Montana Update

After Fairmont Hot Springs, we camped at Holland Lake, a beautiful little spot nestled up against the Bob Marshall Wilderness Area in the Seeley-Swan Valley. When the kids and I walked down to the lake and took in the view of mountains and a waterfall, I started to cry. "Happy tears!" I explained. Happy tears, indeed. I'll try to post photos soon. Cass and I hiked to the waterfall and we all got thoroughly nibbled by mosquitoes. A wedding reception at a nearby lodge provided a soundtrack of Stevie Wonder and Sly and the Family Stone covers for a few hours, but it didn't really detract from the overall experience--and Cassidy and I actually got a glimpse of the bride and her retinue of bridesmaids. Fancy heaven for Cass!

From there, we drove up to Glacier. I'd told Brian I wouldn't be satisfied with just driving through and stopping at overlooks, but that's what we ended up doing--we just ran out of time for more on this trip. And I ended up feeling fine about it. It was definitely better than not going at all, even if it was far less satisfying than being able to get out and hike and soak up the smaller sights you can't see from the car--the glacier lilies and Indian paintbrush along a trail, a hoary marmot sunning itself on a rock. When we first arrived at the West Glacier entry gate (after waiting in a line of cars for 25 minutes, something I'd never experienced at Glacier), Bridger said, "You said this place was so pretty. But it doesn't look any more beautiful than places we've already been."

"Just wait," I told him. "I'll stop talking it up and let you draw your own conclusions."

I was quietly overjoyed when I heard him breathe an awed, "Wow," once we got up high into the mountains on Going to the Sun Road. At the Logan Pass Visitor Center, he got a huge kick out of slipping and sliding on patches of snow and getting glimpses of pikas, rare little rodents acclimated to high alpine meadows who make a cute squeaking noise as they poke in and out of their hidey-holes. He snapped photos like mad of the mountains, waterfalls, and I don't know what all else.

Before we had kids, Brian and I used to go on motorcycle trips to Glacier with a good friend of ours just about every summer (I was on the back of Bri's bike--I learned to ride in a weekend course but decided I wasn't aggressive enough to be a good biker--I'd be the one who'd jump off my bike screaming when I should have had the guts to accelerate). Our memories of Glacier are full of road dust and the smell of hot leather jackets and chaps and clothes we wore until they were crusty because we could only carry so many clothes on the motorcycle side bags, of singing and keeping up a steady chatter of dumb jokes while we hiked so we'd scare away any bears in the vicinity, of downing cold bottles of Moose Drool beer after days of hiking that left us weary and sore but deeply, profoundly happy.

A friend of mine wondered if Glacier would seem different to me after seven years away--diminished, perhaps--with global warming melting the glaciers into oblivion. Signs at the park did warn that the glaciers would likely be gone by 2020. "So the kids will be teenagers then," Brian commented. Certainly there were many threats there that I didn't even notice--invasive animal and plant species crowding out the natives, I'm sure. I did notice some differences: notably, there were vast swathes of trees scorched by forest fire on the east side of the park and more brown, dry trees in the midst of the green valleys and mountainsides. The park was definitely more crowded than I remembered, too. But the waterfalls and rivers fed by the mountain snowcaps and glaciers were still flowing and churning, at least for now. The mountains themselves were still there.

Now we're at my mother and father-in-law's place in Conrad, a small ranch and farm town on the plains, just east of the Rocky Mountain Front. Well, here come the kids from the basement, where they've been playing that the bed where Brian and I have been sleeping is a boat, the mattress on the floor is the ocean, and the blankets are sharks--that is when they're not pretending to be secret agents. On this vacation, they have really discovered each other as playmates, and after playing the mediator role between them for the last three-plus years, I couldn't be happier about that.