Northern Exposure II
^{Towards Alaska, 2005}

Monday 8 August 2005 - GET SMOKED!
_{From Lolo Pass to Glacier NP (US)}

Ah, crawling down from our aerie this beautiful morning. Clouds moved in late yesterday afternoon, rained a bit last night, still cloudy now. I hope we get to see some peaks. We read that summer thunderstorms are common, and if you see rain clouds coming in, RUN FOR LOW COUNTRY!!

We pulled out of our campersite and rolled down the dusty dirt roads on these logged-over mountains, and a couple of female elk ran in front of us. Maureen says, "You go girls!"

We cruise down Lolo Creek towards Missoula and read a historical signpost pointing out that Lewis and Clark camped here on 5 September 1805, 200 years ago, minus one month. And this was the easy part. Once they got up to Lolo Pass, from there on going westward was a VERY hard journey. Only the local Indians saved their sorry butts.

And now we motor along in our luxurious little RV with all the modern comforts except... well, a lot of stuff. See What We Didn't Bring.

HERITAGE: The next roadside point-of-interest sign points out the hisory of land ownership in this region, the modern checkerboard pattern based on grants of alternate land sections to roalroad companies along proposed rail routes. Suddenly in 1908, every other section had distant owners, irrespective of who actually lived here at the time. This same pattern was followed in building the other transcontinental railroads, and was a useful tool in the overall strategy of driving aborigonal peoples from their homelands. Um, you DO know that the USA was built on slavery, and its land was acquired by ethnic cleansing, don't you?

We descend past Fort Fizzle (real name!) into settled regions. The buildings are a mix of log cabins and modular houses, and clapboard and tin structures. I note a new decorative feature, something besides the usual wooden swing-wing ducks and sheet-iron cowboy cutouts: a nearly-life-size plastic bear climbing a tree. Hopefully this will not be as ubiquitous as the big bird pots in Chiapas. But I'm afraid we can expect to see all sorts of cutesy-woodsy stuff from here onwards.

Why is it that some people move out to the woods (or anyplace rural) and find it necessary to dress their trailer like a log cabin, or must install a plastic bear, a carved sasquatch, a plaster moose. Is this a design statement, a psychopathology, or a field worthy of deep sociological inquiry? (Thanks to Maureen for that last idea.) One might as well question the need for lawn gnomes.

MISSOULA: There are fires upwind, the air is very smokey. The radio forecast for western Montana is, thunderstorms in the south and smoke in the north. Missoula is in the center.

The southwestern outskirts of Missoula are lined with shopping malls and casinos and more casinos and bullet stores and more casinos, all smallish. Nothing on the grand scale of Reno or Vegas or even Tahoe gaming houses, not exactly Mom'n'Pop shops, but mini-mall casinos, suitable for these modest western suburbs.

Pass all this newish construction, heading for the heart of old downtown, and you enter a classic residential zone, old bungalows of clapboard and brick, looking pre-WWII. Great leafy trees comfortably shading the not-overwide streets, yes. The downtown is a combo of old pre-1930s shops and original Art Deco and mountain-town (old style) and mountain town (new designer recreations). The northwestern outskirts are typical USA city, you've seen it all before, sluburban sprawl. We didn't get to the southeast quarter, the University district, to eyeball its style.

Then there's the CATS ON BROADWAY!! Veternary Hospital, complete with a spiffy theatre marquee. And more casinos. Large river, large rail center, large RV sales lots. I should note that Missoula is pronounced Miss-sou-la, not Miz-zou-la.

I'm sure it's quaint and cute, living in the old downtown and residential and college districts, but somehow all the smoke kinda detracts from our passing-through experience.

FLATHEAD: North from Missoula, we're steaming across the large and populated Flathead Indian Reservation, If not for markings on maps and road signs, we wouldn't know we're on a Rez. This all looks like stereo­typical western communities, with the usual range of businesses, resorts, homes, farms, ranches, warehouses, antique shops, casinos and bars.

Outside the towns this is mostly rolling grasslands with forests at the margins, gnarly mountains above — those are hard to see through all the smoke blowing in from the Bitterroot Range fires. The reservation seems to be set in a vast wide valley — it could be a graben, a block of land that sank between bordering faults, like San Francisco Bay or Klamath Basin. Well, almost, it's the southern end of a LONG fault-block valley, glacially-excavated, with a lateral moraine at the bottom. So saith the geology text.

Ah yes, the geology. The rocks here and beyond are 100-million-year-old Cretaceous sediments. Glacier and Waterton parks are topped with half-to-three billion-year-old Precambrian metamorphosed sediments, some of the oldest stuff on the planet, and right pretty too. But I digress.

