friday 28th august: kalispell, montana
we woke up in our tent in jessica and toby's garden, having had a really good night's sleep. you can have just the inner up without the outer if you know it's not going to rain, so you can look through the vent bits straight at the stars/moon/trees/wildlife. that afternoon we set off to glacier park to go hiking for a few days. we stayed the first night just on the edge of the park in apgar campsite, near lake mcdonald.
this was a busy site, but really cool, each pitch nestled in the tall tall pine trees - loads of those washer dryer equiped rvs, but we were very pleased with our little tent so we didn't care about that. we pitched our tent, outer-less, by the toilet block as most other sites were taken - handy we thought for needing a wee in the night - not so handy when as the night came on we realised there was a very bright outside light shining from the toilet block. oh well you can't have everything and at least we wouldn't get lost looking for it. it was also around now we realised we'd forgotten our new hiking in glacier park book, and also i'd forgotten my insole things that the man in mexico had made for me, and which would have been very useful for all the walking we were going to do. oh well, such is life. and apparently worse things happen at sea, my grandpa always used to say that. i suppose a shark attack would have been worse than this, so he was right in this case.
saturday 29th august: glacier park
we got up at 5.30. this is because when you hike in the glacier park backcountry you have to get a backcountry permit to go in and stay there at the sites, so you go to the permit office and sort out your route and book your sites for the relevant nights, and the earlier you get to the backcountry permit office, the better, as the sites fill up as you can only book them that day or for the next, otherwise you pay an advance fee. so bert dragged me out of sleeping bag at 5.30.... we were planning to get to the office for 6, and wait until it opened at 7, anticipating a kind of wimbledon men's final day queue for tickets outside it. weirdly there was nobody else around. we parked the truck and i promptly went back to sleep with the heater on full blast, while bert shuffled around and mumbled about backcountry permits and what time did the office open etc. it got to 7ish and bert was becoming more ruffled by the fact that the office wasn't open yet, and there was still nobody around. by 7.10 he had enquired at the coffee shop opposite and a man told him the office was actually 100 yards behind us. oops. we got there at 7.15. i saw a list of campsite availability on the desk and said oh goody it seems there's still a lot of sites available. the man behind the desk chuckled and said oh that list was printed out at 7am, and a lot happens here between 7 and 7.15 you know, i'll print a new list out for you and we'll see what's available. oops, not very clever strategic planning by us. bert was in the military and you'd think he'd know better than to make such an error, so i blamed him for this. weirdly he blamed me.... anyway we planned our next 4 nights and booked the sites, and watched the mandatory safety video about bears and food and camping and safety etc, and left all ready for our trip.
we went back to our campsite and took down our tent, ate some oatmeal (aka porridge in england english), and packed our rucksacks. only to realise that all our stuff did not fit in all our rucksacks - we had my big one, which i guess is 70 litres, and my little one i use for cycling, which is i guess 15 litres or so. we tried to shove everything in, or tie it on with carabiners and rope etc, but it just wasn't going to go. uh oh. we went back to the backcountry permit office and asked where the nearest rucksack shop was - good news, only about 15 mins away - bad news, he wasn't really sure they sold rucksacks. well we had no option but to try it. and how long was the drive to where we'd planned to start our hike please? 3 hours. uh oh. we had 10 miles to hike once we got there, and a rucksack to buy first, and 3 hours to drive, and it was already around 10.30am after all our faffing around. not very military planning i'd say. so much for the great outdoors relaxing you and taking all your stress away..
by 1pmish we were at chief mountain trailhead (right on the canadian border), rucksacked up, walking boots on, gummy bears and werthers originals handy, and off we went.
after 5 minutes i needed a wee. after 5 more i needed to take off a layer as it was hot. 5 minutes later i needed some water and to take off my leggings (i had shorts on too don't worry). bert was not happy with our progress. soon we got into the swing of things though and had just the right amount of clothing on and were hiking merrily along through the trees (lots of) and other hikers (not many) and wild flowers and chipmunks (my favourite montana animal, except for deer). around an hour into the hike, suddenly we heard a big rustling and looked up to the left where a grizzly bear was skulking off, having just crossed the path in front of us. we didn’t get a good look at him, but it was definitely a bear, you could see the size of it. we backed up a bit and got the bear spray out in case of emergency, but he carried on regardless, up the hillside and into the brush and trees. i was pretty scared. bert said well that’s our bear for the trip, that was pretty close, and on we went, kind of excited to have been that close to a bear but scared too (me, not bert - bert doesn‘t get scared at anything except one time when he nearly died on an aeroplane that was landing in a storm in kathmandu).
