Montana September 2 - 3, 2002 about Places, highways in Montana, and mountain goats. (Meh.)

	Eagle Park: our favourite Place in Montana

	We are pretty well hidden, are we not? Our wagon and a very blue tent are quite visible on a larger picture (click)...

Did you notice that there are places and then there are Places, all around the world? One may stand in front of a super-famous natural wonder, and nothing happens -- you are gazing perhaps upon yet another, larger waterfall, a steeper cliff, a stormier sea. But then, other times, you simply find yourself in a Place, which guides may not even find worth mentioning -- and you know that this is IT. One can attribute it to geopathogenic areas, a dragon's favorable breath, déjà vu, or believe theories of some "tribal subconsciousness", according to which a person feels best in a landscape his/her ancestors came from; or one can blame "primitive instincts" (a hunter prefers hills to see farther; forests and prairies are most natural habitat of homo sapiens etc.). It does not matter to me, why it is so and what you call it -- it's simply important that in a Place, you can somewhat breathe out, and temporarily forget about deadlines, due dates, contracts, and screwups.

Little Belt Mountains are such a Place. After two full days of driving, with our heads still buzzing from Butte, we arrived among wooded hills, appropriately alternated by mountain meadows with aromatic grass. There's not much more to it, really, but in combination with Montana's pride - Big Sky - it offered a sanctuary after recent excitements. The sky truly seems larger and deeper -- perhaps for the absence of smog and city light pollution. It appears that Places are in fact shy, and once enough pilgrims begin to arrive, the Places become just famous, depleted places.

	Sitting Hippo: on a campsite at 7,000 ft, Sid reads a book before the sun sets

Sid happened to Little Belt Mountains four years ago, entirely by chance. Together, we drove right to his tested Eagle Park. To elaborate - in Montanese, the word "park" does not mean a green, carefully tended city oasis, but a stretch of forest with clearings and meadows, as opposed to the usual impenetrable wilderness. Eagle Park is an ideal spot for camping -- a comfortable shady (National) forest, a large, bright meadow, a great view. This year, however, it featured disturbance of all the beauty -- a dead cow heavy with crows. The cow smelled bad, the crows cawed, well, we have a somewhat different idea of a romantic location.

Our backup spot was a saddle between two hills, and caused much hesitation of mine. It seemed to me that we would not be sufficiently protected here. Hippo eventually procured a depression that would half engulf both our Wagon and our tent, and indeed: two bikers passing by at sunset completely overlooked us from a nearby road.

	Traffic participants on Montana's Highway 330

Lulled by silence of Little Belt Mountains in the morning, we picked a road slightly shorter, but less traveled - Highway 330. Alas, not every "highway" necessarily implies a ten-lane freeway. Considering Montana's population density (under a million people per 147 thousand square miles), I'm not sure who would drive all those lanes anyway, but I must admit that this was my first "highway" made of packed dirt. It felt like traveling hundred years back in time. Not a soul in sight, just us and hills and cows. Sometimes, a tiny farm would peek from under trees in a gulch where it was hiding. We saw many abandoned cabins, windows and doors missing, that may remember first settlers. An elk jumped almost under our wheels in a blind turn (fortunately he realized the danger in time, and fortunately we have an AWD+ABS, so we were not forced to cook wild goulash, neither were we forced to finish the trip walking). we also frightened an antelope herd; of course right in the moment as Sid swapped his camera lenses and crept out to take pictures, another car (the only one we met on that road), rattled by, sending our antelopes over a horizon.

	Antelopes in a prairie.

Then we noticed a truck parked by a broken fence, a farmer with two dogs, and we run into a herd of sheep. Pushing carefully through a bleating barrier, we finally realized after few turns that this one would count hundreds, maybe a few thousand heads, all limited by fences to the highway, and we would have to drive this way for several miles. Sheep are relatively dumb -- they run in the direction they're facing, and so in a little while there were quite a few furry buttocks trotting before us. If those dummies thought of looking back, they'd see all the remaining room around us between the highway and the fences on each side, but no -- they were going on and so Sid had to lean out and bang on the roof of the car. That scared them enough to look and find the "mortal danger" to be quite small (almost a point in the sea of sheep), so they parted and let us go by.