We see grassy fields with tidy rolls of hay; and towns edged with the usual commercial strips, the town-limit signs announcing churches and civic groups and fraternities: Lions, Eagles, Elk, Odd Fellows, etc. Gas prices in Missoula are lower than in Idaho which is cheaper than Nevada which is cheaper than California; even cheaper here on the Rez. Other than the cheap gas (ONLY US$2.31 PER GALLON, AY YI YI!), it looks like typical all-America. But most all-American communities don' have a National Bison Range adjacent. So it IS a little different here.

FLATHEAD LAKE: We come over a rise and there down below is big, beautiful (as much as we can see in the smoke) Flathead Lake at about 3000 feet. (I'll have to research its area.) And we're immediately into extensive roadwork. A little ways back we saw a sign: MONTANA HAS TWO SEASONS — WINTER AND ROAD CONSTRUCTION — PRAY FOR SNOW. I wouldn't pray for snow, just for a good rain to put out the fires. What;s the air like here? Smells like we're in a smokers' lounge. I don't know how much distance or elevation we'll need to get out of it.

We escape the construction and pass a sign announcing MONTANA VORTEX — HOUSE OF MYSTERY — NATURAL PHENOMENA — LARGE GIFT SHOP. The mystery is, how do they get enough suckers inside to pay for the rent and the billboards. Ah well — considering the vast numbers of gamblers, NewAgers, Mormons and Republicans, it's obvious that many people will believe ANYTHING. (Have I pissed-off everybody yet?)

We turn north and run up Flathead Lake's east shore. The smoke is thinning a bit, the sky is looking a little bluer than browner. Here's tip for mountain vacationing: Besides the weather forecast, check the forest fire forecast. You might not want to commit yourself to a gaggy smokey trip. I mean, this ain't as bad as the burning of the fields in Yucatan or Honduras of even California's Central Valley rice-growing region; but still, who needs it?

Driving beside Flathead Lake, I first thought of Tahoe's east shore; but no, this is much more like rolling around Clear Lake, California, but not as volcanic and more agriculture. Many fruit orchards — signs promote CHERRIES, HUCKLEBERRIES, APPLES, PEACHES, NECTARINES, PLUMS. We stopped to buy a pound of Flathead Cherries and they're just about perfect. Throw in some pretzals, and lunch is taken care of.

I spit all my cherry seeds out the window. Maureen is saving hers, she's gonna plant them in our yard back home. "If they'll grow here, they'll grow in the Sierras," she sez. She hopes.

CAMPY CAMPS: Past Flathead Lake, closing in on Glacier National Park, we pass a sign pointing to Big Sky Bible Camp. And I wonder, but where's the Big Sky Koran Camp? Or the Big Sky (Diamond or Kama) Sutra Camp? Or the Big Sky Torah Camp, or Book of Mormon Camp, or Discordia Camp, or Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures Camp? I mean, everybody with invisible friends and holy books deserves to go to camp! How about the Big Sky Runes Camp, or Big Sky Kells Camp, or Urantia Camp, or Seth Camp?

And then there's Glacier Bible Camp. I guess if you threw all the bibles into or under the glacier, that would work. The korans and all the others, too.

The big meadows above Flathead Lake look very much like Upper Klamath Basin in Oregon. That's a graben; this isn't quite. And now we have a beautiful scene of grainy fields bounded by conifer forests climbing the steep mountains, and blue sky and white puffy clouds... and old TVs tossed by the roadside, as well as the occasional box, tire, stove, whatever. Ah, Americans...

CAMPERING: So, into Glacier NP (US) and a drive along the long, fjord-like Lake MacDonald, up to another friggin National Park campground. Yuk. Crowded, overpriced, buried in trees. And we can't even drive all the way through the park because our vehicle is one foot too long! A 22-foot RV on a 21-foot-limit road! Aargh. So tomorrow, the Hiker's Shuttle. Go see the good stuff. Oops, the Hiker's Shuttle is hideously expensive. We'll try to sneak across, heh heh.

NOTE: I label this place Glacier NP (US) because there's also a Glacier NP (CDN) in British Columbia, just west of Banff and Yoho National Parks. Please mark these on your maps.

Tuesday 9 August 2005 - NAGASAKI DAY!
_{Glacier NP (US) to Waterton Lakes NP (CA)}

MORNING: Early out of Glacier Park's Avalanche Creek campground and we snuck over Logan Pass and Going-To-The-Sun Road. Not bad. Sky a little smokey and otherwise cloudless, lousy for photography. We finally picked up CBC radio — such a relief.

