Tuesday, August 31, 2010: I woke up in the middle of the night last night for the sound of something scratching at the cabin door- lots of wildlife to choose from, of course. Probably raccoons, although the areas closed off for bear activity are all directly adjacent to (literally, I can see the sign from the bathroom building) the cabins at Swiftcurrent. Today Larry woke up customarily early and I tried to sleep a little later, but ended up getting up by 7am anyway since the rain sounded like it was coming down in torrents, hammering the ceiling relentlessly. Since I was up, we decided to have some breakfast in the Swiftcurrent lodge's restaurant. I had steel cut oatmeal with brown sugar, a little bit of milk and white raisins which was really delicious. Larry got the breakfast sandwich (egg, cheese, spinach and sausage on a croissant) and came with the highlight of the meal: the most perfectly cooked perfectly square cubes of hash browns I've ever seen. They were almost all completely uniform in size, perfectly browned on all 4 sides and crispy on the outside and soft on the inside. He added a dash of chipotle hot sauce and they were like little squares of heaven. yummy.
After breakfast, we went back into the cabin through the rain and decided to just try and do the boat trip, may as well. It may have sounded like serious downpour outside, but it was just a persistent lightish rain and I think a lot of the sound was because the wind seems to have really picked up, and it was really windy. Another wet day here in Glacier. The boat trip was scheduled to depart at 9, so I drove us over to the Many Glacier and we headed out to the dock. The boat was a few minutes late, so Larry ran back to the car to get the binoculars and I went inside the ground floor of the many glacier which said there was a cafe inside. I discovered a little maze of stages and theater type rooms for screenings, live music, etc down there along with a little cafe where I got some hot coffee. The 8pm movie for tonight was "Animals of Glacier" and sounded cool to me, so I made a note to pitch it to Larry.
I finally have an understanding of the boat trip now and only now that I've actually been on it. It comes with (or without) a hike into the Grinnell area, usually to Grinnell lake. If you want to go to the glacier, you take the 8:30am ferry, as I said it shaves almost 3 miles off the hike, and you come back basically whenever you get finished and they drive you back (or you can hike the extra 1.8 miles around the lakes if you're in between boats which run every hour). The rest of the trips you take the boat ride down 2 not large lakes over to the trailheads, and the "captain" escorts you on a guided hike to the lake. The 8:30am glacier hike is also guided. You can always go without the group if you please, but the guide is interesting, most of the time. We had a female who seemed maybe 25 named Mara who was very perky and enthusiastic. She was also, it turned out, surprisingly knowledgeable and I wondered if she went to college for natural history, she was that good as a guide. The trails were unbelievably mucky with standing puddles and gobs of mud with all the rain (and on and off drizzle today) and it was crazy cold, the water Mara said was 41 degrees, and I'm guessing the air was somewhere around there as well. Mara is a local- born in Ohio, her mom moved them here when she was young, she went to college at MSU (or something) and now works doing this, at least until next week when they close down for the winter. When we left the dock, someone spotted a grizzly bear on the same hill we spotted them yesterday, but I missed him as he walked into a large clump of trees before I was able to spot him. Swiftcurrent lake is a small lake, and the boat docs on the other side of it, and you walk over this little land bridge onto a second dock and take a second boat across a second lake (I don't know the name of that lake) into the Grinnell side of the Grinnell peak, this is incidentally the wettest valley in the entire park because of the shape of the Grinnell peak, it separates the sides of the glacial valleys and one side is the wettest in the park, the other is the driest in the entire park. The Grinnell wet side is where we were going, and the side of the mountain was also famous for having a lot of avalanches which strips its vegetation and trees, so it has a few trees but a lot of low shrubs and plants that the bears love to eat, so it's a natural place for bear activity. I also noticed a lot of caves in the side, presumably used for making a den, but I have no idea.
We parked the second boat at the trail head, a few people went off on their own, a few people stayed in the shuttle to take the return trip back immediately, and the rest of us, including myself and Larry, followed Mara into the 1 mile trail to Grinnell Lake. She started off talking about bear safety and it was interesting to learn the definitive work on bear safety when hiking:
You have to hike LOUDLY, make noise and yell. Surprising the bear is the worst thing, as a surprised bear is the most likely to be aggressive toward you. Their hearing is also not very good, about the same as human hearing, so you have to be really loud about it. Any time you enter woods, go around a bend, and generally every 100 feet or so you're supposed to yelp or holler at the top of your lungs, Mara liked to whoop. People buy bells and that's nonsense, so are bear whistles. The bells you can't hear until people are basically right next to you, so they are worthless and I didn't need a local to tell me that. The other problem is the cubs have slightly better hearing than adults, so they find the sound interesting and often come to explore it, which is a serious issue since mommy will maul you to shreds if you mess with her offspring. So locals call these "dinner bells." Same with the whistles, mostly because of the pitch which is too high for bears to naturally hear. If you come upon a bear, and he seems unaware of you, you leave him where he is (probably on the trail) and you cut a very wide berth around him and leave him be, walking away slowly. If you're spotted, you stand still and don't make eye contact, look at the bear's feet all the time. This is submissive. Eye contact is confrontational. Bears let you know what they're thinking and they often click their teeth and jaws at you, they may grunt at you, and they occasionally make a fake charge- take a few steps at you then stop. Your jobs is to back away slowly, always looking at the feet, letting it know in a soft voice that you're not there to fight, you just want to back away.
