I bid farewell to Yellowstone, at least for the moment, and drove north following the river down Paradise Valley then west through Montana on Interstate 90, cattle and Christ country. Stopped at a rest area for a break from the heavy rainstorms and discovered I was on the Lewis and Clark trail. They were the bold adventurers sent out by Jefferson in 1804 to explore the area of the new Louisiana purchase, assert US sovereignty over the native tribes and find a way through the Rockies to the Pacific. I read the book earlier on ('Undaunted Courage' by Stephen Ambrose), a good read, interesting historically and a real 'boys own' adventure. There was one young native woman who accompanied the party of around 30 men, Sacagawea, without whom they wouldn't have survived and now a legend in her own right.
The whole escapade was based on developing the lucrative trade in beaver pelts, at that time the monopoly of the British Hudsons Bay Company; the pelts were especially valuable in London and New York for men's top hats. Yes, really. The beaver's extinction in subsequent decades was avoided when population crash made the trade uneconomical and fashions changed. Now the pair are commemorated in numerous names for rivers, mountains, a national forest, plants and animals, and a quick search found Lewis and Clark college, a bridge, a brewery, a dog collar and there's a board game to relive the expedition. Sacagawea just has a statue in Portland and, true to stereotype I guess, a recent cookbook published in her name; I wonder if it includes recipes for bitterroot, on which the party survived, just about, over the first winter. The Lewis thrust fault provides evidence of the tectonic events that created the mountainscapes of Glacier National Park where I was heading next.
I'd underestimated distance, still hadn't got the scale of my road atlas, so getting tired I pulled into Butte. After checking a couple of chain motels I found Eddy's for half the price; ok a fairly bleak part of town and looking a bit worn but the bed was fine, my first real bed in three weeks, and the shower ... bliss. Had a wander around on Sunday morning. Butte, pronounced 'beaut', which it ain't, is an old mining town ... think north of England, south Wales or Fife, but copper rather than coal. It's seen better days, old pit headframes poking above the townscape, now trying to reinvent itself along heritage lines. What was once known as 'the richest hill on earth' has been dug away leaving an open cast hole, the Berkely Pit, a mile long, half a mile wide and a third deep, now filling with seriously acidic toxic water, iron rich and reddish in colour. This is one of the few places in the world where you can pay to visit a toxic waste site ... for $2 visitors can go out onto the viewing platform and ‘look down into the dark abyss’. And there's a gift shop too!
Other claims to fame include the Speculator mining disaster of 1917; some interesting labour history; the current World Museum of Mining; the highest proportion of Irish Americans of any town in the USA, their forebears attracted by the work; and the birthplace of Evel Knievel. Some grand buildings in the centre, mining company offices and banks of yesteryear; otherwise lots of Irish bars, casinos which seem to be a feature of Montana, empty shops and a lone yoga studio somehow out of place. It's a real place, fallen on tough times. The annual Evel Knievel gathering draws folk from all over the land and would be worth seeing, although Paddys day must be good too; afterwards I thought that if they combined the two, and included motorbike stunts around the ‘dark abyss’ fuelled by guinness, that would surely put the place on the map.
In contrast, my next stop was Missoula another hundred miles on, also known as 'East Portland' or the 'Boulder of Montana', it's a vibrant place, all coffee, arts, smoothies and kombucha. It was buzzing on a sunny Sunday afternoon, with a large outdoor craft market along the riverside walkway, and a happy affluent crowd, lots of strollers and students. There's a thriving music and events scene and I noticed Alice Cooper was due in town soon; amazed he's still alive. There's a famed ice cream parlour where I joined the queue, chose huckleberry flavour and sat with folk outside to watch a sleeping raccoon in the fork of a tree above, mobbed by crows; oblivious it snoozed on, waiting for dusk to mop up any leftovers. Nestled in the hills with some great hiking and cycle trails nearby, plus the Clark Fork River and a college campus, the sun shines on Missoula. However, it is downstream of the Berkely Pit, if that was ever to overflow it would seriously threaten the surfers and kayakers using the river weir here as a practice ground.
A couple of days later I'm driving through the strip malls around Hungry Horse on the way into Glacier, a gauntlet of rafting adventure outfits, quad bike trips, outfitters, motels, restaurants and a whole lot taken up with billboards praising the lord and proclaiming the second coming. Each Tuesday in the summer the Park's native plant nursery has a volunteer day and there I met up with Dawn Lafleur and some of her team to help out. The nursery grows some 120 species with close attention to conserving the genetic integrity of plants from different catchment areas of the Park. Some of the common plants, including bracken (!), they use for re-vegetating areas of heavy use like trailheads or road pullins; others are rarer species, or those under threat. There were many familiar species, either as natives or garden plants back home, including the columbines which some of us were weeding and pruning that morning.
