The Mountains at the End of America

This was a huge, beautiful drive across brand new country, from one national park to another. We started early. At seven in the morning Paradise was bathed in sunshine. The mountain shone. All the cloud was beneath us.

Pausing only to grab a coffee, we set off, winding our way back down through the forests, through the cloud and finally out of the park. Once we'd got away from the mountain, the sunshine returned and we drove on through a beautiful morning. It was still early when we stopped for gas at White Pass, a tiny, scattered human settlement entirely dwarfed by the distant peaks that reared up on either side of a broad flat valley. Living here must be like seeing everything through a wide-angle lens.

Back in the car, highway 12 took us east. Suddenly there was a huge body of water on our right, lit by the horizontal sunshine. We didn't know it then, but it has the wonderful name of Rimrock Lake. At the time it was new and nameless in the morning sun, as if just the act of driving towards it had called it into being. We had to stop and stare at it.

If this had been a three or four day drive we could have gone on like this, stopping every thirty miles - but we had to be in Glacier that night. We got back in the car, back on the road, chewed up the miles.

The road climbed up out of the valley. The mountains turned to cliffs. We came over a rise and found ourselves in a yellow desert of sage that stretched ahead of us. Gradually it blended into farmland. Washington grows 60% of the apples consumed in America and we were driving through the heart of it, all the way to Spokane.

For the first time since we had bought it, many years before, we actually used a book describing various long-distance US road trips to tell us where we should stop for lunch. The answer turned out to be Frank's Diner in Spokane, just a few blocks from the interstate. For the last ninety years or so it has been housed inside an old pullman carriage, on a busy corner just below the actual railway line. We were intrigued but not especially confident, but there was a reassuringly long line for tables that turned out to mean only a twenty minute wait.

We were eventually shown to bar stool seats looking straight into the galley kitchen where Josh and Nelson gracefully and silently danced around each other in order to cook all the food. It was simple breakfast food, mainly eggs and bacon, with good coffee that kept coming. Laura had the corn beef hash, Chris had a turkey sandwich, William and I had eggs florentine with hash browns. It was all excellent. In fact, it was one of the best meals I'd had in America, and the hash browns were exceptional.

I'd have gladly stayed for dinner, but there were still all those miles ahead of us. On we went, into the afternoon, letting the rest of Washington play out around us. On into Idaho, a mere seventy miles wide at this point. A vast cloud of dark rain lowered far off on our right. We could see the lightning flashing within it, but the rain remained a vaporous curtain on the horizon and never reached us. The road climbed, more mountains ahead, and then spun about to the right and dipped, plunging into Montana.

If there was one place this trip that I wish we had stopped to photograph, it would be this next section of the drive. Turning off the main highway and heading north we found ourselves passing through a golden landscape of great rolling plains, rising to gentle peaks to either side, the grass glowing yellow in the westering sun. Everything blazed under a perfect sky. Far ahead of us we could see more mountains and I was thinking of our eventual destination, Glacier National Park, on the border with Canada. But we were still hours and hundreds of miles away. There would be mountains behind the mountains we could see, but we didn't know that yet.

On we went, now driving along the edge of Flathead Lake, 30 miles long and 16 miles wide. Although it's freshwater it looks like a small sea, the dark blue surface alive with boats, the shores crinkled with marinas and jetties. We left the lake behind and were back into farmland hemmed in by more mountains, punctuated by tiny towns, or ranches with brassy billboards exhorting adherence to the ten commandments.

Sometime close to seven in the evening (Mountain Time) we made it past the Montana Vortex and House of Mystery and stopped int Hungry Horse, MT for gas and a huckleberry milkshake. I don't think I knew they were a real thing, but up here they are inescapable. Later on, we'd be told that no one had worked out how to grow them domestically, and that anyone who did would be some sort of saint in Montana.

Refuelled, we made our final leg of the day: driving into Glacier itself and through to the eastern side where we would be staying. Only 54 miles, but nearly another two hours behind the wheel. On our right, through the pine trees, was Lake McDonald. Ahead of us rose the indomitable peaks of Glacier, the mountains at the end of America.

After Rainier there was something unforgiving, perhaps even cruel about them: a jagged range of brown rock, like broken teeth. To reach our cabin we would need to drive up and through them, along the Going-to-the-Sun Road. Built in the 1920s to facilitate automobile travel across the centre of the park this is, depending on your point of view, either a triumph of civil engineering or a vertiginous nightmare. At the highest point, Logan Pass, a mere 6647 feet up, we climbed out and watched the mountain tops painted red by the sunset.

