Glacier National Park, Day 4

Y tho

Reed and Busse hiked the Pitamakan-Dawson Pass Trail Loop from Two Medicine, which was almost 20 miles. They left before 8 a.m. and got back after 6 p.m. Reed had an accidental bear mace discharge, and was still feeling tingling in his fingers when he went to bed. They saw lots of wildlife on the trail, and not many people.

The photos above are by Reed Thompson

Photo by Nathan Busse

Molly and I took the 10:30 a.m. shuttle from the hotel to Two Medicine and hiked from the trailhead to Rockwell Falls, which was a cool multi-layer waterfall.

We encountered a chatty chipmunk, and then a chipmunk that really wanted to eat our dinner.

Chippy!

 We made a detour to Aster Falls on the way back, which was also nice.

The shuttle was kind of expensive, and we had to ride with some gun nuts on the way out, which was weird. Our driver was upset that the officials at the Canadian border wouldn't let him take his 30-round magazine into Canada, and the two Texans in the van agreed that that was a severe infringement on his freedom. The driver on the way back was funny and good-natured, and he talked about driving from Phoenix to Fairbanks.

I went to get groceries and beer when we got back, then we got takeout from the Whistle Stop, which was not nearly as good as the Looking Glass. Reed and Busse were pretty much toast from their hike, and they crashed.

Here are the links to the individual day posts:
Glacier National Park: Day 1
Glacier National Park: Day 2

Glacier National Park: Day 3

Glacier National Park: Day 4

Glacier National Park: Day 5

Glacier National Park: Day 6

Glacier National Park: Day 7

Glacier National Park: Day 8

Glacier National Park, Day 3

Someday the mountain might get 'em but the law never will

We were looking for a lighter hiking day, so we hiked from the hotel to Grinnell Lake, which was 7 miles round trip, and pretty much completely flat. We saw a moose by Lake Josephine, and saw a mountain goat on a cliff above Grinnell Lake.

Noble!

We walked across a suspension bridge on the trail, which was cool.

Bouncy!

I think this one goes here?

We were staying back in East Glacier that night, so we drove to St. Mary and stopped at the supermarket, which was pretty cleared out because of the end of the season, and generally pretty depressing. They had any kind of bread you wanted, as long as it was white.

We paused frequently on the drive to appreciate the views. We agreed that we can't believe that we're physically in this place right now. We drove to the Glacier Park Lodge, and we went up to our room, which was pretty strange -- the fire protection piping was placed very haphazardly around the room at a height of 5'-6" or so. We complained to the front desk and got rewarded much more generously than we should have: they put us in the Golf Cottage for two of our three nights, which was a full 2-bedroom house with two full bathrooms, a kitchen, and DirecTV. It is fantastic.

We had dinner at the Looking Glass, which was exceptional. Molly and I had Luna's Salad, which is some sort of Pittsburgh tradition with steak and french fries on it. The huckleberry pie was excellent. Reed said the Indian Taco was better than the one he had at Serrano's. We went back to the cottage and drank box wine and watched The Office which Reed and Busse planned their epic hike for Tuesday.

That's the Grinnell Glacier overlooking Grinnell Lake

Here are the links to the individual day posts:
Glacier National Park: Day 1
Glacier National Park: Day 2

Glacier National Park: Day 3

Glacier National Park: Day 4

Glacier National Park: Day 5

Glacier National Park: Day 6

Glacier National Park: Day 7

Glacier National Park: Day 8

Glacier National Park, Day 2

A panoramic view of Iceberg Lake

Reed and I walked around East Glacier Village and got the dog situation under control. We saw a big, strong boxer with big, strong balls who jumped over the fence in his owner's yard and decided to be our tour guide for the rest of our walk. He walked out in front of us proudly and cleared the way among the other stray dogs who were wandering around, of which there were many. They were all well fed and healthy looking, but there were many of them.

A couple of free goodboys - photos by Reed Thompson

We gathered up Nathan and went to the Two Medicine Grill for breakfast, which was a diner where you could sit at the counter on stools. Reed had got some intel at the gas station on the dead cow from the night before -- since East Glacier is on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation and the roads are marked as open ranges, the owner can sue you if you hit their cow. Some redneck at the diner said that a Blackfeet had hit the cow and had run off to the reservation to hide from justice, which didn't make any sense because they were already on the reservation when they hit it. Anyway, the gist of the matter is that it's real hard to be a white man these days.

We loaded up the car and headed for Many Glacier, which involved some off-roading through a lengthy, thorough construction zone on the way. We came into the park and immediately saw 30 cars stopped alongside the road -- a mama grizzly and two cubs were about 100 yards away from the road.

Trying to get a grizzly view - photo by Reed Thompson

Nathan had 20x binoculars, which was helpful.

Big ol' binocs - photo by Reed Thompson

One of the babies was light-colored.

A couple of bears at a safe distance

We couldn't check into the hotel right away, and Molly was feeling under the weather and walked us to the trailhead. She practiced her bear spray technique, and saw a deer from 8 feet away. Nathan, Reed, and I hiked to Iceberg Lake, which was cool, 10 miles roundtrip and 1500 ft elevation gain. I guess there are icebergs in it most of the year, but not today. 2/3 of the people who we asked on the trail saw bears. Reed jumped all the way into the lake, and Busse photographed it.

