Glacier National Park
(Click pictures to enlarge) (Find me on facebook and be my friend if you want to see all the photos!)
The fact that this trip was able to happen is a testament to our sense of adventure and sense of friendship. So glad we were able to get together and do this. I was in charge of the logistics, which were fun to formulate given that I was starting from Columbus OH, three others from Michigan, another, from Cincinnati OH had a business trip to Minneapolis just before the start of the trip (we ended up picking him up on the way out), and the last flew into Chicago from him hometown of Houston TX to meet us for our cross country trip. Taking 2 cars and driving more than 60 total hours, it was all worth it to see a chunk of the country many of us had never seen, taking our time across the country to stop at a few choice spots and add even more to an already fantastic trip. And more importantly to spend some quality time with friends from college, with all of having gone our own ways to new cities.
Stop #1: July 4, Minneapolis, MN - Minnesota Twins v. New York Yankees baseball game (also to pick Joe up)
One of the coolest things we were able to work in was going to an MLB game on the 4th of July, what could be more American than that!? And it was such a fun game. Justin Morneau hit 2 home runs, and my favorite player, Ichiro Suzuki, had a 1B, 2B, 3B game, with a chance of adding a HR for the cycle in his last at bat. Sadly he did not get it, the Yankees won the game 9-5. Target Field was a very nice new park, my 26th MLB ballpark I have been to. I really enjoyed the almost smalltown atmosphere of the game, and in the closed in, intimate feel of the park design. After the game, we made it out to Psycho Suzi's for dinner and split a pretty good deep dish pizza, which hit the spot after sitting out in the sun all day at the game. The only casualty of the day was my knees, which got burnt pretty badly after failing to apply the necessary sunblock....
After dinner, we marched on and spent the night at a Howard Johnson in West Fargo, ND.
Stop #2: Theodore Roosevelt National Park, NDFun stop #2 allowed us to take in the national park named for my favorite US President, Teddy Roosevelt, which includes portions of the Badlands (no, a killing spree not a Terrence Malick film broke out while we were there). We were only there for a day, took a dip in the silt filled Little Missouri River and drove to the end of the line in the park to take in as much as possible while we were there. The drive took place at sunset, which afforded me the chance to take my favorite picture of the trip, the sunset seen above. We also encountered a herd of Bison crossing the road, which was really cool; I had never seen Buffalo in person before. When we returned to our campground that night, we found the field filled with grazing Bison, and interesting site (sadly I got no pictures of it). My friend wanted to get a shot of it with his camera, which he had left on the picnic table at our campsite, which was on the other side of the herd. So he began to circumvent the herd to retrieve his camera when, about halfway there, the Bison began to hightail it out of there. My friend had to run back to us to get out of the way of the stampeding Buffalo. Quite the site to see a stampede of Buffalo. We also woke up to another stampede before we hit the road early to make our way to Montana.
Stop #3 Havre, MT - The Lunch BoxBefore we made it to Montana, we drove through Northwest North Dakota, which was quite the eye-opening experience. I never caught Gus Van Sant's
Promised Land from last year, but driving through these frac-towns was incredible. ND is mostly rolling grass hills, plains, there were many times I commented that I was the most "in the middle of nowhere" I have ever been in my life. Then all of a sudden we would come up to these pop up communities of trailers and fracking equipment. It really felt like I was in the middle of a Gold Rush.
Between my favorite book being
Lonesome Dove (which treats Montana as the promised land) and Sean Connery's burning desire to make it there as a Russian sub captain in
The Hunt for Red October, making it to Montana has been a lifelong dream of mine, and it did not disappoint. The scenery was amazing. Going through Northern Montana on US 2 on the way in, the landscapes were so wide open, the sky so big and blue. To sum it up, it was perfection, beauty in vastness. The rolling hills of North Dakota were pretty too, but Montana was definitely another level. On our way through, we stopped into little town Havre, MT for lunch, where we 'Yelp-ed' a place called The Lunch Box. It was a solid joint, we all got saandwiches and went along our way. What makes this stop significant was the wait staff. When he came back to check on us, we all said the food was great, to which he replies, "Diggity Dink!" Best thing I've ever heard. I don't know if this is a Havre, MT saying, but it is definitely now a Corndog saying! From Havre we made our way to Shelby, MT, our last stop before entering Glacier National Park!
Stop #4 Glacier National ParkWe arrived in the park on Sunday morning and camped at Many Glacier Campground, where we got a spot right on the river (the above right photo is from our site). When we got back from hikes we were able to chill out in the cold, crystal clear waters to recuperate, sitting amongst such immense beauty. As we as a group have grown older, we begin to say we need to start planning less strenuous vacations, but Glacier was the best of both worlds. It wrecked me physically with the hiking (roughly 50 miles in 4 days, with plenty of elevation gain). But it also provided the best views I've ever seen, and an atmosphere and a place of spirituality, allowing for such a wonderful, relaxing, reflecting vacation in addition to the physicality of it all.