after about 20 more minutes, i was walking ahead of bert, we were clapping and making noise, you are supposed to do this in bear territory as one thing bears don’t like is to be surprised. i happened to look up (this was a thin bit of trail so you had to look at your feet most of the time to make sure you didn’t fall over into the grass on each side), and to my horror there in front of me, about 50 feet away, was a bear, right on the trail and looking right at me - a black face and a big beige coloured nose. in retrospect it was really cute, but at the time it was not cute. i broke the bear safety rules, and basically turned and walked very fast (aka running), straight past bert, saying in a panicked whisper - there’s a bear, right there, right on the trail. i carried on back away from the bear, and bert told me to calm down and get back there close to him. i tried but weirdly my legs didn’t want to carry me back towards the bear… at this point, right in the middle of that panic, we hear a rustle off to our left in the brush towards the trees. bert said, there’s a cub, that’s a mother bear and there’s a cub off to our left, lucy this is not a good situation, we are between a mother bear and her cub. we then heard another cub rustling around. so we were basically between a mother bear and her 2 cubs. uh oh. i was hyperventilating and imagining the bear mauling bert and what the hell would i do? i looked around to see what trees i could climb in the area. all this time, bert was watching the mother bear, as she raised up on her hind legs, and sniffed the air - he’s thinking for sure she’s going to charge us, and he said she was absolutely massive - thankfully i didn‘t see this bit as i probably would have passed out. after a while she plopped back down, apparently satisfied that we were no threat, and lollopped off to the left towards the cubs. one cub was up a tree by this point, that’s what mother bears will do to protect them - the big bears can’t climb trees because of their long claws, but the cubs can. bert, seeing that the mother had left our immediate danger zone - ie. right in front of us - tells me to get the camera out and get some pictures. i told him he was insane, but he insisted, and quite frankly i was too scared to put up more of a fight, so i got the camera out and tried to get a picture of the cub up a tree, who was staring right at us, which was very spooky. i wish i had got it, but i missed and got a picture of just a blurry branch. we had to decide whether to carry on, or leave the trail and cancel the whole hike. we chose the former and carried on past the bear area, me looking warily to my left the whole time and trying not to imagine in great detail what it would be like to be eaten by a bear. if they run at you you are supposed to get down in a ball position and hide under your backpack, and if they try to get you with their claws in that position, it’s probably that they just think you’re a stone to be overturned or something, and you should let them turn you over, then curl back up into a ball - this way you won’t appear to be a threat to them. or if there is a handy tree you can climb up it to escape too. if you try to outrun them you will always lose as they can run at 35mph.
so this was bear encounter numbers 2, 3 and 4. surely that is enough for one day, if not for one lifetime you would think. but oh no, 10 minutes later, i’m walking ahead again in case the mother bear comes back from behind us, and there off to the left, around 30 feet away is a huge brown bear, standing in a meadow, looking right at us. there’s another f-ing bear robert - i yelped - where, he says, right there you idiot, looking right at us ohmygod - oh so there is, get your camera out please - no i really will not, i said, wanting to cry. we had no choice but to walk right past the bear, going backwards we’d be heading back towards bears 2, 3 and 4, so at least carrying on would take us away from bear 5 too, but in to who knows how many more bears……… i was feeling a bit weak and pathetic from all the excitement and heightened blood pressure and mental trauma by this point. this bear just stood there, all big and scary looking, and watched us go past, and didn’t move a muscle.
bert has spent tons of his life in this part of the world, in this park, and in the bob marshal wilderness, and other backcountry hiking places, and he’s never seen a bear other than in the distance going through a meadow or up a hill or something. and here we were having 5 bear encounters in the space of 2 hours, on our first day of hiking, on my first day ever of going to this type of place. so i’m thinking that there must literally be bears all over the place, just waiting around to scare the crap out of all the hikers. you see their poo (scat) on the trail, full of berries all the time, but bert says that just means they could have crossed the path anytime recently, and that it was really really unusual to have all these encounters. i don’t understand quite how bears got their cuddly teddy bear reputation, or those nice little stories about them having picnics in the woods or testing out beds and porridge - this is not a true representation readers, of actual bear behaviour. what they actually do is hang out in the woods scaring the crap out of people. and doing tons of poos.
about 20 minutes after all this drama, we happened upon 4 horses, a cowboy and a lady lying on the ground with a broken arm.
