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