Going to the Sun in a Handbasket

By Bob Wire, 6-29-09

When you look at a map of Glacier Park, Going-to-the-Sun Road looks like the heart rate monitor of a gay Filipino man when he heard that Michael Jackson died. It’s as twisted and bent as the plot of a Coen brothers movie. But you should go. For just a few short weeks during the peak of each summer, the entire road is plowed and passable, from West Glacier clear through to St. Mary’s (home of the $3.50 bag of ice).

We drove it the other way, though, and I’m glad we did. If you go east to west, like we did, your lane is the one hugging the mountain, not hanging out over space with nothing but a crumbling two-foot wall between you and an endless plunge to your death.

We were coming from East Glacier, where the Magnificent Bastards and I played a wedding reception for Dusty and Erin at the Glacier Lodge. The Lodge is a hundred-year-old log structure roughly the size of Brooklyn, build from old-growth trees so big that usually you see a tunnel cut through them for a road. I am somewhat embarrassed to admit that I haven’t been to Glacier Park in about 12 years, and I decided to expand this wedding gig into a little family getaway. Plus, the bride is the librarian at John Colter Elementary, where the kids spent their grade school career, and she’s one of their favorite people. Erin was gracious enough to invite them and Barb to join in the festivities.

The morning after the wedding (the MagBads mysteriously disappeared from their cabin early, probably to skip out on the minibar tab, even though there is no minibar at the Jacobson Cottages. Probably just force of habit.), we packed up the 4Runner and headed out for St. Mary’s and the Park entrance. Our annual pass expires on July 1, so Barb and I were giddy about using it one last time, saving $25 on the entrance fee. That’s almost enough to pay for half the lunch we had in East Glacier.

Going-to-the-Sun Road had been declared open for traffic a mere two days before, but the two-lane blacktop was already thick with traffic. It seemed like half the vehicles we saw were gleaming Corvette Stingrays with a grey-haired executive at the wheel. Probably taking one last joy ride before his company is “restructured” and he is “repurposed” into a “lateral deployment” position, thereby losing the ability to pay for his precious ‘Vette and becoming a “bourbon enthusiast.”

We also saw several of the bright red Jammers, the celebrated touring buses that shuttle tourists around the park. These 1932 vintage buggies were completely restored a few years back, courtesy of the Ford Motor Company. You remember Ford, they gave us such national treasures as the Pinto and the Edsel. But these jammers (named for the gnashing of gears required to coax the vehicle and its load of terrified, Nikon-wielding foreigners around the hairpin turns of GTTSR) are really a sight, with their redder-than-red paint jobs, classic car lines, and period details, right down to the handlebar mustaches on the drivers. Even the women.

We did a short hike to Baring Falls, then we enjoyed a picnic lunch in the parking lot. On this spectacular Sunday the temperature was in the high seventies, a few wispy clouds were scudding across a cornflower sky, and the wind was gusting with such force that the only vehicles not being flipped over in the parking lot were the low-slung Corvettes. We chomped our sandwiches with one hand and held down the plates and food with the other. If we had not all been sitting on the picnic table, it would now be floating in Saint Mary Lake. We looked out over the whitecaps in the water and saw a large tour boat, the St. Mary Princess, loaded with sightseers. It chugged doggedly into the wind, waves crashing against the hull, as the poor passengers no doubt were plotting a mutiny. If not for the courage of the fearless crew, the Princess would be lost.

At least there were no mosquitoes. They had all been blown into Lake County. We shoved the lunch detritus into the back of the SUV and continued our drive to the Sun. Next stop was Logan Pass, where a boardwalk, still partially buried in snow, leads you up the trail onto an Actual Glacier. Plodding through the snow in my Chacos, I ignored the titters and puzzled looks of the other visitors. I puzzled myself, actually, why I had finally emerged from seven months of snow-infested winter only to drive hundreds of miles so I could walk through some more of it. I came dangerously close to grumpiness, but the absurdity of the situation won out, and I just laughed it off. Hell, I wasn’t going to use those two or three toes I lost to frostbite anyway.

As you’ve probably read, global warming is causing the glaciers to recede (unless you’re a Republican, whereas you believe the mountains are just getting bigger). During these first, sun-baked days of summer, the melt-off is reaching its peak. With all those glaciers and all the snowpack from the winter melting at once, the Weeping Wall was more like a log flume ride. Barb was at the wheel, so I rolled down my window and hung myself out as far as I could (without slamming my face into a passing rock) and let the icy downpour soak me to the bone. I was yelping and screaming like a kid on a roller coaster; Rusty was hanging out the window behind me, laughing like a hyena on nitrous. “I’ve never felt so ALIVE!” I shouted as I sat back down in my seat.

“That’s great, honey,” said Barb, glancing at me for a nanosecond. “But you still have queso dip on your face.” I wiped off my mug with a bandana and grabbed the map. We were not in the proper mode for anything but the shortest of hikes, so I marked the redundantly named Trail of the Cedars Nature Trail as our next destination.

When we got there, though, both kids were sound asleep, flopped over in their seats, earbuds screwed into their heads, Nintendo DS’s chittering away. So we nixed that hike, and drove on to the Apgar Visitor Center. Rusty and Speaker finished filling out there Junior Ranger books, and were sworn in for another badge to add to their growing collections. We then walked out to the pebbled beach on the lake, and the kids impressed me with their bravery by getting all the way into the frigid water. Okay, I suppose you don’t have to be all THAT brave to get pushed off a dock.

Driving home down 93 as the sun settled toward the horizon, I was actually struck by the fact that the towering mountains and glaciers we’d seen that day can actually make the Mission Mountains kind of, well, puny. I made a promise to myself right then and there that I would not wait another dozen years before I took my family up to this spectacular national treasure that’s right in our own backyard. And yes, next time we’ll leave the park in time to visit the goddamn go-kart track in Columbia Falls. Stop crying.

[Bob Wire is taking the summer off from writing his blog, but will be posting the odd dispatch every few weeks or so, just to let you know he’s still out there. Somewhere. Lurking. His usually torrid pace of humor writing will resume after Labor Day.]

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