Quick note: My hands are very sore and not used to typing anymore. This is a very long email so I hope you appreciate my suffering to bring it to you. I suggest that you make yourself a beverage and a small snack before reading it although you should be warned that there is a brief moment of lewd content.
I felt a natural affinity with the Chicago and Illinois region because of the Blues Brothers movie, which is set there. It was the one film my sister and I were allowed to stay up and watch no matter how late it was on. The entry in the TV guide would be highlighted and the whole family watched it and laughed each time. At an incredibly young age my sister could do the hard bit in ‘Minnie the moocher’ and for days after watching it, when he was offering cups of tea, my dad would say “Orange whip? Orange whip? Three orange whips”, with the associated hand gestures. I went to sleep with the Illinois accent ringing in my ears and coming to the place is like a trip down memory lane.
With that said I was getting a bit sick of big cities. I didn’t come to America to research the history of the skyscraper or to compare the subtle differences between a New York and a Chicago hot dog. I wanted to see the land, the thing that makes the United States an amazing place – the mountains, the deserts, the plains. Well, maybe I had seen enough plains for a while. All I knew was that if I went to another city I was in danger of flipping out.
This situation led to me shattering all previous journey endurance records with a 32 hour train journey to Glaciers National Park and a small town called East Glacier. The park is situated in Montana, at the very top of the United States and is combined with the Canadian Wareton Park to showcase 1.5 million acres of the US version of Switzerland. Luckily the train had enough leg room to accommodate even my stretched limbs and as I settled in for the journey the train rumbled through the Chicago suburbs for 10 minutes before breaking down. This wasn’t a good sign. An air hose had blown and it took them two hours to replace it as the old hose had rusted on. Apparently breakdowns are very common which I suspect is the real reason for the comfortable seating.
31 hours of the trip were terminally dull. The train travels through Wisconsin at night, with bushes and trees framed against the night sky, but once the light started creeping back into the landscape we were in North Dakota, otherwise known as the flatlands. By this stage I was sick of looking at fields but at least the crop changed from corn to wheat and there were a few cows and horses to break up the monotony. A little further into North Dakota are the badlands which live up to their name. Stagnant pools and sketchy grass give the place a depressing air until you get to the grass plains of Montana with it’s horse herds.
Montana is quite a long state, measuring from east to west, and mainly consists of grassy plains. I was heading towards my second sunset on the train and had given up trying to enjoy myself when from out on the horizon loomed a set of sharks teeth. The start of the Rockies is an amazing sight, especially as it comes on the heels of such a vast expanse of flatness. From out of nowhere enormous mountains sprang up and lifted my spirits. The train even started to deviate from it’s normal dead straight course and we weaved around the slightly hillier plains in front of a set of mountains stretched across the sky and decorated in twilight pink.
I had arrived at East Glacier which is nestled in the shadows of the mountains. The town holds about 300 people during winter but is mainly a summer destination centred around the station and the massive lodge style hotel. The town doesn’t appear to have changed greatly in a hundred years with old stores simply being restyled rather than rebuilt.
The hostel was located behind a Mexican restaurant which wasn’t as bad as it sounds. The Mexican restaurant reminded me of where I worked in Canberra but here they served much nicer food to a smaller audience. It gets remarkably cold in East Glacier at night and in a bare bones hostel there was no easy way to keep warm. For two and a half months I had been sweatily trying to remain cool and now I was lying awake at 4:30 am with my feet stuffed in my backpack and a towel doing it’s best to comfort me. In the end I had to resort to rigorous masturbation in order to try and generate a sustainable body temperature.
I arose early in the morning and wearily took a stroll around town. Dawn was just breaking and casting a feeble light on those looming monsters to the west. The mountains are the result of a couple of continental plates practicing their sumo wrestling skills. While the mountains did look great I had more pressing things on my mind, such as getting warm, eating breakfast and securing warmth for the night. For some strange reason a town where temperatures drop to -80 degrees Fahrenheit in winter and which receives a least 60 feet of snow did not sell any sleeping bags or blankets. I only found an overpriced blanket at the lodge gift shop but I refused to squander my money and redoubled efforts to find a cheap bedding solution. My salvation came with a roadside billboard advertising a camp store and associated merchandise at Two Medicine Campground. A trail map revealed the place to be a ten mile hike away. I quite like walking and while it had become an overcast day it was still early in the morning so I decided to see a bit of the place while fulfilling my task.