	Scrambling uphill to Hidden Lake

After several hours of a very rural Montana, we finally reached otherwise boring pavement, and swapped places behind the wheel. Running around our wagon led to discovery of thousands of moths, flies and bees, all caught in grids of our foglights, having thus turned them in flylights. It also explained a certain unpleasant odor emanating already for a while from our wagon - all the dead meat filling our radiator and air conditioning intakes, baking in the heat of the engine.

	Hidden Lake, Glacier National Park, Montana

Several hours of landscape boredom ensued -- a totally uninteresting, sweltering flatland. Hence I was sufficiently surprised to find tall mountains on our horizon, with cloudy caps. I did not expect the end of summer to arrive so abruptly. It still took us over an hour before we reached St Mary, and another thirty minutes to get a (last available) room at Red Eagle Motel. Unfortunately, Glacier National Park has been very popular and very crowded -- and prices follow the demand. For a miserable "jewel of Bombay" (as we call substandard accommodations) we paid as much as we normally do for a respectable hotel, including a breakfast. There was no room for bargain -- weather grimaced maliciously, it does not befit to make a "wild" campsite in an Indian reservation, and our favourite National forest was too far.

	Mountain goats bleat very sparingly: Meh.

We came to see the park, of course, and headed for it right away. Driving, Sid quickly negotiated switchbacks up to Logan Pass. There, hilarity ensued, for several mountain goats came to check out tourists at a parking lot. These cute animals with snow-white fur appear as if they had just run away from a toy store. They can afford their conspicuous coats -- they practically don't have a predator. Strong muscles on each goat's back propel it up to many a steep rock, with the help of non-slip hoofs -- leaving everybody else behind. These goats have obviously lived all their lives side-by-side with harmless tourists. They stoically accepted all picture taking and video taping; one was polite enough to pose on a rock for us, with one leg elegantly slanted. Long live wildlife!

We left (human and ungulate) crowds and opted for a walk. It was not so simple as a trail marked a sign that it was OPEN (despite trenches and heaps of an abandoned pathway construction), but a line blocked it, equipped with another sign directing us to go THROUGH a tourist info center, which in turn was closed (for the season, no doubt -- they did not reopen the next day). So we negotiated the construction site for a while (merciful snow will soon cover all "traps" and justify keeping all population away; have you noticed, how all park management seem to excel in virtually only unique skill -- blocking public from visiting?), then we ascended at a slow pace towards Hidden Lake. The elevation had to have some effect, only thus I can explain why I moaned already in the middle of this easy walk, "are we there yet???" and accused Sid of having misread a simple datum (1.5 miles), for that we must have already walked, have we not?

	"We got to hike out there tomorrow!"

	Sharp rocks are great for scratching

The lake itself is rather unique. Its three sides are surrounded by tall mountain cliffs, the fourth side is a steep abyss, featuring a necessary waterfall. The lake is really very "hidden" -- at this elevation right under the top of the glacier slopes, one would hardly expect it to form. We enjoyed the scenery in perfect solitude, and then suddenly we heard: "meh". Four mountain goats arrived to the lookout, probably also wanting to peruse the view. They laid down comfortably on rocky ledges and only from time to time said something. They're very succinct speakers -- making very short and very low noises. Later, another tourist came trotting down the trail, gawking at the lake. When we told him we had company, he almost fainted. He likely missed the corrupt goats down at the parking lot, now thinking himself being endowed by improbable luck.

Lights were fading, it was time to run back down, drive out of the park and get something to eat. Park lodge was the only remaining attraction of St Mary. Their prices give you a sense of exclusivity, but the food was excellent. We asked for going prices on their rooms -- I don't tend to insist on "natural" decorations of elk horns and carpets with oppressive patterns of moose and bears, but the place was obviously cleaner than our very filthy indeed Red Eagle. A lady in the lobby hesitated to name the price first, but then gave us a range between hundred sixty to three hundred twenty dollars per room per night. Suddenly reinforced in our conviction of having paid adequately, we rolled off to our tired little motel.

Copyright © 2002-2005 by Carol & Sid Paral. All rights reserved.