By the time we made it down the other side to Rising Sun, on the shores of St Mary Lake, the night was black around us and the stars were glinting in above our heads, seemingly closer than ever.

Paradise, WA to Rising Sun, MT

Miles: 606
States: 3
Licence Plates: zero. Inexplicably we didn't see anything new.
Brunch: Frank's Diner, Spokane, WA
Dinner: Two Dog Flats, Rising Sun, MT

Marmots in the Mist

Presumably, on a clear day, the views of Rainier from that path are extraordinary. We may never know. We had a good walk anyway. The cloud was (ha!) atmospheric, and the trees and flowers were still beautiful. The top of the path wound across a flat heathland populated by a huge number of friendly marmots. They bounded around, something like a beaver crossed with a rabbit, eating the flowers and staring ambivalently at any passing humans. Occasionally one would sit up on its back legs and fire a piercing screech through the mist. If anyone urgently needs two hundred photographs of marmots, please get in touch.

After the Wisconsin Disaster

We shan’t dwell on the details of the incident that has become known as the Wisconsin Disaster. Suffice to say that practitioners of the Licence Plate game divide into Purists and Pragmatists and, momentarily, the Purists took charge. The question was, does a licence plate spotted on foot count, or does it need to be seen from the car? Ten minutes later we had abandoned a perfectly good parking spot and were scattered across the cloud-wreathed mountainside car parks of Paradise, without phones or signal, and with visibility at ten metres. It’s safe to say that the Pragmatists will be making the decisions for the rest of recorded time.

The resulting Board of Inquiry made several recommendations, the most significant of which was that, given the heavy and increasing cloud at Paradise, we should give up on our planned walk and head instead back over to Sunrise where we had been the day before. It was a drive, but it should sunnier there – at the very least we should get a view of the peak.

We found the car and set off down the mountain. Just like yesterday, the cloud permeated the forest, tendrils of vapour curled above the road. Then, also just like yesterday, we turned the magic corner and the curtain was drawn, the sky went blue, and the sun blazed merrily.

As we approached the gate back into the park we encountered traffic – we slowed. Was this a bear jam? We crawled forwards, excited…

No. A ranger stationed at the roadside was warning each in-bound car that there was a two hour queue to enter the park. In fact, it was one car out, one car in. Turning around meant another hour and a half drive back to Paradise and, presumably, a similar wait at that entrance too – not to mention the danger that even then we wouldn’t be able to park. We decided to stick it out. Almost immediately our luck began to change.

First, a scruffy green campervan came the other way sporting a dusty, miraculous Hawaii plate. Then the queue began to move. Suddenly we were back into the park and carving our way around the switchbacks on the way up to Sunrise.

As we reached the top, it happened. The road runs straight along the ridge from the last turn to the parking lot of the visitors’ centre. On the right, the land rises steeply, thick with pine trees, to the top of the ridge. On the left, the slope is gentler, with intermittent clumps of trees separated by thick pale grass. At almost the same instant, both William and Laura shouted ‘Bear!’.

I hadn’t seen it and we were already well past. A moment later we reached the car park and turned around, pulling over maybe a quarter of a mile back down the road. We piled out, grabbing the camera. There were bears. Black bears, a mother and cub, cinnamon-backed, making their way through the trees parallel to the road, at least fifty metres away. We stopped. We gawped.

 A pair of cyclists we had overtaken twenty minutes before pulled up. A car stopped behind ours and a woman climbed out. What had we seen, they asked. We had started a Bear Jam.

The mother moved in stately procession, her shoulders making mountains of her brown fur as she paced ahead. The cub frolicked and bounced behind her, bounding delightfully through the grass. Laura laughed with glee, as happy as I’ve ever seen her. The woman from the car sighed with satisfaction; she had been a Ranger at Mt St Helens for six years she told us, and she had never seen a bear before. We didn’t mention the Bear Woman of Minneapolis from the day before.

The bears moved off out of sight. We got back in the car and forgot about Sunrise. We drove back to Paradise, got waved through the line, and parked right in front of the inn. The cloud hadn’t lifted, in fact it was probably worse. We did the walk we had originally planned anyway and it was fine, everything was fine. 

Paradise, WA to Sunrise, WA and back, again.

Miles: Just a smidge higher than yesterday - say, 109?

States: 1

Licence Plates: 4 (total now 47, we're missing Mississippi, Kansas, Kentucky, and D.C.)

Breakfast and Dinner (we didn't need lunch): Paradise Inn, Paradise, WA.

Number of Wisconsin licence plates ironically spotted in the immediate wake of the Wisconsin Disaster: 3.