Butte, MT – St. Mary, MT
6/17 – 6/21/16
6-17
It took forever to escape Yellowstone. The park’s two-lane roads, constructed before the era of the RV, reveal their age and inadequacy at every choked intersection and crawling road.
Once I finally exited the park, I drove for nearly three hours across the immensity of southwest Montana. The landscape was scenic but static: snowy mountains and blowing grass, forever. I staved off boredom by engaging in high-speed passing maneuvers, though the short sightlines of the winding road often forced me to tail some doddering RV for agonizing miles. I jockeyed for nearly twenty minutes to get around a pickup driven by a tiny old man in an enormous cowboy hat, who drifted from lane to lane with the nonchalance of extreme myopia.
Checking into my cheap motel just outside Butte, I asked the manager whether the summer rush had gotten underway. He looked at me with a harried expression. “Yeah, right about now is when the vacationers start to show up.” He paused for a moment, then added: “most of ‘em are assholes.”
Driving the few miles to Butte proper, I was treated to a panorama of the city. Butte straggles over low hills in a sagebrush-grown mountain valley. Over the faded brick buildings of downtown loom the rusting head frames of the mines that made the city the “greatest mining camp on Earth” for nearly a century. To the east, immense heaps of rust-colored spoil mark the location of the Berkeley Pit, one of the largest copper mines ever excavated.
Before exploring the city, I visited Matt’s Place – a well-known burger joint that has changed little in the past fifty years. Seated at the chipped Formica counter with two truckers, I was served a good burger and a spectacular chocolate shake. Since my usual lunch is a granola bar or peanut butter sandwich with water, this was a nice change of pace.
Pleasantly bloated, I drove through the heart of Butte to the World Museum of Mining, the local sight I was most eager to see. The museum has several parts: a large room of minerals, a “village” of historic buildings, and the Orphan Girl Mine. This last section, a large silver mine abandoned in the fifties, is the main attraction. All the components of a working mine – the “dry” building, the headframe, the hoists – are on display, elucidated by helpful placards. The real highlight, however, is underground.
Having purchased a special ticket, I joined about fifteen visitors on a tour of the first level (“drift”) of the Orphan Girl Mine. Donning a miner’s headlamp (surprisingly heavy), followed the guide down a series of dusty tunnels. Along the way, the guide demonstrated the use of various pieces of mining equipment, from the power drills used to cut holes for dynamite to the carts used to haul ore to the lift. The lift itself, still in place, provided a sense of the mine’s massive scale. I walked into the creaky wooded cage and, holding on to my helmet, shone my headlamp down. We were at the 65 (foot deep) level. Below, I could make out the doors of the 110 level. A few feet under these doors lay a pool of inky water nearly four thousand feet deep. Broken timbers, mementos of a tunnel collapse somewhere in the drowned levels, floated on the dull surface. I found myself holding very tightly to the railing.
My next stop was a very different mine. The Berkeley Pit, more than a mile in diameter and a half-mile deep, was Butte’s most productive copper mine for decades. After production ceased and the pumps were shut off in 1983, however, it began to fill with toxic water. Year by year, the deadly sludge crept up the pit walls, inching closer to the water table. It is estimated that the critical level will be reached in eight years. In the meantime, this environmental disaster is one of Butte’s leading tourist attractions. After paying two dollars and passing through a gift shop filled with pit souvenirs, I walked out to a viewing platform. I was treated to the arresting sight of a vast rust-colored bowl, filled halfway to the brim by oily fluid. By chance, I fell into conversation with an old man standing next to me. It turned out that he had been a truck driver in the pit fifty years ago – “when it wasn’t so ugly.”
After leaving the pit, I drove around Butte for a while, stopping to examine some of the rusty headframes on the hill over the city. Driving back downtown through a series of faded neighborhoods, I decided to grab dinner at Pekin Noodle Parlor, Butte’s oldest (and only) Chinese restaurant. As at Matt’s Place, menu and décor had changed little in the past half-century – I sat in a curtained booth with red glass lamps, and was served a hoary variant of chop suey from a rolling cart.
6-18
The last leg of today’s drive to Glacier National Park was remarkably scenic. North of Helena, the road began to roll over endless lines of grassy hills. Far to the west loomed a range of tumbled and snow-flecked mountains, darkened by rain. The whole panorama was embraced by the awesome gulf of the Montana sky.
Just before I reached the St. Mary entrance station, a bend in the road afforded my first sight of Glacier National Park. A gorgeous alpine lake, rimmed with razor-sharp peaks, glimmered through a burnt-over forest, bright against the inky clouds of an approaching thunderstorm.
