Glacier National Park

It's hard to find words in English that capture Montana. On my first and only previous visit here over 30 years ago, I fell hard for this state. Its vistas weaken the knees and make you gasp. Today was all about gasping with weak knees.

First a nice surprise. The charge for spending 7 days or so meandering through Glacier is typically $25, but for an additional $10 you get a year's pass to all the national parks. Why wouldn't I? An observant (and sort of brave) young lady asked if perhaps I qualified for the senior pass for those over 55, which I obviously do. For a total of $10 I got a lifetime pass to all the national parks. Neat.

After getting the usual maps and a pamphlet on safety information about bears ("make plenty of noise"), I visited the rangers' office for guidance. We agreed that with the forecast for foul weather Saturday in the Eastern part of the park it would be good to see that today and save the rest for tomorrow and perhaps Sunday.

The snow started as I drove around the mountain to Saint Mary, and it spat snow or rain off and on all day.  There seems to be a circuit that gets completed when my speedometer touches 60mph, setting off one kind of precipitation or another. That's been going on for a couple of days.

Kate's suggestion of driving the Going-to-the-Sun Road was a great one. Despite the poor visibility, it's a truly amazing trip. The road is closed in its midsection, so I could get just to Logan Pass, where I took this shot of Jackson Glacier (I never saw a glacier before, and you probably can't see this one very well, but it's in the V between and among the clouds), and had a grey wolf skulking 20 yards away pointed out to me by a couple of young fellows who were also looking at the glacier.

I saw several significant trains on the drive, paralleling the highway and approaching 100 cars long. I noticed that the first one that passed had two cabooses, which I later realized were two locomotives at the back end matching another two at the front. No chance to be a little engine that could out here.

This photo is of the brilliantly green Flathead River beside  railroad tracks that are emerging from a tunnel through the mountain. The tracks are variously beside and below the highway, cutting through the mountains the highway climbs and descends.

The highways have rumble strips down the middle instead of at the shoulder, which must say something about the tendency to look at the scenery instead of the road. I did see one of those markers of a highway fatality (red posts with white crosses that I mentioned in an earlier post). This one had 9 crosses. It was pretty obvious what had happened.

It was just starting to snow here in Kalispell when I returned this evening, despite a temperature of 59 degrees. 

The third photo is for my editor friends. Look closely at the sign over the door of the building on the left. (Jonathan has a hilarious comment about errors of possession that escapes me.) There will always be a need for us, even among those who don't know it.