Day Six - Going to the Sun

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Today’s story will pretty much be told in pictures. I left Kalispell a little after sunrise and headed north towards the western entry point to Glacier National Park. The departure from Kalispell is pretty neat because you get to watch the sun rise over the Swan Range of mountains. A few miles out I took a wrong turn in Columbia Falls. There is a road that allows you to see a portion of the park not seen from the main road that runs through and I thought this was it. Part of the reason I wanted to take the road was to see more beauty but also to kill some time until the sun was higher in the sky.

There are three important things about photography; first you need a subject, second you need perspective, third and most important you need light. When taking photographs of landscapes the lighting is provided by the sun and in the mountains you need to be on the same side of the subject as the sun otherwise all you get is a silhouette and none of the colors whose contrasts allow the eye to judge scale. And, while the camera can capture the colors, it really is almost hopeless at capturing scale but it does allow the sharing of beauty. For those of you who have been to New York City, there are valleys in Glacier National Park in which you could fit the entire island of Manhattan, valleys with walls so high that not even the tallest building would be visible outside the valley.

Anyway, back to the wrong turn. Once outside of Columbia Falls the speed limit jumped back up to 70 and I decided the oil needed a little warming up so I rolled on the throttle and brought the needle to an even 80 so as not to attract the attention of the department of revenue generation, otherwise known as police. I was tooling along happily, looking at the scenery unfold, passing from lush, forested hillsides to devastated, burned out hillsides. I had read the night before that the fire that burned this section of forest came through in 2001 and up until now the hillsides were still bare of trees. I wanted to stop and get a good look closer to the ground and see if there were any little trees taking the place of the charred remains that now stood.

Deep in contemplation I saw a sign that warned of a speed zone up ahead. In Montana that means that you are entering either a town or a congested area and you will have to slow down. Now, you normally get the warning about a mile before the first sign that will read, for example, 45 MPH Ahead, and then you have about half a mile to get your speed down. In this case, the first sign was about an eight of a mile before the 35 MPH sign and I thought that was strange because there was no town on the map, no intersection and no camp ground. The 35 MPH sign was on a gentle right hand bend and just as I passed the sign I realized why the speed came down. Ten yards past the speed sign was another sign that read Pavement Ends.

Um, the pavement ended about 50 yards past that. When you are traveling at 80+ MPH, the yards tick by pretty quickly so even though your brain can read, register, comprehend and decide in the space of a second, in that time you do cover quite a bit of ground. I hit the brakes hard and then let go in order to get the load off the front wheel and allow the bike to settle before getting on the gravel. There was a good amount of loose gravel on the unpaved road and my eye told me that I would normally not go over about 30 on a straight portion of road like that and I glanced down to see that I would be hitting it at 70 ..... on a curve!

I relaxed my grip on the handle bars and prepared to feel the first sign of a skid so that I would know when I was going down. I looked at the left side of the road which was an embankment strewn with pebbles but at least there were no trees. I hoped that I would go down before that so I could at least slow down before hitting something hard. That way I would walk away with bruises but nothing broken. The bike would probably be destroyed.

I was off the pavement and gently held the bike leaned into the turn with no brakes on and the throttle in a partially closed position – you don’t want to fully close it otherwise you get engine braking on the rear wheel and that will cause the back end to get loose, something I did not want. I picked a path with what looked to be the least amount of loose gravel to the inside of the turn so that I would have as much road as possible to slide across.

The front wheel held on as did the rear and the curve straightened a little. With that I eased way off the throttle and gently started to brake and with a feel for the available traction with that action I fully let go of the throttle and applied more brake pressure. There was another curve to the left coming up and I did not want to enter that with any amount of speed. I managed to stop about half way around that curve.

I stopped right there in the road and waited a moment as my mind caught up to what just happened. I pulled off the road, turned off the motor and decided to wait a bit while watching the river I had just crossed. Everything I just described took place in the space of a few seconds but it took several minutes to play it back in my head.

Well, that was the first surprise of the day and, as with yesterday, my alert level was back to EXTREME. For some strange reason I didn’t get the adrenaline rush and shakes you normally get after a close call. Maybe because I was actually doing stuff through it rather than waiting for what had appeared to be the inevitable.

This is the scene with which I contemplated that close call.

Oh well, I got the bike turned around with no incident and headed back towards Columbia Falls. While passing through the burned part of the forest I saw a river access road that would allow me to get close to the water. It was a pleasant detour and I walked along the bank for a little looking for a good photo shot but none was available. I was on the west side of the river facing the sun so the camera really would not capture anything.

Back on the bike I soon go back on course and arrived at the gate where I bought my pass. Inside the park I took the initially intended detour which took me ten miles north through more burned forest but gave me the opportunity to whet my appetite for what awaited me in the park. Along the road I got glimpses of the many peaks that decorate this part of the park. This time, when the pavement ran out I was down to first gear about a hundred yards from the end of the pavement and turned around without my wheels touching even one pebble in the gravel.