The thunderstorm struck almost the instant I reached my campsite. Ducking into my car to eat lunch, I emerged a half-hour later to survey my surroundings. Over the shining leaves of low aspen groves, snowy peaks rose to the east and west. A rising wind sent waves over a sea of brush, whipping fine drizzle into my face.
Unwilling to hike in the rain, I decided to drive the famous Going to the Sun Road – the two-lane highway that traverses Glacier, often described as the most scenic road in America. It lived up to this reputation. The first fifteen miles, from St. Mary to Logan Pass, were achingly beautiful. Peaks cut and polished by glacier ice reared up on both sides of the road, dusted with fresh snow. Between the summits, a long green valley, bristly with spruce and dotted with lakes, wended its way toward Logan Pass. I stopped at a series of overlooks on St. Mary Lake, trying vainly to capture the spectacle of another thunderstorm rising over the tapered peaks.
Logan Pass, the highest point on the road, had only been opened for traffic the day before. Snow was heaped in massive piles along the roadway, and piled deep in the vicinity of the Logan Pass visitor center. Parking here, I decided to hike up the snow-covered trail to a frozen mountain lake about two and a half miles uphill. Having foolishly worn my gym shoes (I didn’t want to soak my hiking boots), I slipped and slid the whole way. The views down the valley to the east, toward the lake to south, and over the snow-dusted crags in every direction were spectacular. The western horizon, however, boiled with the clouds of yet another thunderstorm.
The storm caught me more than two miles from my car. A wall of water washed over me, soaking me to the bone within a few minutes. Slipping over the smoking snowdrifts, I decided to run all the way down. The clouds settled lower and lower, wrapping the trail in thick mist. The downpour continued, hissing on the snow. And through the middle, I came jogging, slipping and postholing at every other step.
When I finally reached my car, I stripped – trusting to the privacy of fogged windows – and waited until I had air-dried. Wriggling into dry clothes, I headed back down to my camp through the pelting rain. I finished setting up my tent just as yet another thunderstorm approached. When this showed no signs of relenting after a half-hour, I gave up on cooking dinner and drove into town, where I ordered a pizza from one of St. Mary’s two restaurants. The pizza was surprisingly good – but my appetite was dampened by the view outside, where rain was blowing sideways.
Coming out of the restaurant around 11, I staggered in the wind, which had risen to a steady 40 Mph gale. The sky was clear a few miles to the east, where a full moon glowed; but to the west, over my camp, inky masses of clouds still hovered. On reaching my site, I was horrified to discover my tent collapsing under the force of wind. Working by moonlight, I dragged my tent to a place partly sheltered by clumps of aspen, lashed it down with ropes tied to the saplings and my picnic bench, and stuck in earplugs to dampen the keening wind and flapping tent fabric. It was a long night.
6-19
I was wakened by the roar of a gust that nearly flattened my tent, bending its poles until the fabric touched my face. Dark clouds still hung over mountains to west, but the sun was rising in a patch of clear sky over the eastern peaks. A fine rain was falling, driven almost horizontal by the howling wind. As I surveyed this scene, another monster gust – I would guess nearly 60 Mph – collapsed my tent. Resigning to the inevitable, I took my tent down for the day.
I had arranged to meet a college friend working at Glacier for a short hike in the western part of the park. The drive west on the Going to the Sun Road was glorious. A storm was raging over the mountains, but the morning sun was slanting in from the east, scattering rainbows through curtains of sleet and jeweling every snowfield. As my car skittered in the gusting wind and rain spattered the windshield, I drove agape. The contrasting colors reminded me of an autumn storm – of the moment at which clouds heavy with rain, poised over fields of brilliant leaves, begin to obscure a watery sun.
St. Mary Lake was whipped to a boil by the wind. Whitecaps roared over pebbly beaches, and plumes of spray whirled sprite-like over the waves. As I watched, a rainbow shimmered into existence over the center of the lake, arcing toward the gray mountain wall. The only other spectator, an old man braced against a retaining wall, turned to me with a broad smile and said –shouting to be heard over the wind – “I love this place!”
It began to snow as I approached Logan Pass. The peaks, dusted with fresh powder, shone dully against lowering clouds. A bitter wind shook my hands as I tried to frame photos of the spruce-filled valley far below.
After cresting the pass, the road sank through an increasingly wooded landscape. The wind subsided; and by the time I pulled into the trailhead, the weather was positively balmy for Glacier: 50, cloudy, and windless. My friend and I hiked the popular Avalanche Creek Trail, a pleasant walk that culminates in a glacial lake fed by three spectacular thousand-foot waterfalls. The powder-blue stream of Avalanche Creek itself, which twists picturesquely through a sculpted gorge, was another highlight.
