Glacier National Park (Montana, not British Columbia)

Ken Burns made a film about the U.S. national parks, subtitled “America’s best idea.” The quotation comes from writer Wallace Stegner in 1983: "National parks are the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst."

Nothing comes to mind immediately to rival the national parks as America’s best idea. Still, I think Stegner is not quite right. For no national park I have ever visited is more beautiful than Glacier, in Montana, and yet it is only part of an International Peace Park. The other part adjoining it is Waterton Lakes National Park, founded in 1895 and located in the province of Alberta, Canada.

Canada and the U.S.A. share the world’s longest undefended border and, present administration aside, the Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park celebrates the longstanding peace and friendship between the two countries. (Present administration aside, it is also a Unesco World Heritage site.) The brochure we got at Glacier was binational in nature. “This landscape has always been sacred to the Blackfeet, Salish, and Kootenai peoples,” it reads. “Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park represents a vision of a world in which peoples set aside their differences to work collectively in the interest of all life, for all time.”

Flags of three nations

The park is contiguous on its eastern side with the Blackfeet Nation, which shares in its stewardship. We talked about visiting the Canadian part of the park, where evidently you can hike across the border and get a special passport stamp. But nobody else in our group had brought a passport. T. had another ambition, though: to drive the Going-to-the-Sun Road from the eastern boundary of Glacier to the west, and back again. It is one of the world’s great drives and follows what the Native people called the backbone of the world.

We would do this on our last day, a glorious climax to the trip. But first we had to get there. It’s a day’s drive through Montana from Yellowstone and, as you will be tired of hearing by now, it was scenic.

If I had been driving the last thirty miles or so to St. Mary, I’d have done what Dad and Ben did and continue on U.S. 89. On a map, it’s the obvious route. But T. was driving and for some reason, the directions Ben/Google had provided were telling us to detour down a road called Starr School. Or at least, it was called that on the directions. I never saw a street sign at either end of the road, so we stopped to ask.

At the gas station in Browning, I could not help but notice that everyone but me appeared to be a member of the Blackfeet Nation. The guy confirmed that the road we were turning on was Starr School, although its only signs designated it Route 8. We continued down this quiet community road until it rejoined 89 and we could finish our approach to the park. Only later did we realize why the detour. Route 8 cut off a section of 89 which, according to Dad, was in such a poor state it resembled sub-Saharan Africa more than a U.S. highway. (Based on his description, it sounded much worse than some Tanzanian roads!)

We had seen several white-tailed deer, including spotted fawns, before even reaching Glacier, and I was optimistic about seeing more wildlife than ever. There was a water pump down a path behind our campsite, with a big berry bush right beside it. Surely it was only a matter of time before we saw the elusive bears! Though I didn’t particularly want one to wander right by our picnic table, which had the best views of anywhere we’ve ever camped. As for stars, I have never seen so many at night, whether in the southern or the northern sky.

View from our campsite

Unlike Yellowstone, where we frequently saw hitchhikers because there is no public transportation to or within the park, Glacier has a very helpful shuttle up and down the Going-to-the-Sun Road. We decided to spend our first day taking this from trailhead to lookout, avoiding the need to drive and find parking. St. Mary Falls Trail was the only hike on the trip that all seven of us did at the same time. A bystander was kind enough to take a group picture.

It was wonderful weather for hiking. We’d expected the nighttime temperatures in Glacier to be substantially cooler, in the 30s F, but I’m sure the coldest night was in Yellowstone. My down jacket and thermal bottoms remained tucked away. In the daytime, it was warm, but not too warm like back in Arizona!

St. Mary Falls

v

Virginia Falls

The trail continued to Virginia Falls, so we pushed on. Thanks to the shuttle bus driver, whom we saw so often we started calling her Susan, we did finally see a bear from the window of the bus. Of course there are no photographs of that! 

The eponymous glaciers, as distinct from snowfields, are fewer and smaller than they used to be. One of the best to view from the Going-to-the-Sun Road is Jackson Glacier.

In the afternoon Ben, Elizabeth, Maisie, and I went to cool off in the creek next to St. Mary Campground. We had a big evening ahead. Once or twice when she had the night off from little camping friends, Maisie would play the card game Uno with us. 

There was also a campfire, and more S’mores!

Ben’s family was planning to leave Friday in order to take their time getting back before the weekend was over. We had, it occurred to us, substantially farther to drive back to Phoenix from near the Canadian border than we’d driven to get to Wyoming. T. and I thought about leaving Friday, but then agreed to stay one more night as originally planned, and just split the long days of driving back. So Thursday was the last day all of us were in the park. Ben & co. wanted to get in some more kayaking, while the rest of us hiked at Sunrift Gorge (Baring Falls Trail).

We agreed to hike as far as Sun Point, although there was a slight misunderstanding about what this meant. Dad thought we meant the bus stop called Sun Point, while I meant the actual lookout. In any case, it was worth the extra 0.1 mile to Sun Point.

It’s certainly not that Dad was lacking for hiking energy, as he was eager to continue on the shuttle bus to Logan Pass. The Pass of the Mountain Goat, as it's also known, is the high point of the Going-to-the-Sun Road, in more senses than one. It also abounds in mountain goats.

There was a short hike to Hidden Lake Overlook that Dad was keen to do. Mom, not so much. She correctly judged that the mile and a half up would be relentless, so she hung out at the bottom and befriended another sensible woman who didn’t want to climb. 