The drive eastward UP the transcontinental road is kinda hairy in this RV, mostly due to sub-one-lane narrow sections (with abyssal dropoffs) under reconstruction. Past the pinches and overhangs and roadworkers, the road is fairly glorious, with cirques and cols and aretes and hanging valleys suspended over the main classic glacial valleys. The east side has a more gradual slope, again with fjord-like finger lakes. Long thin Saint Mary Lake extends due to a long lateral moraine, topped with small lakes infested with vicious moraine eels.

ANIMALS: We strolled around Logan Pass and had close encounters with ground squirrels. I pulled one's tail twice. He looked surprised. A big white mountain goat shuffled dirt and guzzled grass just above us. No, he's not roped out each morning. The air was still.

In St Mary is a General Store with Internet Cafe (two terminals in the back). I can tell we're not in Mexico any more: connections in Chiapas were about US$1.00 per hour while the rate here (on a slow dialup-speed link) is ten times that. Damn. Get the email and run.

We left St Mary and looped around east and north to the Many Glaciers entrance and lodge and facilities. Campground full — time to move on. A bear ran across the road in front of us, or so I'm told. I was looking in another direction just then. Damn. I miss so much.

MID-AFTERNOON: Heading from Glacier NP (US) to Waterton Lakes NP (Canada). We dropped out of the canyons, onto the high plains, and are now crawling up lush green foothills. Dark cloud cover is moving in. A few minutes ago we heard on CBC News a report of two Alberta teenagers, 12- and 13-year olds, who came across a pregnant cat that had just died, and with a shard of broken glass, a scrap of tin can and some cotton, they performed a C-section and saved four kittens. Now why don't we hear news stories like THAT on stateside media?

Dragonflies are swooping low across the Chief Mountain International Highway, not chasing b'ars, nor being chased. We want to see some b'ars, some b'ar butts, b'ar butt flapping in the wind whilst running down the road, like we did in Oregon so long ago. Meanwhile, off to the left is a GREAT huge honkin' tall butte, what looks like an immense volcanic plug, rising a mile above us into the sky. Chief Mountain: obviously a totem of phallic worship. Oh yeah, it ain't volcanic, it's the last outpost of that Precambrian overlay on the Glacier-Waterton region.

BORDER: Crossing the border into Canada took about 90 seconds. We pass over our passports and answer a few questions: No, no firearms or weapons. No gifts or merchandise or anything we intend to sell or leave behind in Canada. No mace or pepper spray. (We won't talk about the alcohol and cigars.) Aw darn, he didn't stamp our passports! So, officially, we're NOT HERE. Not until we use a credit card, anyway — which may be in about 1/2 hour. The young Customs Canada bloke seems none too happy about being posted to this beautiful but remote location.

Immediately after crossing the border, the terrain becomes a mystical-misty-mountainous north-of-northwest-looking realm. A light-to-dark cloud cover blankets the fading-into-the-distance layered-shades-of-blue mountains. After our first sighting of Lower Waterton Lake, the thunderstorm commences. Lightning crashing against the mountainside, animals fleeing in terror. There goes a black bear with his tail on fire! I guess the strike was pretty close. The rain pounding down like gatling-gunfire, the ponds beside the road frothing and boiling. Yahoo!!

WATERTON: Into Waterton Townsite, and the rain lets up just in time for me to photograph a waterfall. This is a tidy little planned resort community with the huge victorian Prince of Wales Hotel on a hilltop, overlooking the drowned-valley Waterton lakes snaking through looming blue cloud-covered mountains.. We head out of the village towards Cameron Lake; Maureen says this looks like Switzerland, like Brienz going from Lucerne to Interlaken. (Mark those places on your maps.)

During a break in the rain, we step into the local Parks Canada Visitor Center for three minutes. As soon as we step back out there's a fellow with a clipboard, come to survey us about our experience in the Visitors Center. What did we find useful there? The maps. What DIDN'T we find useful? Don't know, we weren't there long enough. Could we find our way around inside? Yes, it's about a 600 square-foot trailer-size shop. How could it be improved? Well, the Alberta Visitors Center back in West Glacier has a full-size Tyrannosaurus skeleton; it's sure be nice if there was one here, too. And he asks, what's our ZIP code? It ends in 666, the ZIP-code of the Beast. And he says, "Ah, that's my boss's phone number."

LAC CAMERON: The Cameron Lake drive is a crawl through a narrow gorge (past Canada's second oil well) in steep mountains covered with conifers and quaking aspens. I don't think we're in Guatemala anymore. Yeah, the aspens are a dead giveaway, and the lack of chicken buses here.