Even more hilarious, if you are charged, you spray the pepper spray. If that doesn't work, or you don't have it, you go down on your stomach. Mara added something much better to the "curl up in a fetal position and do not move" with "don't do a fetal position, it makes it too easy for them to turn you over. You want to stand with your legs apart a little more than shoulder width, dig your feet in and then go down on your stomach with your hands laced behind your neck like this and dig in your elbows and shoulders." Then went on to illustrate that they're going to bat you around and this makes it hardest for them to turn you over. Lying dead doesn't give the bear a fight, so they usually end up leaving you alone. Don't get up until you're sure the bear is gone.
The left picture is a shot of the morning clouds on the mountain, and the left a view of what a bear does to a tree: rip it to shreds, then lick out the termites and bugs in there.
I found this all extremely amusing, mostly because she told it with such gusto and did the visuals for us, but the take home was that silent hiking in bear country is irresponsible to you, the bears and ultimately everyone else on the trails. If everyone make noise like they should, there would be less bear - human interaction. So, we all followed Mara into the woods as she whooped every 100 feet at the helm for us. She stopped a few times and talked about trees (there is a moth larva that is killing pretty much all the spruce trees in the park, it's unbelievable able as you can see the damage- some areas all the trees so dead it looked like fire came though and wiped them out. Really startling to realize all those trees were actually dying. There hasn't been a fire in Glacier for more than 400 years, and so many ecosystems are actually dependent on fire, so the trees there are only spruce and fir, with very few pines. Then she talked and showed us a couple stops of flora, finding the ubiquitous huckleberry bushes and letting some people try a berry to taste it, but the bears love them- very high in sugar, so good when you want to pack on the pounds. The bears don't bother to pick the berries, of course, they simply rip the whole thing out of the ground and eat the leaves, stalk and entire plant along with the berries. Very funny. A flower called "pearly everlasting" that is a dry flower is also all over the place, and they say that it can be dried and smoked, and is supposed to restore lung function- cure asthma, bronchitis, all sorts of lung ailments. Larry and I were laughing at that one, but it does make for good story telling. She was very entertaining.
One of the last stops was about the rocks. Glacier, being glacial has almost no igneous rock (if you see it, it's the rare black band of rock in the layers) most all of it is unstable sediment, hence all the landslides and avalanches. It also had been underwater for centuries here and the water level would rise and recede, so that the same rock comes out in two different colors based on its exposure to oxygen- the rock that was in deep water, with little oxygen, turned green and the same rock that was in shallower water was exposed to oxygen, which reacted with the iron molecules in there turning them red. She picked up the red, green and another cement colored rock to show us these 3 most common, the red and green being the same kind of rock. Cool. I have no idea what the kinds of rock were as I write this...
Left: the rocks. Right: the salamander glacier which was on view at the end of the second boat trip.
Farther into the forest along the trail, which is heavily forested and less dense than the subalpine forests from the iceberg trail, the group came across a handmade suspension bridge which only one person could walk across at a time. It was wide enough for three abreast, but I suppose weight wise could only handle one person- think Indiana-Jones here, it was fun to cross, not high up at all if you fell, but the racing rapid stream below would have been frigid, I'm sure. I walked across then we got a few funny shots of Larry as he crossed. Just around the bend from the bridge was a large group of extremely hardowking forest crew (volunteers? I have no idea) doing the most back breaking labor imaginable- hauling rocks and digging fencepost holes, etc. Really impressive. Mostly women, too. They were working so hard it was a little odd walking by, you want to let them know how much every back breaking bit of their sweat is appreciated- the crews here are seasonal like the rest of Glacier's staff. In the winter, everything is snowed in. In the spring thaws, water takes the paths of least resistance which are usually the hiking trails, so every one of them basically has to be dug, cleaned and made fresh every single season by a crew like this removing debris, tree stumps, shrubbery, rocks and the miscellaneous sediment picked up by the water and snow which clogs and obliterates the trails. I can't even imagine anything more like Sisyphus in real life...
