Our northern wanderings took us to Bozeman Montana where we enjoyed Friday evening in the historical downtown area where the retailers and local artists collaberated with artworks displayed in the stores and, best of all, complimentary beverage & nibbles.
Saw some awesome objects de art, bought nothing, lingered long, ate & drank local fare.We travelled the next day thru vast Montana vistas, took a couple of back roads and saw the crosssection of this state, beef ranching, forested mountain ranges & closed mines.
Montana has an ongoing issue with toxic waste from closed mines and part of the tax on fuel is allocated for the ongoing costs of cleaning up this pollution which has become the responsibility of the state.
We checked out an art studio of an amazing 92 year old man who started painting at 80. We met him & he told us he aimed to offend everyone with his extreme anti-materialism & environmental philosophy. Then thru a ghost town called Garnett up a rough isolated road.
We arrived at Glacier National Park the next day & based ourselves at the Apgar campground for the next 3 days while we tried to get a scarce backcountry 4 day hiking permit.
The park is bisected by a very spectacular drive with the grand name of "The going to the sun road". The park runs free shuttles buses over the road dropping visitors at the various hiking trails. We did a long 12 mile hike from the highest point of the road, Logan pass, which took us along the continental divide on a great trail, which in parts were hewn out of the cliff faces. We saw big horned sheep, the white mountain goats which are the parks symbol, Columbian ground sqirrels and a ptarmigan.
Mary & I did a side hike up up to the ridge for a view of Grinnell glacier
the largest glacier in the park. Well, those of us who have visited the Tasman, Fox & Franz Joseph glaciers were impressed with the mountain views but were under-awed by Grinnell, a large snowbank destined to be water vapour by 2020.
The continental divide is where the water flows east or west.
There is Triple Divide peak in the park, where streams from 3 sides either flow into Hudson Bay, the Pacific via the Columbia river or the Atlantic via the Missouri, Mississippi & the Gulf of Mexico.
There was constant reminders to be wary of bears in the campground & out hiking. We had borrowed a book on grizzly attacks which Mary has been reading to the kids at bedtime. We now own a can of bear spray which is never far from our side. The idea is that when a 250 kilo, 3 meter tall grizzly is charging & about to kill you, you squirt this flyspray sized aerosol in its face. Yeah right!
We enjoyed talks in the evening at the campground, one about local Indian legends and the other about wolves. The Indians revered the wolf but to the settlers they were vermin and 100,000 were shot untill they were locally extinct in the 1930's. It is now understood that the ecosystem then went out of balance with an exploding deer population which stripped vegetation causing a collapse in the beaver & racoon populations.
The removal of wolves allowed coyote numbers to increase which predated pronghorn antelope young almost wiping out that species. It all just goes to show how delicate the environment is. The good news is that wolves have moved back into Glacier from Canada.
The ranchers & rednecks of these northern states are very anti-wolf & their slogan, which we saw on big pickup trucks was a wolf picture with a red cross thru it with the words "Smoke a pack a day".
Getting a hiking permit is a complicated process & after going to the permit office twice at 6-30 in the morning to get first in line, we got a 4 day permit to go up Belly river over Stony Indian pass and down the Waterton valley into Canada. The positive effect of the permit system in that there are not many hikers in the back country.
Interestingly Glacier has 2 million visitors a year, mostly in the short summer season during July & August. Only 2% go hiking, with only 1% staying 2 or more days in the park. The average visitor drives across the park staying 4 hours. A a result the road & visitors centers are very crowded whereas the back country is empty.
We headed to the east side of the park with Mary & the kids biking down from the road summit thru gorgeous scenery.
The next morning we headed up the Belly river trail. We talked to a group of hikers and a mule train coming out who were led by a ranger who checked our permit. One of the group had tramped in NZ. I told them I was reallly impressed by how well the park was managed & one commented that I should put that in a letter to the park superintendent, at which comment the group all laughed.