There were trail signs warning that the boardwalk we started on would soon give way to snow. As in Grand Teton, the snow seemed out of place, because the weather was so warm.

I wore sandals for this?!

Photo courtesy of T.

Another sign warned that beyond the overlook, where we weren’t planning to hike anyway, the trail to Hidden Lake was closed because of bear danger. A mother grizzly and her cubs were living there, and it was better for everyone if they were left in peace. Maybe we would finally see a cub though?

Hidden Lake Trail was hard going, and at one point positively slippery. On a trip full of superlatives, though, it really was spectacular.

Just as we reached the trickiest curve of all, whom should we meet coming back down but Ben, Elizabeth, and Maisie!

Elizabeth explained that we had to go up this point on the side of the mountain one at a time, and use our hands. On the way up, they had just seen a young guy wipe out and go careening down the hill. Luckily, he seemed to be okay.

This was a popular hike, and among the many others walking with us were a number of families in plain dress—Mennonites, probably. At certain points, with the snowy mountain backdrop and with no one else in the frame, it looked like I was walking back in the nineteenth century (except smaller glaciers). But then one of the little girls pulled out her binoculars, just like Maisie would.

At last, we reached the lookout over Hidden Lake.

The picture below means more than may at first appear. T., as I’ve mentioned, was not very well at all for days during this trip. For his part, Dad has had more than three years of struggling with sometimes unmanageable pain. Things had greatly improved, but we (not least Dad himself) were still surprised to find him bounding ahead of us up the hill, “like a mountain goat” as T. said. Years ago, Dad was notorious for streaking ahead of everybody else on a trail, occasionally losing the trail in his enthusiasm. For these two weeks and beyond, I feel we had the old Jack back!

And at this triumphant juncture, we saw the bears! T. got her telescopic lens out and, with the help of that and some binoculars borrowed from a fellow hiker, we could see the mother grizzly and her cub, far below on the edge of the lake. It’s not the clearest picture, but we finally got one.

Photo courtesy of T.

Our last night all together started with another ranger talk, about wolves and coyotes. Maisie was so taken with this that she then gave us her own ranger talk. She showed us an (imaginary) coyote pelt, delicately stating that its owner had “passed away.” A young German couple back in Yellowstone had given us extra firewood, so we had that to burn.

End of day from our campsite

And so the next morning we went our separate ways. Ben, Elizabeth, and Maisie started driving south to Idaho. We put away the bed in our camper van, turning it back into a bench seat, and took Mom and Dad on one of the great scenic drives of the world. We were Going to the Sun.

T. had been knocking herself out almost the whole trip: cooking bacon and eggs, playing with Maisie, doing more than her share of driving. This was what she most wanted to do, limited parking be darned! As became clear, T. can park pretty effortlessly in a space that would deter others (e.g., me). And all four of us enjoyed being able to stop and take in whatever views we wanted to.

The curves and angles just west of Logan Pass were the most jaw-dropping, and I was very glad not to be the one driving. We took it slowly, only scratching the hubcap once (thanks, collision damage waiver!) Dad was especially taken with the many waterfalls. Perhaps the highest and most beautiful was Bird Woman Falls. It was named for a woman of the Blackfeet Nation, not, as I supposed, for Sacajawea of the Lewis and Clark expedition (they traveled some distance from here).

West of this area, the road gradually descended through woods and past another large lake, Lake McDonald. We made it to Apgar, at the west end of the park, in time for a picnic lunch. Then we returned by way of the Johns Lake Trail and had what T. called our most authentic nature hike of the trip. We walked on a bed of cedar needles, with hardly anyone else around. Just by Johns Lake, a doe stepped onto the path, stopping us for some minutes while she took her time grazing and looking at T.

Dad for scale

In retrospect, the doe was probably trying to tell us to turn around, as Johns Lake Trail is not a loop as we thought from the signs. We emerged on the road, but not where we’d parked the van, and by the time T. walked back to get it she’d probably doubled her hiking distance! But we weren’t in a hurry. We even had time for the accessible (paved) Trail of the Cedars, which was where T. impressed everyone by squeezing into a campground parking space when we thought there wasn’t one.

Photo courtesy of T.

By the time we got back to St. Mary it had been, as promised, a seven-hour day on the Going-to-the-Sun Road. But what a day! It being five o’clock by now, it was happy hour, and for Mom and Dad that meant ice cream. They treated us to the most enormous ice creams I’ve ever seen at their local, the Curly Bear Cafe.

We were all leaving early in the morning, so thought it best to say goodbye after supper at our campsite. It was weird to be there by ourselves. Also dangerous, because I get reflective when it’s quiet. Ben had mentioned that in two weeks, without phone or Internet service, we heard two items of news: about the World Cup (England didn’t make it to the final, alas) and that the Thai boys trapped in a cave had been improbably rescued through scuba diving. I did buy a Great Falls newspaper, once, to read the exceptionally fine Montana weather forecast and the latest on Vladimir Putin laughing at our country. Do you know what I ended up using that newspaper for? Shucking corn!

It was great, but what about being an informed citizen? I still believe in that, but over months of traveling the world I’ve become more convinced of this truth also: “think globally, act locally.” Change is made at an individual level, by what you and I can each do where we are. Do you doubt that this can make a difference? One rock does not a moraine make either.

I’ve quoted Julia Abigail Fletcher Carney before:

"Little drops of water,

Little grains of sand,

Make the mighty ocean

And the pleasant land."