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30th Sep 2005
Huckleberries ...
Friday, 30th September, 2005
It rained all night, without stopping once and by morning many leaves had come down … gauged by the number lying on top of the car. We sorted a few things for the day and scouted the immediate environs for breakfast – not a chance! so drove back down to West Glacier and joined all the other hungry, late season tourists.
Huckleberry muffins and huckleberry French toast with maple syrup and whipped butter Mmmmmm Yummmmm.
We also learned at this stage that Logan pass had been closed and would remain closed for at least a day due to rockfalls and mudslides … some of the rocks apparently requiring blasting to shift them. Glad we hadn’t lingered any longer up there to get pictures!
From the booth outside, I phone Lisa at USGS to check arrangements for the morning. She was expecting me at 10 so we scouted out way in the ‘suburbs’ of West Glacier … down a forest track and along another until we found the converted cabin where the geologists hang out.
Anne set off to look at fire sites, catch up on Suduko and relax while I had a really good couple of hours discussing the image processes of recording glacial retreat .. and more to the point trying to find out how the resulting message is being relayed through the PR network to raise awareness. The short answer is it isn’t happening, which is a shame as the images they have spanning a century or so of surveyors and visitors to Glacier NP are a gift waiting for someone to take them firmly by the scruff of the neck and shove them under the noses of America to demonstrate the considerable changes of the last century of so.
This afternoon we took a spin down the road to Columbia Falls in search of an internet hook-up and anything else that we might be able to discover en route. We discovered very little except that there is very little depth to the town in this part of Montana. Once you have clocked the diner, the shop selling genuine Indian artefacts, the garage and the liquor store, you pretty well have it.
In CF however, the little café we visited .. sorry, no idea of the name, was obviously at the cutting edge. It is the only venue around offering internet access … and wireless access at that, so when at 5 o’clock last orders were being despatched and the doors closed, we decanted into the car park and parked outside the empty building a continued to work online until the battery was exhausted.
There was a talk by the National Park Wardens at McDonald Lake Hotel this evening and we arrived there at about 7 in time to document the interiors of the hotel and to have a bar supper … still in POURING rain.
The Hotel is fantastic inside, massive stone fireplace where they burn logs about five feet long and six to eight inches diameter, all the time.
The hotel is made out of massive trunks of lodgepole pine … the upright columns, three or four feet in diameter and there are loads of old hunting paintings and dead things clapped onto the walls to add to the atmosphere.
Even the chairs are fashioned out of logs, most of them with the bark still left on and the arms of the chairs and hand-rails have got a polish which only come from about 90 years of use, they are like glass they are so worn.
I fared slightly better than Anne with supper … a selection of sausage kebabs was eminently more ingestible that the soup ‘de jour’ … which ‘jour’ exactly might have been up for debate. The bar tender was in particularly fine fettle as it was his last shift of the year.
The talk was about medicinal plants and was fairly interesting … I’ll say not much more; the differences I would say between a similar delivery in the UK were that it was undertaken in an Ophrah Winfrey style which relied on audience participation … more worryingly was the fact that most of the front row were readily engaged by the speaker and wanted to take part. I think in Britain you’d be sitting there still, waiting for a response to an open question to the audience as I doubt anyone would put themselves forward.
It rained even more during the talk … continued afterwards and as we went home and we fell asleep in our little shed to the constant drumming on the roof.
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