I don't want to write more than I already have and bore everyone to pieces, but we did the Grinnell Glacier hike, the Iceberg Lake trail and the Pitamakin-Dawson Pass loop. We also spent time at Lake McDonald on the west side of the park and the Many Glacier Hotel. All told we encountered quite a bit of wildlife, including a moose and 6 bears (4 Grizzlies, 2 Black Bears). Two of the bears were seen from the car on the side of the road, but the other two are decent stories. In fact, our first hike included the best bear story. The entire Grinnell Glacier trail was not all the way open due to snow, so when we came near the end of the open part of the trail, there was a large group of people and a few volunteer rangers hanging out because a grizzly had been seen about 20-30 minutes earlier in the area. After waiting for a little bit, we decided to continue on the trail with the approval of the volunteer rangers. When we reached the "end of the road" of the trail, a snow covered area a quarter mile or so further, we turned around and the bear had returned, essentially splitting us off from the larger group. This made us stay put for about 20 minutes as we waited to see what it would do. Eventually, bear spray in hand, we were able to pass back on the trail with the bear all of 30 yards away to make it back to the larger group and head back to camp. Nothing like that the first time out on the trail!
Stop #5 Waterton, CanadaAfter spending a few days in Glacier, we headed north to the Canadian side and the beautiful little town of Waterton, which have some amazing views. We were all feeling pretty rough by then; I had a pretty gnarly blister on my left heel. So for our only overnight hike of the trip, we chose the easier route, a supposedly fairly flat 4 mile hike, then camp at Boundary Bay, crossing back into America on the trail. But upon our arrival (after a gruelling up and down hike - the elevation gain may have been minimal, but the up and down made the hike strenuous for our tired legs), we found the site to be infested with mosquitoes, prompting us to turn back and hike another 4 miles of up and down back to town where we stayed at the campground there. This did allow us to go into town and enjoy some live music and catch a much needed soapless/shampooless shower at the campsite.
Our second close Grizzly encounter was on the Waterton trail as well. As seen above we were fairly close this time, with the bear ahead of us on the trail. It was going the same direction as we were, so we, along with 4 other people, made lots of noise and kept our distance as we followed it along the trail until it finally veered off back into the woods, allowing us to pass by. Also of note, our original plan was to take a shuttle from Waterton and do a longer overnight hike, but this plan was derailed by the fact that the road the shuttle has to take had been washed out in a recent line of strong storms. Thankfully it did, or we would have still had to camp at Mosquito Bay, er I mean, Boundary Bay.
Stop #6 Going-to-the-Sun Road (and Lake McDonald)
When we returned to America, we were all pretty tired and a trip down Going-to-the-Sun Road was in order. An insane road, immensely impressive from an engineering perspective, how they were able to wind the road around and through the mountains, and in the 1920s! (was completed in 1932). A must for any visitor of the park, it offered some of the best views we saw all week, including a great one of the continental divide. A good, relaxing last day in the park before hitting the road back to Ohio; a long, dreaded drive back into civilization and the world of work.
Stop #7 Mount RushmoreMount Rushmore was a bit of a strange way to end the trip for a couple of reasons. It was not in the original plans to stop here, but we wanted to leave a little earlier in the day Friday to get a jump on the driving. We were tired, yes, but the trail we had planned for Friday, the supposedly breathtaking Highline trail was closed, which left us with nothing to do. When we arrived in the park Sunday, the trail was partially open, but you could not complete it due to snow covered parts of the trail. The reason it was closed completely come Friday was the death of a hiker on that trail. A young man who was working in the park for the summer was with a few friends hiking the trail, and fell 1,000 feet to his death upon attempting to cross one of the snow covered parts of the trail, which prompted the park to close the trail completely. Such a tragic event, and harrowing considering we were going to hike the same trail, and also because prior to learning about his fall, we had crossed a very short snow bound section of the Pitamakin-Dawson loop trail, at a fairly high altitude. It was one of the more thrilling parts of our hike, but in retrospect, quite frightening, even if the pass was very short, no cliff edge in sight, and the slant of the mountainside where we crossed was not overly severe.
So we left the park early and worked in Mount Rushmore on the way back, but the whole way there, thinking about the history of the land, passing near Little Big Horn where Gen. Custer made his last stand, all I could think about was how tragic that part of our nation's history is. Perhaps our greatest folly and largest blight as Americans is our treatment/extermination of Native Americans and their lands. With that in mind, I struggled to find the grandeur of a statue of 4 white guys in the middle of the Black Hills, a Native American land held sacred by local tribes. I love America, and truly admire Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt and Lincoln for their contributions to this country, but I find Mount Rushmore to be fairly tasteless and unnecessary. We should have erected their monument elsewhere. In addition, Keystone, the local city, is nothing more than a tourist trap, another blight of a city within the beautiful land of the Black Hills. Nothing could be further away from the true spirit of that land. Mount Rushmore felt more like an obligation to see as an American than a pleasure. It is out of the way now.
That night we stayed in Wall, SD. The following day, Saturday, we departed Wall, SD at 7am local time, and arrived back in Cincinnati, OH at 2:30am local time. A long day of driving to say the least. I slept on my friend's couch for 5 hours, woke up and drove the additional 2 hours back to Columbus on Sunday morning. I was finally home.
An incredible trip start to finish! So glad to be back in this great community now though!