On my friend’s recommendation, I drove down to Lake MacDonald on the park’s western end. The view from Apgar Village was spectacular – though I found that I preferred the less developed St. Mary Lake.
Accordingly, I drove back over the Going to the Sun Road to St. Mary Lake, where I hiked a series of trails past three spectacular waterfalls on the lake’s west end. The thunderous Virginia Falls, tucked into a heavily-wooded side valley high over the lake, were particularly impressive. As I walked back to my car, I was treated to a panoramic view of the lake’s mountain wall, glowing in the evening sun.
The wind had diminished to a light breeze by the time I returned to my campsite. I performed my usual dinner routine; and then, having finished drying my pots, sat for a moment at my site’s picnic bench. The sun had just set; and over the mountains to the east, a full moon, ghostly and gigantic, was rising through the snags of a burned-over forest. As twilight faded into night, the moon grew brighter, silvering the narrow leaves of the aspens around my tent. Then, naturally, the scene was closed by clouds of mosquitoes.
6-20
I drove out early to Many Glacier, often considered the most beautiful part of the park. Parking at the Grinnell Glacier trailhead, I immediately encountered the familiar sign warning hikers that they are entering bear country. As usual, I stopped and pulled out my bear bells, readied my bear spray, and began clapping at regular intervals – precautions I have taken every day for the past two weeks. Since I was hiking alone in the morning (when bears are especially active), I was especially careful to make plenty of noise.
I had not reckoned with the fact that the bears of Glacier, accustomed to the noises hikers make, see no reason to flee from them. About three hundred yards down the path, a short distance past a bridge over a small river, I rounded a corner and saw the grizzly. He was a large male, perhaps forty yards away. He was walking down the path toward me at a brisk trot. He was enormous, and he was approaching quickly. I did what I was supposed to, backing slowly away while talking to myself. The bear saw me, but didn’t seem especially interested. He kept walking toward me at the same pace, and I kept backing up. Finally, as I reached the bridge, he turned away into the bushes, leaving me alone and thoroughly rattled.
I returned to the trailhead, trying to decide whether I should try a different trail today. Just at that moment, an older couple walked up. Introducing myself, I warned them about the bear – and then, on discovering that they planned to hike a trail parallel to mine for the next two miles, decided to operate on the safety in numbers principle and shamelessly foisted myself upon them. My bear repellent (as I mentally labelled them) turned out to be pleasant company, and we chatted amiably up to the juncture at which they turned toward Grinnell Lake, and I began to clamber toward Grinnell Glacier.
After about a mile of switchbacks, a rope stretched across the trail carried a sign in red ink: WARNING: HAZARDOUS SNOW CONDITIONS AHEAD. HIKING STRONGLY DISCOURAGED. I (literally) brushed the sign aside. I had seen many like it over the past few weeks, often beside hard-packed and passable trails. I should have heeded the sign.
The first patch of snow across the path, perhaps a hundred yards past the sign, was almost level and easily passable. The next patch, another hundred yards on, was a different proposition. The surface of this patch, about fifty yards wide and perhaps a half-mile long, was almost vertical. There was only one way across: pressing myself up against the surface, I had to kick footholds and punch handholds into the face, gradually working my way over the icy snow. Congratulating myself on avoiding any slips, I continued walking –and immediately came upon an even broader and equally steep drift. This time, when I was in the middle of the patch, the snow beneath my feet gave way, and I slid down nearly fifty feet before I managed to stop myself with aching feet and bleeding hands.
This continued for two miles. Sometimes, I could detour around the ice patches by scrambling through the muck and thorns around the top or bottom. Usually, however, I had to kick my way across. After the first snow patch, I had no footsteps to follow; so far as I could tell, nobody else had been foolish enough to attempt the trail since at least spring. This was not an encouraging thought.
It took me more than an hour to get through the first mile. As I climbed and slipped and swore, the beautiful glacial lakes in the valley came into view – three power-blue pools, strung gem-like through a bristly carpet of spruce and fir. At the valley head, a waterfall plunged five hundred feet into the first lake, fed by the snows of the mountain amphitheater above.
I had, however, little opportunity to appreciate the panorama. Rounding a corner, I discovered that the last mile of the path had vanished beneath a sheer snowfield, which even I had no illusions about crossing. I had two options at this point – to turn back, or to make my own path through the partly snow-free wilderness of scrub and tumbled rock on the slope three hundred feet below the trail. I chose the second option.
It was simple enough to run and slide down the snowfield; it was excruciatingly difficult to pick a way through the dense undergrowth and slipping stone along the base of the slope. It took me nearly an hour to reach the ice-scarred rock shelves just below the glacier, where I ate my lunch on a ledge overlooking the three lakes.