We skipped on past them, Larry actually said thank you to a few people who were all in rather good spirits, and came out into a clearing along the rocky shore of the lake. Another glacial stream-fed lake, the stream entering in a modest waterfall at the mouth of the lake and spread out choppy waves of crystal blue which was beautiful even in the rain. No more than 5 minutes for pictures since we had such interactive sessions on the way with Mara, Larry and I opted to go fast back to the boat. I was feeling energy from some unknown place, but the hamstrings and gastrocs that were seized up since I woke this morning seemed to loosen up and get into the hike as I went along so I employed half the trail on the way back to whoop and holler at the top of my lungs and trail run back. At least I had a good time, and I occasionally heard somebody echoing my calls from the back of the group. We made it the mile back to the dock pretty darn fast, and got to the dock just as the boat was arriving and waited a few minutes in the HAIL to get on. I was picking little beads of hail out of my hair on the boat. Wow. The snow came down to 6,000 feet yesterday and they all seem to be speculating about the early start of winter around here. I'm not sure I did the best research by somehow failing to realize that at this latitude and this elevation, September may NOT be the best time for a trip. At least not with what I had brought- shorts, tee shirts... not even a heavy jacket. And I'm freezing. Duuh. Banff is farther north and higher in elevation, so I bet it'll be colder still. And I'm not sure I might not just cop out and do the car-vacation thing and skip the heavy hiking if it's rainy and cold there too. It's also a really cute, charming little tourist mecca, so lots to do that doesn't involve hiking 12 miles a day.
The ship got us back to the Many Glacier at about noon, I was hungry but in a pretty good mood and ready to get warm. I wanted to go up to Waterton Park (Waterton is in Canada, and in 1976 Glacier and Waterton became the first ever International Peace Park, so both are national parks and sister facilities). The famed and much photographed Prince of Whales Hotel is there, and I really wanted to at least drive there, snap a few shots and then leave, but I also am not sure a few pictures of this building are worth a $30 entrance fee and 45 minutes out of the way... we'll see how I feel tomorrow I guess. Realizing I'd need a passport to cross the border to Waterton, I tabled that plan and went back to the cabin instead. We came into the cabin to find the heater on and our "maid" left us a really nice note on the bed:
"Dear Guest: I already change the pillow cases. Tomorrow is my last day in this summer. Then I will go back to China so if you need any service please leave a message to me. Have a good day! :) I want to do the best. Chuck." Very nice of Chuck! And very nice of him to pre-heat the cabin for us when we got home from the freezing morning in the rain and hail. I love that Chuck :)
At the cabin I realized we needed to gas up the car, get a cheap fleece of jacket somehow for me, and I wanted to at least try and get to Sun Point back in the park where Jon the bus driver said was the most photographed and rumored to be the most beautiful spot in Glacier, so we drove there. Gassed up, went back into the park hoping that the few rays of sunshine would hold out and shine down on Sun Point for one lousy photo...
When we passed the entrance, the ranger came out to check my ticket, and said "welcome back" as I noticed a sign in red saying: "Iceberg Lake Trail is Closed" and asked her why? Bears. Lots of them apparently. Just today! So they closed it. I have never felt quite so lucky :) And we didn't even see the bear there, just all the signs letting us know that the adjacent land all around us was closed for this very reason. "Yeah, you just gotta go when it's open" said the ranger as we passed. No kidding.
Sun Point is having a bunch of construction and is serving as the holding location for all the masonry work that's going on up at Logan Pass to repair it. I parked the Versa in the lot, wearing flip flops in the rain ran over to the trail head which didn't exactly let you know where the lookout point was, so Larry said "Let's go in 10 minutes, if we don't find the lookout point, we leave." Within 150 feet, you couldn't miss it. Larry ran full speed up the hill to the top, I tried in my flip flops to follow, totally freezing, and got to the top to realize that the national record for wind speed recorded in Glacier at 170mph (before the sensor blew off the post and was never found) was no myth. Holy wind. I stood there a minute on loose rock feeling like if I moved, I'd get blown off the rock into the freezing glacial lake below. But wow. What a view. I continue to fail for words here in Glacier, as one thing is more amazing than the next. I was so glad to see this amazing place, and I'm with Jon, although Iceberg Lake was incredible.
Running back to the car in the freezing rain with ominous looking black clouds sweeping in and the wind picking up we sped down Going-To-The-Sun road to the next stop which is Wild Goose Island, snapped a quick shot and left the park, the blue sky coming back as we got to Babb. A look into the shops at St. Mary Lodge for some cheap fleece for me yielded nothing I cared for, so back to the cabin. A shower, pizza that you can order as take out from the kitchen (black olives, pepperoni and mushroom) and some packing for the departure tomorrow.
At 8pm we did head back into the inclement weather (OMG it's bone-chilling frigid and rainy out there) to Many Glacier and listened to an hour long talk by a ranger named Rick who was funny and very dry talk about "The Mammals of Glacier." I loved it, the room was completely packed, Larry didn't seem so taken by it, but we left back to the cabin in the horrible weather again to get some sleep before departure to the Great White North tomorrow morning. I hope the weather gets better. This is crazy bad planning on my part.