Dawn was showing two visitors from the Glacier NP Conservancy around and they stopped to chat with a young intern who'd just started that week; the Conservancy is a non-profit group that raises money to support the Park in various ways, including funding interns. A similar fundraising partner works back in Yellowstone, Yellowstone Forever. In addition to the staff at the nursery Dawn's team includes a restoration crew who do the planting, an integrated pest management crew (non-native invasives are a big problem, plants like spotted knapweed that I was to get to know quite intimately later on), and a monitoring team. It was a busy day, with Annabel hosting a visiting school group and after lunch, Rebecca, the nursery manager, gave a talk on the orchids of the Park. Later, Levi, who's been there eight years, and I compared notes on growing aspen and juniper. One of the most important plants they grow is the whitebark pine, a keystone species of higher elevation that has suffered a 90% decline due to an introduced blister rust and beetle attack; they are collecting cones from trees with natural resistance and getting these grown on for re-planting.
I headed up into the North Fork (of the Flathead River) area of the Park and followed the deteriorating dirt road to the Bowman Lake campground, a basic site amongst the trees, angry with mosquitoes. I got talking to Steve from Arkansas who worked delivering rv's to various customers in the west and had stopped off on his way back from somewhere in Washington state. Early next morning a distant howling, either coyotes or wolves, I've not yet got my ear in. I took the trail uphill walking through a lusher forest than Yellowstone, nice flora including slipper orchids, spotted twinflower along the track, a rare plant in the Scottish pinewoods, to the treeline, with occasional whitebark pine, my destination the fire lookout cabin on the Numa Ridge at some 3000 feet above the lake.
Great views, huge Torridon-like mountains of sedimentary rocks with marked red and green strata alight in the sun. I chatted with one of the lookouts who stays up there for twelve days, then has four off, although during the main fire season it could be sixteen straight. When I asked what he did all the time I expected he’d say meditating and reading poetry, aka Kerouac, but he simply replied 'watching for fires'. It had been a really hot day and difficult to stop to rest on the trail given the mozzies so on return I braved a quick dip in the lake, glacial!
A cold night, I'm off the next morning and stop at Polebridge where the Mercantile (store) dates to the early twentieth century, a very remote spot in those days. The 'town' lies just outside the Park and claims to have fifty six residents, although quite a few more in the summer with new housing, cabins and yurts scattered around. There's a constant stream of visitors to the Mercantile, in particular to sample the famed huckleberry clawfoot, a bear paw shaped chunk of fruit pie ... very nice but would have been better hot with custard.
The next two days I spent in the West Glacier area, exploring on short hikes and taking advantage of the facilities, especially the Lake Macdonald Lodge. Built in the rustic 'Parkitechture' style, the central foyer/lounge is three storeys high, timber constructed, with twelve huge cedar trunks supporting the upper floors, balconies and roof. There's a grand stone fireplace with petroglyph carvings in the surround, where one morning an elderly mormon woman sat by the fire, dressed in black with headscarf, chatting amiably to another guest. Monumental trophies of elk and moose, a white bear skin, vast landscape paintings. A group of tourists arrived and wandered around unconcerned about the residents, taking photos. A man with a daypack sat down at the piano and played 'twinkle twinkle' and nobody told him that the instrument is reserved for guests and those with some talent at that. I like the equanimity that exists here .... this is the kind of classy place I might hesitate about going into in Britain. Here everyone feels that it's a part of their heritage, they have the right to enjoy it and are treated respectfully. Nostalgia for a bygone age of the romantic west includes a fleet of vintage red tour buses loading up outside, these dating from the 1930's with roll-back tops, driven by folk in tweedy outfits and caps of yesteryear; there was a similar yellow fleet back in Yellowstone.
Of an evening there's a programme of ranger talks in an outdoor amphitheatre overlooking the lake, and I caught one about keystone species. Think of the central stone in an arched bridge or fireplace and you'll get the idea. He was good, delivered a few gags, but lost the kids early on with some technical words. The next night was an indoor performance by Jack Gladstone a storysmith of Blackfoot heritage, a talented raconteur, singer and guitarist, telling a mix of tribal stories, animal legends and historical anecdotes. He sang about Sacagawea and also about York, the only African-American on the expedition. His songs were set to a great collection of photos including the historic paintings of Charlie Russell that I'd like to see if I'm ever in Great Falls.
The microclimate around Lake Macdonald supports an outlier of Pacific rainforest, with the Trail of the Cedars running through a cathedral grove of 500 year old western red cedars and western hemlock. There are also some stupendous black cottonwoods here, some of the largest broadleaf trees I've ever seen. Following the gorge there's an easyish walk uphill to Avalanche Lake, a huge dam of fallen timber at its outlet testifying to its name. The head of the lake is surrounded by 1000 foot cliffs, fed by waterfalls from the Sperry glacier on the shelf above. The lovely glacier lilies were now poking through the snow.
