind of figured this out when we took a wrong turn and ended up about twenty miles from Canada, which I can say with a straight face because it’s true. But even when you’re just sightseeing, the views are still pretty damn majestic. That’s the thing about this place, I guess; my biggest regret from the trip isn’t anything that I did or whatever, but it’s the things we didn’t do. I would have loved to go hiking more. And it wasn’t really feasible, what with our huge group of people of varying abilities and our limited time in the park, and I’m ok with that. I really am. But it does make me want to go back, and I want to backpack some more in this place. Because if we can see all this from the road, imagine what you can see from the trails? There’s got to be even more incredible views out there, somewhere. And also more bears, probably. But even with all that we did, it was an amazing trip. From the Going To The Sun Road and the red busses, the hiking up to the snow blocking the trail to Grinnell glacier, not being able to figure what the hell is or isn’t a glacier, the fancy-ass lodges, the huckleberries, wildlife on the side of the road, white-water rafting and horseback riding, hiking up to an actual lake and around some trees, poking around in a museum and paddleboarding on the glacial lakes, and even to driving on some of the most treacherous roads I’ve even seen, we did a lot. And even all the stuff that I’m forgetting, the other things we did or saw. They were all part of a pretty incredible trip, with pretty incredible people. And I mean that. No cap.

As a means of thanks for reading through all of this and going on this journey along with me, here is one of the most special photos from our trip to Glacier, with its many ups and downs and bears in between. Hopefully they enlighten your day a little bit further. Are you ready?

Feast your eyes:

THE CHICKEN SKIER. My one other regret is not buying one of these posters.

Thank you.

Actually, as one last aside, one our last drive out of the park, an inchworm got stuck to my clothes, and I kept it on my finger and transported it all the way from the north fork to East Glacer Park, where we were staying. Here is the worm, his new home, the clouds from the final lodge we visited, and the world’s largest purple spoon (that we know of), just to round things out.

Bravely going where no worm has gone before.

Gee, I sure hope this isn’t some sort of an invasive species that’s going to wreak havoc on the local ecosystem!

The colors here aren’t edited or anything. It really looked like this. Crazy how nature do that.

Ok, now thank you for real. Thanks for reading, and I hope that this final part of the trip was worth the wait, especially to those of you who enjoyed the first half so much. Thanks for sticking around, and thanks for reading! Hopefully I’ll see you next time with whatever goofy shit I get up to next. See you around!