The guy confessed he was the superintendent, so we had a chat about ranger exchanges with DOC in NZ and also administrative & scientific aid to national parks in Africa.
The super warned of bears ahead as they had been watching a group that morning.
We had a long 10 mile day ahead of us and as the scenery got better so did the proliferation of bear crap on the trail. We stuck together and made plenty of noise with our bear spray at the ready. The danger is surprising a bear or getting between a bear sow & her cubs. Luckily none were seen & we got to our campside tired & hungry at 7.
Enjoyed a pleasant evening in the campsite with a band of 4 brothers from Wisconsin. The campsites have stipulated food preparation & storages areas well away from tentsites, so it is very social hanging out with other hikers. The campsites only have 3 or 4 tent sites with a usual maximum of 4 hikers per site. They let us have 5 in our party.
Next day was a short hike to very picturesque Mokowanis lake where we arrived early and swam. The next day our wildlife highlight was seeing a pine marten. It was our big day climbing 2200 feet up Stony Indian pass over the continental divide up thru flowery meadows and passed numerous waterfalls. We started off in light rain but when we got up high it cleared up into a bueatifull day.
We had a big feast of huckleberries which turned out not to be so, but we didn't get ill. Then down the other side to camp by another small pretty lake. Our cooker had broken & we were able to borrow one to boil water for our dried food.
An early night with our nightly scum card tournament with lots of laughing & crying from the kids as they won & lost during the evening. I cant imagine what the other campers thought of the noise we made.
We had deer all round our tent the next morning. We packed up & made our way down hill in light rain which continued on & off during the day as we made our way 7.5 miles to Goat Haunt and Waterton lake. On this trail we surprised a moose which ran off down the trail leaving hoof prints for us to follow for quite a distance.
Otie also found a yellow & black salamander, an amphibian in serious decline in the northern part of the park.
We caught the Canadian ferry (a vintage boat from 1927) at the south end of the lake and took a 1 hour voyage into Canada. At Waterton town the captain phoned Canadian immigration to advise on the hikers coming in from the States. He handed me the phone & I was advised that only US & Canadians were allowed over the border at Goat Haunt and I needed immediately to get to the road crossing about 25 kms away so I could be processed as coming into Cananda to allow me to leave back to the States. I explained I was already in the system having been in Canada in July and that we had no vehicle & was advised I could check in the next morning as we were going to get a shuttle out the next day.
Our van was parked at that border crossing where the hiking trail had started. 2 other hikers off the boat were listening and offered to take Mary back into the US where they were headed, to get the van, return & pick us up.
Mary did the trip returning with the van & we camped the night in Canada. That evening we drove up to Cameron Lake and were treated to seeing 2 black bears crossing the road. The first ran across just as I sarcasticly said we will only see a bear if one crossed the road. It was fantastic.
The next day we looked at the grand Prince of Wales lodge with a magnificent setting at the head of Waterton Lake. The old grang lodges around Glacier were built in the 1920's by the Great Northern Railway who diversified into tourism to grow their rail business.
We drove back to the border & again were treated to a grizzly cub running across the road. It was so good to view bears from the van.
No worries at the border. A last stop at the park St Mary's visitors center for Lotte to hand in her completed park booklet & get sworn in as a junior ranger.
The center had lots of very good stuff on the 3 local Indian peoples who lived in the area foe 10,000 years. The Blackfeet have an oral story telling tradition which went back to the last ice age. The Indians told their legends and stories including the signing of a treaty in 1855 ceeding territory to the government & their struggle ever since because the area taken was not what was explained to them prior to signing. Sound familiar!
Another tribe, the Salish, had a history of assisting the Lewis & Clark expetition and living in peacefull cooperation with early European settlers. They signed no treaty but were swept up into a reservation with the other local tribes. In this part of Montana the place names were in English and their Salish names with its very complicated linguistics.
The nights were getting colder so we are back on the road heading south for warmer climes.
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