And here's the thing, when you only have two wheels and one decides to suddenly go rolling down a hillside, your cute, little, single axle Airstream immediately leans severely to one side and you screech to halt on the side of the road. A windy, mountainous road with little to no shoulder and many, many miles from anyone willing to come to your assistance.
But let's back up, way up. (Insert sound of cassette tape rewinding in your head, why tape you ask? Because I'm old.) If you had been following along with the blog you now realize that it has been a long while since I wrote anything and to be honest I'm writing this post from the comfort of my couch back in Austin and we have been home for a month. It's taken me this long to go through the Kubler-Ross steps of acceptance and arrive at the realization that the Bambi is still sitting in Fresno, California awaiting repairs and who the hell knows when we will get it back.
I can't dwell on it forever though and I'll give you all the details in a much later post near the end of our trip which is when it happened, but for now I'm gonna try to focus on remembering how much fun we had until we had our near catastrophe or little mishap, you say potato, I say potahto.
Which brings me to where we left off:
Glacier National Park
I mean come on! What's not to love, you've got your purple mountain majesties, your spacious skies and although I did not see any amber waves of grain there were waves of tourists in the parking lots so it's kinda the same.
That's bear grass and every few years it just explodes and boy did we get lucky because it was exploded all over the place.
Wanna know a secret to getting away from amber waves of tourists? Get up early and then you can have the whole trail to yourself. Not even that early really because even though the park was way crowded we had every trail to ourselves walking out each morning as long as we set out before 8:00 a.m. Walking back, not so much.
It's a long way down that's why there's that handy steel cable to hang on to. You can see this trail is pretty darn narrow narrow which is fine if you're the only one on it. But get groups of fellow hikers bunched up here and there can be a bit of a mountain goat standoff to see who is willing to let go of their white-knuckled hold on that cable to walk on the side of the trail that leads to a death-drop.
We took the Highline Trail, probably the most popular in the park, for several miles and the views did not disappoint. But, if you feel the need to twirl with outstretched arms while singing about hills being alive and such, don't unless you are holding on to a cable.
Our only regret is that we did not go all the way to the historic Sperry Chalet which we learned later in our trip had burned down due to one of the many fires burning out west.
This was my absolute, most favorite hike in the park except possibly for the next hike we took. The Grinnell Glacier Trail.
Unfortunately for Fred, but fortunately for me, we encountered this sign about halfway up the trail.
See that last line, in capital letters
And sure enough 3.5 miles ahead there was the snow warning do not cross sign. You will notice that Fred is on the other side of it because after all it was just a warning a mere suggestion of a hazard if you will.
Right about here along this slippery section of the trail being doused by an icy waterfall is where I questioned my long ago decisions in the marital department.
Can you see what Fred is trying to take a photo of? Way out there, look closer.
It's a moose, swimming across the middle of this lake. Can't really identify him that well, without binoculars he's basically anonymoose.
Like I said this was my favorite hike except for the next one we took or maybe the one after that.
This icy, glaciery (it's a word look it up) trail runs right behind the visitor center and you slip slide your way up to a still, snow-melt lake
Along the way your likely to run into very tame mountain goats and
Very wild mountain goats
Back at the visitor center we learned of the devastating effects from the lack of qualified orthodontists in the backcountry
But my favorite, favorite hike was the one we took to Iceberg Lake.
Sure it's awe inspiring but the scenery did not inspire the same kind of awe I felt for the 3 dudes who stripped naked and jumped in while we were admiring the view.
Fred and I declined the nude bathing option
On the way back we rounded a corner and......
Not sure if this is a grizzly bear or a black bear but he had really big teeth so I know he wasn't a gummy bear
Last shot of Glacier but definitely not our last visit
Making a run for the border
How big was that moose we just saw Fred?
Sometimes after a long hike you just have to reward yourself with a huckleberry margarita.
No visit to Glacier is complete without the early, early morning ritual of trying to get a campsite at first-come, first-served Many Glaciers Campground. Here's how it works, first you drive to the campground so you can be told it's highly, highly unlikely you will get in, second, you curse and immediately begin strategizing determined as hell that you are in fact gonna get in there, third, and this is the most critical part, you get up way before dawn the next day and drag your butt back down there convinced you will be first in line only to be greeted by this:
Hard to tell but the line snakes around the corner, we were 10th in line of about 20 at 6:00 a.m.
But guess what, don't tell the Dalbey's they can't have something because, like ever other person there, that just makes us want it all the more. The fourth part of the ritual is the most important: if you get in, and you will if you get up way before the crack of dawn, always, always smugly walk by the line of anxious, bleary-eyed people waiting in their cars for a spot to open up and give yourselves a high-five and say really loud "Last spot, aha ha ha ha ha!."
Why go to all this trouble, I mean all of Glacier is beautiful so what's so special about Many Glaciers? Well, first off it isn't the glaciers 'cause those are all melted but look at all the great wildlife that makes up for that:
Why go to all this trouble, I mean all of Glacier is beautiful so what's so special about Many Glaciers? Well, first off it isn't the glaciers 'cause those are all melted but look at all the great wildlife that makes up for that:
Last shot of Glacier but definitely not our last visit
Making a run for the border
How big was that moose we just saw Fred?
Glacier National Park shares a border with Waterton Lakes National Park on the Canadian side.
Now, I don't want to say that Glacier is better than Waterton 'cause that's not really true.......well, yes actually I do want to say that. Glacier is better, it's just more dramatic and Waterton has a town right in the middle of their park so it just has a completely different feel to it. It's definitely beautiful, just tamer overall. The focus here is primarily on the deep lake which we took a cruise on and a couple of leisurely drives and short hikes but if you have to chose one over the other pick Glacier.
I can't leave Waterton without a shout out to the place we camped at, Crooked Creek Springs Campground, because the owner was such a hoot. He had mowed out a trail around a creek and as we zigzagged our way through we kept seeing these signs and as we got closer and closer we heard a loud gurgling and peering through the bushes we finally saw this:
The famous Crooked Creek Springs
The gurgling? Just a pipe emptying into the creek. Totally got us.
As we were preparing to leave, the campers next door asked us about our next stop and when we said Banff they knotted their foreheads and went "hmmmm, do you know about the fires?" Um, no what fires?
Uh, oh.