Straight black glacial-carved walls hang over Lac Cameron. One can rent or launch non-motorized boats in this lake. Go fish! But do not fish from or near the far shore, and do not throw fish guts near the shore. That is grizzly bear territory, and they would like to eat your fishes, and you too.

We promenaded around Lac Cameron a bit and got back in the RV just as the thunderstorm resumed, rain POUNDING down, trying to erase all human traces from the planet. The rain is a deluge of almost Mexican proportions. Small water sprites and nyaeds cavort by the stream banks. Raindrops on the road are nearly explosive, with splash-coronas spitting skyward. (Maureen just coined that term, splash-corona. It has nothing to do with beer in the bathtub.) I guess we picked a bad day to hang up wet laundry. But this is the summer weather we were looking for, our escape from western heat.

This is a warm rain, and the forecast calls for lots of it, maybe four inches tonight. A news report forecasts Canadian gasoline prices well over US$3.00 per gallon. So maybe we're back in Guatemala after all. But Canada is bigger.

FRANCOPHONES? For those of you who don't know, I should mention that all official signage in Canada is bilingual. This is a sop to the tiny portion of Earth's population, and the sizeable Canadian minoriy, who speak some form of French. In France is a government agency charged with preserving the purity of the language by rigorously censoring all foreign elements. English (which was based on French long ago) has no such committee, happily adopts words from anywhere, and will devour modern French in the near future. But like Navaho and Nez Perce and Nahuatl, French will undoubtedly be taught in elementary school to minorities who wish to preserve their dying cultures.

Bad joke: Many years ago we were autumn camping in the Maritimes, and we pulled into a soggy deserted campground in New Brunswick. The camp host, who'd recently moved from British Columbia, quickly identified us as Californians, nobody else being loony enough to pitch a tent there then. He asked if we know why Canadians had a French problem while Americans had a Black problem? We said no. He said, it's because you Yanks had first choice. [BONG!]

But back to the signs. The roadsigns we've seen so far use a clean International Sans-Serif font, but colored yellow on brown. Lower-impact than US signs; somewhat difficult to read, eh? Maybe they're ecological, but they also have a military air, almost camoflagued. I'm sure we'll get used to them.

EVENING: Up the Red Rock Canyon to Crandell Campground, right where The Prairies Meet The Rockies (that's a slogan here). Beautiful ecotome, the edge of ecosystems from north-east-west-south, and lots of animals run through here. Mule deer right now, maybe bears later. And yet more rain and hail. Maybe the bears are staying dry in caves tonight.

Wednesday 10 August 2005 - AND IT RAINED!
_{Waterton Lakes NP to Maycroft Rec Area}

EARLY: Rain and hail pound down like drumming, a military tattoo all night. The bears in their caves are laughing at the humans in their tents. In our RV, we laugh too.

I hesitate to mention my dream of shopping in Canada. It was like buying thread in Chiapas, Mexico: get in line, wait for a clerk, point at what you want, get a ticket for it. Get into another line, wait for the cashier, pay up, get a receipt and your ticket stamped. Get into another line, wait for another clerk, hand over the receipt and ticket, wait til your merchandise is gathered and packaged. Except in the dream were further bureaucratic complications: special coupons needed for some types of goods, special vouchers offered to handle price adjustments, a certain questioning as to one's suitibility and eligibility for some goods. Just a dream.

ROLLING: In Waterton Lakes NP, we drove up Red Rock Canyon, and indeed there is one little spurt of red rocks sticking out of a hillside. The lower part of the canyon is indeed like a finger of prairie stuck between conifer-forested mountains. At the valley bottom are tall grasses. Along the streams are birches, beeches, aspens. Assorted glorious vistas up great canyons and defiles assault our eyes. Massive cloud-capped peaks, etc. All well worth spending some time poking around. Waterton is MUCH less crowded than adjacent Glacier (US), and less commercial — except for Waterton Townsite village, of course, designed and constructed to separate visitors from money. But ain't that what resorts are for?

We're already hatching a plot for the next twelve months, as our new US and Canada park passes expire at the end of August 2006. I may have mentioned this already but we're firming it up. RV and lollygag in Mexico (Baja and around the Sea of Cortez) during winter and early spring; for late spring and summer, come wandering northeast through the Rockies and high plains, US and Canadien alike. Hmm, it just occurred to me: if we RV to Canada in the summer and to Mexico in the winter, are we officially snowbirds?

We head north and east from Waterton and immediately we're on the high prairie. A low heavy layer of roiled clouds as far as we can see. This big prairie is not all flatness; the topography shows relief. Gulleys and gorges are carved by the mountain-spawned rivers. Low hills rise here and there. It gets flatter further down, though.