we had seen these guys at the trailhead and talked to them, they were headed to the same site as us, but the horse with the lady on had freaked out and tripped over its lead rope and she had gone flying over his head and she said she heard her arm breaking just below the shoulder. i offered her a werthers original sweet, or gummy bear, or pain killer. she had had enough pain killers said the cowboy, whose name was scott ping (like ping pong he said). there was nothing we could do to help, they were waiting for the helicopter to come and airlift her out. we didn’t hear the chopper until around 9pm that night which means she must have lay there for about 7 hours, which is really not very nice. bert took some photos of her as she lay there with her arm in a sling, all pale and upset looking. bert likes to take photos of dangerous/unpleasant situation, as you may have realised.
so, on we went to our first night’s campsite, which was at cosley lake.
we pitched our tent, exhausted after the 8 miles with our big backpacks, and mentally exhausted from the wildlife encounters. we ate our dinner and chatted to peter from new york who had met us at the bear encounter time and got his bear spray out too, but generally seemed un-phased by the experience - he had done a lot of camping it turned out, and just finished working on some kind of children’s retreat where you take bad children camping in an attempt to make them good. he was a strange character, slightly reminiscent of the guy from into the wild in some respects. there were some other people there too, one had a blue jacket with bright orange stripes on it, i had thought he was a ranger but he wasn’t.
all through the night deers came round the tent, sniffing by the tent and looking for food. i freaked out thinking they were bears coming to eat us, but was too tired to really pay attention to my paranoia by this time and slept surprisingly well.
sunday 30th august
today we hiked 5.5 miles to mokowanis lake. first we had our breakfast. when you camp in the backcountry, there are very strict rules related to food/eating etc - you have to hang up all your food in a food hang, up on a rope around 15 feet off the ground, and any other things that may give off an odour, like shampoo, soap, your cooking stove and utensils.
you can only eat in the designated food area, not by your tent, and you can’t have campfires unless it says so, mainly you can’t though. the campgrounds are not supervised, and are small - usually only having 2 or 3 pitches, thus you still have the feeling of being in the wilderness as there are only ever a few other human beings around. so when it’s time to eat you go to the food hang and get your bag of food and stove down and take it to the food area. we had freeze-dried food mainly, which was surprisingly tasty - they do things like lasagne with meat sauce, eggs and bacon, omelettes, pasta and pesto etc. the best was the raspberry crumble we had. when you wash up and tidy up you have to make sure that no trace of any food or drink or anything that might attract an animal, gets on to the floor. the deer came right up to our food area to have a look, but went off to eat leaves again, not impressed with our freeze-dried food. i think of all the animals we’ve seen the deer are my favourite: the best thing about them is that they can’t kill you, not that i’m aware of anyway.
on today’s hike we met 2 really cool girls, they’d been hiking in the backcountry for 11 days, and were doing the full 14 (you aren’t allowed to be in there longer than 14 days without coming out and getting a new permit). one had studied geology so told us about the mountains, which are apparently 80 million years old. i can’t believe they can date things that far back, and bert doesn’t believe in it at all but that’s another story and he’s entitled to his beliefs just like everyone else is. anyway we and the girls and another boy that was there hiked up to the top of a waterfall through lots of scrambly rocks and bushy trails.
the view was great from the top looking back at our lake and we picked some huckleberry finns on the way. on the way down we passed scott ping with his horses. one of his horses is called harvey wallbanger, and scott and harvey are the national champions at a sport called ski joring which is a horse and rider going really fast and a skier attached to them behind the horse. sounds crazy. anyway he had seen a huge bull moose and said we must have been blind to not have seen it on our hike. he showed us a photo of the moose and it was huge. because he’d come in on horses he had brought tons of supplies like wine, beer, rum, vodka, gin, tonic, etc etc, and he generously shared these around and we sat around in the food preparation area drinking and him and bert told stories about hunting and being manly and hiking and things like that.
scott then waded into the lake (freezing cold) and attempted to fly fish, whilst drunk and a little bit stoned. he borrowed my glasses to be able to see the fly, which i can’t imagine helped at all as they are the stupidest prescription ever, then asked me to tie the fly on to the line as he couldn’t see what he was doing, which i managed to do. he didn’t catch any fish, but it was all quite amusing and the point isn’t always to catch a fish i suppose.
monday 31st august
bert awoke at 7am on hearing the bull moose run right past our tent. on talking to the other girls one of them said she had been standing outside the tent, and there was the moose staring right at her, and she freaked out thinking it was going to stampede her - moose are very dangerous apparently - and then she watched as it ran right next to our tent. i missed all of this in my blissfully unaware sleep state, but i do wish we’d been up to see it, as moose seem fairly rare to see. i traded her some coffee for one of their huckleberry pancakes which was really amazing - food always tastes better when you’ve made it outdoors and it’s been somewhat of a hassle.