I arrived just in time to hear the last few words of a ranger who'd led a guided walk to the lake; he was saying that the glaciers in the Park, over 150 back in 1850, would all be gone by 2030 and exhorting people to act now to prevent further warming. He stopped short of castigating Trump, which is what it comes down to, restraining himself being in uniform. I'd not really considered the implications of this until I spoke with him .... reduced water flows from the mountains will mean lower levels and higher summer temperatures in the creeks and lakes, which will have a big impact on the whole aquatic ecology of the Park, including important native trout populations, which in turn will affect all the animals and birds that feed on them. The rangers are a passionate bunch and smart in their uniforms, although their authority is somewhat undermined by their hats, wide brimmed but with a domed rather than dimpled top, giving them the look of a schoolgirl outing; moreover if it rains, which it did, they have plastic showercaps which fit around the hats, a look that can only be described as parknaff.
The 'Going to the Sun Road', across the continental divide towards the east, had been finally cleared of snow, now late June, and had opened for the year a few days earlier. Unfortunately it was a day of low cloud when I drove over, nevertheless I joined the procession up around countless hairpin bends, with glimpses of towering cliffs above and beneath, great waterfalls and the forested valleys far below. At the top is the Logan Pass where at the visitor centre it was hard to find a parking spot; I moved on after a quick look, stopping for a short hike to the Apikuni Falls and then arrived to make camp at Many Glacier.
The lodge here is the grandest of them all, built in a swiss/bavarian style and sited in a spectacular setting at the foot of a lake, with what can only be described unsatisfactorily as panoramic views of the mountains. Inside, the lobby is on a vast scale, again supported by huge unpeeled logs, with a central fireplace, grand piano and a guy dressed in lederhosen attending to visitor needs. I'd had a short hike around the lake and got pretty wet in a heavy rainstorm so it was good to come in, warm up and wander around. There was a talk that evening about predators and prey, given by an enthusiastic ranger who'd worked for several summers at the Park, otherwise a teacher the rest of the year.
The ranger was leading a guided walk to Iceberg Lake the following day and I decided to join it; the trails are busy anyway and she was knowledgeable and entertaining. There were around twenty of us, including one kid with a bell on his pack; these are supposedly to alert bears but if I was a bear I'd take those folk out first. She pointed out bear scratches and back rubbings on the trees; a range of flowering plants and shrubs; higher up those red and green strata again, apparently argillites laid down in aerobic or anaerobic conditions; above us some mountain goats with kids crossing a near impossible scree slope. We crossed a couple of snowbanks and at the next she exclaimed 'watermelon snow' and prostrated herself to take a sniff; some of us followed suit and sure enough the pinkish patches smelt just like the fruit, although we were advised not to eat it. Since then I saw this elsewhere and sometimes in huge areas of distant snowfields, apparently caused by a green alga producing a secondary red compound as a kind of sunscreen.
The lake lived up to its name, in another fantastic glacial cirque backed by stupendous cliffs rising to a jagged knife edge of rock at the arete above; water aquamarine with huge blocks of ice that had fallen off the cliffs above. We stopped for lunch and I chatted to a couple of young mixed race teachers from LA; I mentioned that I'd hardly seen any black folk in the Parks and at first they went a little quiet, I thought I'd made a faux pas, but then they agreed and said that the origin of the Parks was born in a need for a racist escape from the cities. They were working to use what green spaces there are in LA to offer the kids some essential connection with nature. A group of lads arrived in t-shirts, scamping about and a couple of them dipped their heads in the water, ouch! I let folk drift off back down and as the sun came out went off to explore the marshy areas and willow scrub around the edge of the lake.
An hour later the weather suddenly turned wintery with a cold wind and rain coming through and I was glad of my waterproofs; some people hike these trails in flip flops and shorts and must get caught out. I wandered down slowly, stopping to search for the goats again; and later watched a groundhog mooching about amongst the trees. Lone hikers are not that common and I got talking to a woman from California, Tomiko, ambling on downhill together. I cooked up some food in a redundant telephone booth, out of the wind. The weather was really wild that evening, blowing in gusts and squalls across the lake, with dramatic cloudscapes as it got dark so I was glad to retreat again to the lodge for a drink and a chat around the fire with Tomiko. Sadly it was my final night at Glacier, and indeed for now in the USA, my visa expiring the following day.
Next morning there was a flurry of excitement, and concern, around camp ... an early angler had been gutting his trout for breakfast when a grizzly wandered in and said 'I'm having that'. No argument there. I was a little anxious about getting across the border within my visa time, given my experience with cops in Yellowstone I thought I might face the electric chair, so I headed off, had some breakfast en route at a diner just outside the park, and, thankfully without problem I was in Canada by midday.
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