SIGNAGE: Those yellow-on-brown signs seem to be a feaure of national parks. We leave the park and colors emerge, and signs instructing us to report poachers, to dial 911 for emergencies, and to camp.

We pass a corral full of city slickers on horseback; the dude wrangler is getting ready to rope'em up and ship'em out. Git along, little dudies and dudettes, git along! Take a ride out across the high prairie, maybe even up into the canyons.

We're heading for a big escarpment where indians used to stampede herds of bison off the edge, collect their bodies at the bottom. They did that for 10,000 years and the bisons never learned.

CARDSTON: But first we're approaching Cardston AB, founded by C.O. Card, a son-in-law of Brigham Young, who established a polygamous Mormon community here, beyond the reach of US law. So we see some BIG houses with many doors, kinda like parts of southern Utah and northern Arizona.

Coming into Cardston is a sign: TRUCKERS, PLEASE DON'T USE ENGINE RETARDANT DEVICES WITHIN CORPORATE LIMITS. In the US it would say NO JAKE BRAKES. Are Canadiens more polite?

Cardston has an ordinary downtown; the streets aren't spotless. There's a HUGE Mormon temple, the LDS headquarters for western Canada. And there's a Fay Wray fountain with a King Kong cutout. I wonder if she's from around here.

BLOOD RESERVE: Quite a few Indian faces on the streets. We're right next to the Blood Indian Reserve, which looks like miles and miles (klicks and klicks) of flat shortgrass prairie. The Blood are one of the four bands of the feared Blackfoot Confederacy: the Blood, Piegan, Siksika (Blackfoot), all Algonkian speakers, and the Sarcee, Athabaskan speakers.

The song running through my head is Ian and Sylvia's THE SHORT GRASS (one of my favorite finger-picking pieces). A couple days ago it was Carole King's IT MIGHT AS WELL RAIN UNTIL SEPTEMBER. Yesterday it was Merle Haggard's THE FUGITIVE. My mental soundtrack continually evolves. eh?

CBC news sympathetically reports that a ceremony will be held on the Blood Indian Reserve to put wandering spirits to rest. Two teens were killed in a recent auto accident here. One died on the spot; the other was unconscuous when she was taken to hospital and died there. It's believed that her spirit is roaming around looking for closure, especially since their identies were mistakenly swapped for awhile and the wrong rituals were originally performed. We don't hear about such ceremonies on mainstream US newscasts.

PAGLIACCI: Ah, more stuff we don't hear on stateside radio! CBC just played Homer and Jethro with Spike Jones doing their classic version of PAGLIACCI, which I haven't heard for a LONG LONG TIME. What year is that from?

We stopped to reprovision and refuel in Fort Macleod. HINT: Buy gas at the pumps in front of EXTRA FOODS markets and you'll get a rebate, a percentage per liter, that can be applied on items purchased in the store (alcohol and tobacco excepted). We went into Fort Macleod to handle an online transaction (HINT: libraries offer free iNet access), then out thru the rain to the afore-mentioned escarpment.

BUFFALO JUMP: At Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump Provincial Park we couldn't see the jump site; the trails are closed because of a cougar in the area. The park features a splendid seven-level interpretive center and museum. We arrived late, just 1/2 hour before closing, and were granted free admission and directed to a modern theatre showing a fine short film on how to drive bison off a cliff. The preparation, the rituals, the runners, the rush to doom — everything except car chases and alien UFOs. We *must* return to see the cliff itself, maybe not on such a soft wet day. Did I mention that the displays are excellent? S'truth. The friendly joking staff are all First Nations folk — Blood? Cree?

Driving bison off a cliff. Maureen says it's a hard way to get your dinner. I say it's better than eating grubs, and a bit more exciting. And more rewarding; it's hard to use those grub-hide robes to stay warm and dry come wintertime. Making pemmican from grubs is difficult also.

From Head-Smashed-In we head westward, off a highland into a lower prairie filled with giant windmills. A great windfarm here, several scores of whirling titans. Big fockers. They're labeled on the side: VisionQuest. Or so I'm told. A sign back at the interp.center says that winds here are rather constant, with speeds of up to 150 kph (90 mph). Hmm, the label I can see looks like Vestias. And beyond, a smaller array of vertical windmills, with the stretched-egg-shape-slice blade structure.

MAYCROFT: The rain is almost heavy, ie, sufficient. Lightning strikes around us. It probably doesn't rain ALL the time in Canada, just when WE are here. We pull off the road at Maycroft Provincial Rec Area on the Oldman River, the Rockies profiled just a few miles west of us, to sit this one out. See y'all tomorrow, eh?

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