today we hiked back to cosley lake, another 5.5 miles. we saw bear scat along the way, but by now i had just about calmed down from our encounters. i still thought that every large dark object i spotted, like a tree trunk, was a bear waiting to jump out at me, so was still quite jumpy. we swam in a lake - freezing cold, but very refreshing especially when no other way of washing is available. i think the most we managed to stay in was around 1 minute. we swam in cosley lake and mokowanis lake and this other one we passed, i don’t know its name.
so we were back at the same campsite as the first night, which was really a beautiful place - a long lake in a bowl of mountains, all reflected on its smooth surface, and no noise (except the occasional plane passing overhead - talk about shattering the illusion of being away from the world). we met 2 guys, one a photographer, and the other a real life indiana jones character, who knew belize well and went there often on caving adventures to undiscovered places and the like. he said once he got lost for 14 hours in the jungle and was all dehydrated and disorientated. we met another couple who were in there without a permit and blatantly flouting all of the backcountry rules - they lit their stove and it exploded and fire spread round the food area much to our horror - we were being all self righteous and proper campers and tutting at them. then they went off to their tent and built a fire near it and cooked on that. can you imagine our horror at such rule breaking….
tuesday 1st september
today was a rest day, we only had 2 miles to hike to our next site, at gable creek back on the way out. we chilled out by the lake, i started the cloud-spotter’s guide book that abi and laura had posted to me, and learnt about cumulus clouds, that’s the first chapter. i read about a pilot that had to eject right into a cumulonimbus - those are the massive grey storm clouds - and the description of him falling through it - it took him 40 minutes to reach the ground because he was getting so bumped around, he was black and blue from huge hailstones hitting him and you get gusts of up to 70mph blowing you back up the cloud. then he went through the actual stormy bit and thought he must have died and gone to heaven because when he looked up some lightning had lit up his parachute so it looked like a big heavenly white dome. bert said silly man, he should have stayed in his plane even if it was broken, and ejected from it once through the cloud.
we hiked our 2 miles in the afternoon, stopping off to look at a waterfall and little pool on the way, which bert jumped into and had a freezing cold swim. we got to gable creek campground just as it was starting to drizzle, for the first time since arriving in montana actually. it turned into a bit of a big drizzle but we got the tent up in time and sat in it, all cosy listening to the rain. shame you can’t eat your biscuits and things in your tent as that would have enhanced the cosiness.
we had gone to the ranger station which was just nearby this site, to report the bad campers from the night before, and report our bear sightings. the ranger and his wife were out, somewhere else in the backcountry, so we talked to a worker man instead.
there was a mule there and 2 old horses, he said they bring them here when they’re old and retired. we went to stroke them and take our pictures with them. they have a pretty good retirement home, amazing view of massive mountains and a nice little ranger wooden house and some other out buildings nearby, i bet they love it there.
i didn’t have a rain jacket with me, so i used my backpack rain cover to shelter me at the food preparation area. we met a couple from texas, she said she’d heard a bear cub crying as it had been separated from it’s mother. i started having palpitations imagining the mother bear eating us all in revenge for losing her cub. then the lady said the cub had stopped crying so all must be fine now. we also met 2 men from atlanta, georgia who had brought absolutely tons of food and spices and herbs. they made a fire and roasted chicken on it in foil, and fried some veggies in a pan and had a selection of drinks. me and bert drank our whiskey we’d brought with us - it was our last night and we had to finish it so we gulped it down. it made my eyes bulge out of my head a bit as it wasn’t very nice, but it warmed me up. they were really nice men, one was a doctor, and they talked about deliverance which is filmed in georgia and they knew a lot of the people in it. i haven’t seen it, but i can play that duelling banjos theme on my guitar. we talked about flying, and cycling, and england and things and generally had a really nice time. it’s so cool meeting all these new people just for one evening round a campfire or a non campfire, and sharing stories and being just there in the wilderness and away from everything. your whole perception of life slows down and all you have to think about is your camp stuff, your food, your hiking, and where the bear spray is at. it’s really the most incredible scenery i’ve ever been in, and we had amazing weather. we had to put the outer bit on the tent a few of the nights as it helps keep you a bit warmer. bert had this swanky sleeping bag which has a special bit for your mat to go inside so that you don’t slide off your mat in the night on your slidy sleeping bag. he loved this. i didn’t have this function and i did slide off my mat most nights.