At last, struggling over the moraine atop the highest rock shelf, I came into sight of Grinnell Glacier. Though only a shadow of its former self, Grinnell Glacier remains imposing – an arc of snow-padded ice half a mile long and two to three hundred yards broad. I walked along the shore of the meltwater lake – still frozen, save for a few spots of turquoise. On the far side, the glacier presented a twenty- or thirty-foot face, which emitted occasional groans and snaps. Above glacier and lake loomed the sheer three thousand foot wall of Mt. Grinnell, scarred by ancient ice and dusted with new snow.
After walking the shore of the lake, I gingerly forded a meltwater stream and climbed onto the glacier itself. In most places, the surface looked little different from the surrounding snowfields. But where embedded boulders had caused the mantling snow to melt away, dirty ice was visible. In one such place, I came upon a virtual rock garden half-freed from the ice – pebbles, cobbles, and boulders slipping toward equipoise through the dissolving matrix of the glacier. As I watched, pebbles rolled free of the ice with a pop and rattle. Realizing that I stood in the literal shadow of a twenty-ton boulder balanced on a column of ice, I decided not to linger.
Leery of crevasses, I walked the edge of the glacier, following a series of newly-exposed rock ridges and ancient moraines to a point high on the mountain shoulder. I finally reached a point five hundred feet above the glacier. Climbing an isolated boulder, I stood like an orator about to harangue the vast theater of ice and rock. And then, the moment past, I turned back downhill, my tracks the only blemish on the shimmering slope.
The return trip was agony. The icy slopes I had crawled over with such difficulty in the morning were icier than ever. On one particularly difficult drift, the snow gave way again, and I was saved from a three-hundred foot slide by a single handhold. By the time I ducked back under the sign, I was physically and mentally exhausted.
And then, of course, I encountered more bears. In the interests of safety, I attached myself to the first group of hikers I saw, a pleasant family from Texas. As the only hiker with bear spray, I walked at the head. Within a quarter-mile, my fearless leadership steered us through a meeting with another grizzly – a young male digging for roots on a slope about thirty yards above the trail.
Relying, apparently, on the principle that lightning never strikes the same place thrice, I left the group near the trailhead to take a few photos of Mount Grinnell in the evening light. I rejoined my fellow hikers just in time to encounter a third grizzly, foraging in the bushes a mere ten yards from the path. This bear, fortunately, decided to lumber away; and I stumbled gratefully to my car. For what felt like the hundredth time, I unlaced my soggy boots, strapped on sandals, and drove off into the sunset.
6-21
A sudden gust of wind woke me around 5:30. Hearing the patter of rain, I poked my head outside to see whether I would have to batten down the hatches again. A small thunderstorm was sweeping in from the south, sending a curtain of rain through the twilight. A perfect rainbow spanned the valley below. It was beautiful – and then very inconvenient, as rain began to whip under the fly of my tent.
As I drove out to the park’s Many Glacier entrance, roughly 15 miles away, another storm appeared over the mountains. A gorgeous double rainbow appeared as I approached Many Glacier Lodge. The resultant scene, the rainbow descending to a glacial lake against storm-crowned peaks, was stunning.
To avoid any more encounters with bears, I had decided to join a ranger-led tour to Iceberg Lake, a ten-mile hike through some of the park’s most beautiful scenery. Almost the instant we set out, a steady drizzle began. As we progressed, it freshened into a soaking rain. My raingear, useless after the first hour, began to cling soddenly to my skin. My boots, already damp, were wholly soaked by the end of the second hour. It was miserable – until a cold wind kicked up. Then it became utterly wretched.
The ranger alleviated the misery by giving short lectures on local geology and wildlife. At one point, she pointed out a small herd of mountain goats, bounding along a narrow ledge hundreds of feet overhead.
Iceberg Lake, a tarn still half-covered with ice, was nestled in a gorgeous amphitheater of glacially-sculpted stone. The drizzle did not dispose me to linger, however; and after a hasty lunch beneath some windblown hemlocks, I hurried back as fast as I dared in the driving rain.
The five miles back to the trailhead were the longest of my entire trip. Rain and mist reduced the surrounding mountains to gray silhouettes. Ankle-deep water cascaded down the path. The wind kept blowing my hood back, until I finally surrendered and walked bareheaded, water streaming over my face. It was with profound relief that I finally caught sight of my car. Dripping and muddy, I changed in the restroom of the adjacent lodge, toweled off my hair, and set off back toward St. Mary. The sky, inevitably, cleared the instant I reached the highway.