Back on track I stopped at the visitor center on the west end of Lake McDonald, turned onto Going To The Sun Road and got my first good shot. The road travels along the southern shore of the lake before climbing out of the valley, over Logan Pass at 6,646 feet in elevation on the continental divide before descending to Lake Saint Maries on the east. Below are the photos I took. I don’t know the names of the peaks or the valleys. I will let the photos tell the story and here or there I may add a caption that tells why I liked that shot. My travel agent Michelle recommended this park to me and boy, am I glad she did. She is the best and I would recommend her to all who are reading this. The link to here website is in the menu on the right at the top of the page.

This was my first view of the peaks in the park.

The peaks peeking over the trees. You can see what having the sun on the "wrong side" does to landscape shots.

A display on the fires that ravage the area. Most are started by lightening

Looking east into the park across Lake McDonald

Looking up a stream bed to the rocks over Logan Pass.

My favorite photo of the stream feeding Lake McDonald

I liked this shot of the outline of the mountains and the trees in the foreground.

This is the valley and the stream that feeds Lake McDonald.

In this shot you can see the foreground in recovery from a fire in the 60's, the middle ground is lush forest and the background is still devastated from the 2001 fire. It takes a very long time for forests to recover from fire!

I like the colors in this one.

I like the way the foreground and the background have such different colors.

Up at Logan pass.

At Logan pass I saw a little Honda 125cc enduro motorcycle with an Arkansas license plate! There was a true king of the road! To travel this far on a motorcycle is one thing but to do it on a motorcycle made for trail running in your back woods is another. I saw the guy and he was keeping to himself so I did not bother him and we leapfrogged each other down the road as each stopped to take pictures and take in the views. That guy amazed the hell out of me. It is true you can tour on anything as long as you have the will and the machine. When it tugs at you it is hard to resist the call of the road when it comes!

Somehow the trees find life in the rocks!

You can see the road cut into the hillside.

That is a smile of stunned amazement at the beauty of this place.

One of the many waterfalls in the park.

This has been a particularly hot and dry summer so there is less snow on the mountains than normal.

This, like all the other valleys here is shaped by a glacier. The difference between a glacier formed valley and a river formed valley is a glacial valley is "U" shaped as is well seen here while a river valley is "V" shaped.

Yeah, I like rocks up against the blue sky!

This is a shot of the park looking west from the east entrance.

Peaks rimming Saint Mary Lake looking west.

A slightly different view of the same shot.

A little further down the road looking east on Lake Saint Mary.

A parting shot of Lake Saint Mary.

On leaving the park I made took route 49 at Kiowa which would take me to another access point in the park. I was not disappointed! I had to pull over to unload the camera into the laptop as I had filled the memory card and I was glad I did because I got the following shots in this section.

This is the Two Medicine River

Two Medicine Lake looking west into the park.

Looking back at the park from the plains of Montana.
Another shot of the park from the plains of Montana.

And, a parting shot of the peaks of Glacier National Park. What an amazing place. As always, the photos don't tell half the story and cannot capture the scale of what you find there.

After that I headed for Great Falls where I was to spend the night. It was about a 150 mile ride and I had to pick between the freeway and back roads. To this point the road was twisty and the vegetation was not cut back. I had happened across cows both on the road and on the side of the road since leaving the park and this did not allow for full enjoyment of the roads because there is no way I was going into a corner hard – especially not after having to brake hard for five cows that seemed to be contemplating the meaning of life in the middle of one particularly sweet left hander.

The terrain quickly turned flat. Not as flat as Kansas but a hell of a lot more featureless!! Wheat fields, miles upon miles upon miles upon miles!! Every once in a while there was some pasture dotted with a few cows but otherwise it was just fields of wheat! Even trees were scarce and the only ones to be seen were those that were next to the occasional house. If you don’t like having neighbors close by, this is the place to be. Oh, you can see your neighbor’s house only it is about five miles away!

With the wide open spaces and no place for a cop to hide I decided to make quick work of the trip to Great Falls. Rather than take the initially intended back road and risk more encounters with open range stock or other large beasts I headed for the freeway. Let’s just say that it took way less than two hours to cover the distance and a tank of gas that would normally last 250+ miles was burned through in about 150 miles and leave it there.

About five miles outside of Great Falls I hit the rain I had been watching for the last half hour. I wondered when the clear skies would end and now my question was answered. Funny thing about it was the forecast had called for 0% chance of rain. Weathermen!!

The rain must have been torrential before I got in because the streets were flooded! I found my hotel and the rain stopped as I finished unloading the bike. There was a Mexican restaurant within walking distance so I strolled over for a good filling meal washed down with a tasty Corona.

Back in the hotel room I decided to check the weather for tomorrow and all along the route they are calling for cloudy skies with 60% chance of rain in the morning and thunder storms in the afternoon. Looks like a wet day on the road!