The first thing you notice when you start a hike up here are the warnings about bears. ‘Bears have injured and killed many people in this park.’ it proclaims and goes on to list a set of rules for hiking in bear country. I immediately broke the rule against hiking alone and I was pretty sure I would break the rule about making a lot of noise, as to me that defeats the purpose of being out in the countryside. I had my own plan for dealing with bears. If one tried to attack me I would perform the samurai dave ‘two finger on one eye’ gouge and surprise it into submission. The attack had successfully worked on cats, dogs and small children so I was confident I could execute the move on a larger opponent.
With bears now slightly on my mind I wandered up through light forests and little fields blossoming with wildflowers. Pockets of blue, mauve, yellow, red and white kept popping out at me, as I was in a highly alert state on the lookout for bears. Suddenly, about 20 yards to the left, a large black shape darted out from the bushes. I jumped a bit to position myself better for the attack but it turned out to be only a cow with little calf in tow. I had a steak for dinner that night in revenge.
I can’t do justice to the scenery in words. I don’t think pictures can really capture it either. The vastness of scale is enormous and it gets bigger the more you climb. Once I had cleared the tree line the plains I had come from stretched out behind me and still more mountains loomed ahead. It was so quiet that I heard the wind ruffling the feathers of an eagle that passed close overhead. I was starting to think that it was going to be a tougher walk than I had expected. I was constantly surprised when I turned around at how high I had climbed, yet the path kept going higher and higher, twisting back and forth on itself as the steepness grew.
I was walking through a rock-strewn landscape now with only the odd bowed pine tree as testament to more trying conditions. I found out that it had snowed in the hills a couple of weeks earlier and if you had told me at this point in the walk I would not have been surprised. Clouds started rolling in from the peaks and the tempestuous alpine weather looked like it was about to maul another victim. Luckily, I have watched many survival programs on TV and knew that I should stop moving, change into dry clothes and build a shelter. I had forgotten to pack my tomahawk that day so the multi-level shelter with granny flat was out, but the shrivelled pine trees on top of the mountain served me well as a temporary hideout while the storm blew up, rained gently for ten minutes, then left again. I was almost disappointed but took the opportunity for a final assault upon the summit.
I was pretty bloody tired by this stage. I hadn’t expected the ten mile hike to take me over the top of a mountain, Mt Henry in this case. Mt Henry is 8870 feet high and I was starting from 4796 feet, so that gives you an idea of the sort of climb it was. It seemed to go on forever with each small summit simply revealing a higher one further on. I had to stop and recover every hundred metres as the thin alpine air was taking it’s toll. I’m no slob but nor did I go hiking every weekend in London, so my fitness was being tested. Every time I stopped I gazed around in dazed awe at the scenery – the range ahead of me and the now tiny valley. When you reach the top of Mt Henry you follow a ridge to another mountain before the path starts to follow a route that has been blasted out of the side of the mountain. To the left was the steep side of the mountain and to the right a 2000 foot drop covered in loose shingle. As I traversed the narrow path I began to think that it was quite possibly a world record for the longest and most arduous walk in search of a sleeping bag.
Thankfully the path started heading down from the dizzying heights and I could once again breath normally. The Two Medicine Camp-ground is a lovely spot, near a lake and surrounded by more enormous monsters. When I looked back at what I had come over I simply couldn’t believe it. After five gruelling hours I had reached the camp store. When I went inside my heart sank as the only available warm item was an overpriced blanket. I bought it anyway and was thinking about giving it away as a present but I went through too much to get it. It’s good to have a blanket with a story behind it.
The most exciting wildlife I saw during my rambles were ground squirrels, or as I like to call them, chipmunks. They’re cute little things when they sit upright and eat their pine nuts like corn on the cob. They use the trails as shortcuts but when the hear you coming they shout “bonsai” and leap into the bushes. Glacier National Park is the kind of place you need to come before you die, and judging by the average age of park visitor that’s exactly what’s on their minds. Apparently one man committed suicide by walking off into the wilderness to be slowly overcome by the cold. I was thinking that this wasn’t a bad way to go until it was revealed that a couple of bears thought the body was a new range of frozen snack and gnawed it a little bit.
The place that’s on everyone’s lips who has been to the park is the ‘Going to the Sun’ road. It cuts through the park from east to west and crosses the continental divide. To give you an idea of the type of mountain, one of the first viewing spots looks upon the mountain used as a logo by Paramount Pictures. It still has the snow still on it in late August. The road follows a perilous path, you sometimes feel like you’re more off the mountain than on it, but it is a truly spectacular drive.
Dave out.
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