Glacier National Park
By
Amanda Gradisek

Whenever my father was trying to find away out of going to church when I was a kid, his excuse was always that he goes to church for a solid two weeks in the summer, when he’s out in the backcountry in Glacier National Park, Montana. Maybe that’s why I felt like something sacrilegious was happening when it caught on fire early this past summer. But with two weeks off and the start of school looming over my proverbial horizon, and after being plagued with wildfires at home all summer long, we simply packed up a car and headed North along the Rockies, feeling we might as well try our luck.

The best thing about those reckless road trips with no plans and no reservations is the feeling of the wind in your hair, knowing you’ve got all you need in your car, and thinking that you are one of the coolest bastards on the face of the planet; the worst thing about those same trips are later than night when you can’t find a place to stay and you’re driving around in the middle of the night, wondering if they “mean it” when they say no camping off site.

Needless to say, driving up North through the mountains with the wind in your proverbial hair makes you realize many things, and perhaps many are more profound, but it sure makes you realize that America is big. Starting at Lake Powell, going through Zion, Bryce Canyon, Salt Lake, the Tetons, Yellowstone, the lakes of Idaho, and pushing through Southern Montana, nature gives you more colors and shapes than you can possibly imagine.

Upon first seeing the place I’d considered my home away from home, I thought, it’s all gone, it’s burned, my heart feeling heavy. But pushing through the ominous haze of smoke that hangs over Columbia Falls and Kalispell, and up over the Continental Divide on Going-to-the-Sun Highway, perhaps the world’s most spectacular road, I realized that there was at least one positive thing about the fire—there was no one there. After being shut out on backcountry passes, we discovered we could go wherever we wanted to and that everything had reopened that day, so the following day we packed God knows how many pounds onto our back and limbed 4,000 feet and seven miles into stay at Sperry Chalet, an old lodge in the backcountry where you can stay and get hot meal from the folks that work there all summer, before doing twelve miles the next day up to Sperry Glacier, perhaps the most amazing spot I’ve ever seen in my life. While the mountain goats hop from precipice to precipice, the water glitters in the prehistoric cliffs of this hike. The glacier, ever receding, is at the top of a wall covered in endless wildflowers and waterfalls splashing over the trail, tinged blue with the glacial minerals, and a staircase carved into a wall of solid rock, so that coming over that ridge, you’re faced with the awe-inspiring roar of the wind moving around the peaks whose height you’ve nearly reached, and everything is either the reddish rock of the mountains here, white in snow, or greenish blue water.

The next night we camped at Lake Ellen Wilson, where fireweed softens the sharp fall of the rock into the green lake, and mountain goats and waterfalls come down to the campground. We were, at this point, rather proficient at setting up our tent and hanging our food from the bear poles, and I thought perhaps that was the world’s most beautiful spot. Yet it only got better the next day when we went up and over Gunsight Pass, coming down a valley whose beauty was only dampened by the knowledge that this was bear country, and all the yelling and bells in the world might not help. However, that hike, beginning above the timber line and moving with the sweeping lines carved by the glaciers into the rock so many years ago, came down after about eight miles into the trees, and that last five miles, with those heavy packs struck me as my last hours at the time. Even with my feet feeling numb and my back crippled for days, I can still look at that hike and think, “what trouble?”

After enjoying the cool water and white water kayaking, we realized we couldn’t breathe in Glacier, so we sadly packed up and headed West to Rainier, down the black cliffs of the coast of Oregon, and down Route One along the ocean to San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Right before I left on the trip, a man buying hiking boots from me in the outdoor gear store where I worked looked me in disbelief when I said I was going to drive to Glacier. 5,055 miles later, I can say, well, maybe it was a little crazy, but it certainly wasn’t any trouble.