wednesday 2nd september
we hiked our last 6 miles back out to the carpark at the trailhead. this was all up hill, not very steep, but definitely up hill. we were surprised to finish these 6 miles so quickly, and must have definitely got stronger over the 5 days. we had set off really early, and watched yesterday’s rain and the dew becoming mist as it rose off the meadows as the sun warmed it up.
it is very much worth getting up at daybreak, it’s a really special time of day because things are just coming back to life and there is a sense of optimism and excitement about the rest of the day. i know i don’t exactly have a reputation as being a morning person, but just because i can’t formulate sentences for the first few hours of the day doesn’t mean i’m not happy - i like to stay quiet and adjust to being awake and alive still. i’ve never understood those people that jump out of bed and start singing and whistling, it’s like some strange disorder.
anyway that was that, and we got back to the truck with wet feet and sore backs and shoulders, and less food than we had at the beginning, but great memories and near death stories, and feeling fit and strong and healthy. we went to the customs man at the border, as we were right on the border, to ask what would happen if i was to enter canada after my near deportation from LA - he said i’d be fine now i’ve got the visa waiver paper in my passport, they wouldn’t ask any questions. that was good to know, but we never did get round to going up there - we can save it for another trip as i’m sure it will always be there. that is unless the supervolcano in yellowstone erupts and wipes out all of north america - i read about this in national geographic this month - not whilst in yellowstone as that would have scared me too much, but once we were a safe distance away in colorado. anyway, we drove back to kalispell and stopped en route at a café for some non camping food, and some berry pie.
thursday 3rd september: kalispell
nothing much happened. i felt a bit ill, maybe from some takeaway noodles we’d had last night, so i lay in bed making bert bring me cups of tea and painkillers and things. we babysat madi, who didn’t wake up until 10am which is late for a small person apparently. she is so cute and has all these books about princesses and animals and things, she loves reading which i think is great. she likes eating cheerios for breakfast, but doesn’t like grapefruit, or at least she didn‘t today. i’m not surprised as it’s quite bitter.
we did our washing and hung out our tent to dry in the garden, which after walking harlee the dog, had blown halfway over the fence. harlee chased a few cats like a mad dog. we had real trouble putting her harness thing on her that you then put the lead on. it was like some intelligence and spatial awareness test you’d get in krypton factor, and we broke out in a sweat trying to figure it out and had to ask the neighbour to help. we watched a river runs through it, which is filmed in montana. sadly the dvd broke about 15 minutes from the end, just when it’s kind of getting into the interesting bit that ties up the whole rest of the film. this angered me a lot and i had a tantrum. and that was the end of that day.
tuesday 8th september: kalispell, montana
got some utensils, and a really good frying pan - one of those ones with a spot in the middle that i guess is meant to tell you when it’s hot enough to use, but doesn’t actually do anything, nor do you need it to because you can in fact use your own brain to determine this matter. i saw an advert in the paper for an amazing new tap (aka faucet in america) which you can turn on and off by merely touching it. like turning a tap is so difficult or time consuming in the first place that it necessitates a whole new invention to make it easier and quicker?
there was an article about a fur fish, and a picture, which was of a fish covered in fur, which it needs to survive the extreme cold temperatures in glacial lakes. it took me a while to realise it was a fake article and picture as it was cleverly done, and i am pretty gullible and have lost most of my english sarcasm, having hung out with american bert for a year. i think this is ok as i’m sure it will grow back one day, and also maybe it makes me a nicer person to lose a bit of the scepticism/sarcasm/cynicism (all these things are very lacking in america).
we then went to the library, i really like libraries as i may have mentioned before. i like the idea of all that knowledge on all those shelves in one place. also outside this library was another of my favourite things - a bike, all stocked up with panniers and tents. it was a surly bike, like the ones mike and max the alaska to patagonia cyclists were riding, and we saw the cyclist inside the library but didn’t talk to him. his bike was in good shape so we figured he must have just set off recently.
we had pasta and bruscheta in monty tonight, and slept well, the bed is very comfy. the only thing is that if you set the heaters to come on in the night (which you ought to do in cold cold weather so things don’t freeze up) they are fairly noisy and annoying. bert wants to get a memory foam pad to go on the mattress to make it more comfy, which i think is ironic as he has a fairly bad memory, but he never forgets to talk about memory foam. Perhaps if we do ever get round to this, some form of osmosis will take place and his brain will become a memory foam centre and all his memories will come flooding back in the night.