Couple more bears

Taking a well-deserved break from the trail

We met Kevin at the lake, and he hiked back with us, despite us not extending an invitation to him. We saw bighorn sheep butts briefly as we were leaving. We saw a couple of young, unprepared guys heading out as we were leaving. We were pretty tired when we got back. We had a beer in the lobby and had dinner. Our room was choice, classic vintage and elegant, great lake and mountain views.

Many Glacier Hotel lobby - photo by Nathan Busse

Many Glacier Hotel on the shores of Swiftcurrent Lake

Pretty good!

The highlight of dinner was our server, Shawni, talking about the staff living arrangements, which sounded pretty fun -- they all live in dorms and work seasonal jobs in different places throughout the year. We looked at the stars from the balcony; it was incredibly dark. Reed fell asleep hugging his pillow.

Here are the links to the individual day posts:
Glacier National Park: Day 1
Glacier National Park: Day 2

Glacier National Park: Day 3

Glacier National Park: Day 4

Glacier National Park: Day 5

Glacier National Park: Day 6

Glacier National Park: Day 7

Glacier National Park: Day 8

Glacier National Park, Day 1

Oh, she so happy to not be riding on a train anymore!

We boarded the Amtrak in St. Paul on Friday night at 10:50 p.m. or so (the train was 30-40 minutes late arriving). Our car was nearly empty, the seats could recline almost all the way, and we were ready to crash. We slept until Minot, North Dakota, sometime around 8 a.m. on Saturday morning. The landscape was almost totally flat until we got within about 20 miles of the East Glacier Park stop were we got off the train. Here's a quick time-lapse summary of what it looked like:



We saw two ghost towns in Montana where buildings still stood, but there were no windows in the buildings and no occupants.

Oh so scenic. 

The train was very nice; our car was maybe 10% filled, so we had plenty of room to spread out. We had breakfast in the dining car, seated across the booth from a young Amish couple (there were a lot of Amish people on the train). This couple had just gotten married in Michigan (where she was from) and were moving to Montana (where he'd lived for the last 10 years). His family ran a sawmill, and he worked there. We had a lot of questions, but tried not to pry too much.

The couple two rows behind us also got on at MSP and were extremely loud the whole trip, playing music from their phone, talking loudly on the phone, and talking to each other. They broke up somewhere in eastern Montana, and he said the only thing that was keeping her safe was that he just got out after 8 years in prison and he didn't want to go back. So that was cool.

Please note extremely friendly stray (or maybe just wide-ranging outdoor) dog in foreground. 

We made it to East Glacier by 7:15 p.m. on Saturday and Reed and Nathan rolled up just as we were leaving the station. We checked into the Circle R Motel and Nathan and Reed went back to look for hitchhikers that they'd passed somewhere near Browning, MT. They were either eaten by a bear or got another ride, because they were nowhere to be found. There was a dead cow by the bridge as they entered town and a mama bear and her cubs nearby. We went to dinner at Serrano's, which was just around the corner from the hotel, and then watch the Rolling Stones in Cuba on cable (the Stones looked just as leathery as ever).

Please note mountains in background, behind the train station.

Here are the links to the individual day posts:
Glacier National Park: Day 1
Glacier National Park: Day 2

Glacier National Park: Day 3

Glacier National Park: Day 4

Glacier National Park: Day 5

Glacier National Park: Day 6

Glacier National Park: Day 7

Glacier National Park: Day 8

Eastern European Adventure: TL;DR

So, there’s a lot of photos and text in the other posts. Here’s kind of a summary of our thoughts if you just want to skim or ignore the rest:

• Poland is straight-up cheap, while Prague is affordable, especially compared to Western Europe and big U.S. cities. Admission to sites in Prague was a little steep at times (no free museum days and several places were $10-20 admission), while it was very reasonable across the board in Poland (either free or a couple bucks for the most part)
• Neither Czech food or Polish food is outstanding, but it’s OK in moderation. Lots of meat and potatoes. 
• Prague’s Old Town has incredibly lovely buildings, but it’s incredibly touristy to the point where it’s difficult to imagine an actual human being living there, and it’s difficult to have any sort of authentic human experience. The tourists are quite ethnically diverse, though, with huge groups of Asian tourists especially. We had a better time when we hung out in the Holesovice neighborhood. 
• Krakow’s Old Town has slightly less lovely buildings, but it is less crowded and also seems to attract tourists from primarily Eastern Europe (read: all white people). We spent two full days there and felt like we would have been repeating things on day 3. 
• Warsaw is not nearly as beautiful as either Krakow or Prague, but its bike infrastructure is surprisingly great, and I had a much better time there than I expected. The Poster Museum is fantastic.
• Stores in Prague outside the Old Town have an *extremely* lax approach to open hours, and don’t seem to be open on the weekends at all, even when their posted open hours say they should be.
• The Cross Club in Prague was really the only place the whole trip where we saw any people who could be considered a little weird, and even then they pretty much followed a standard dress-like-a-punk playbook. Not that I have any room to talk, but it's just an observation.
• We saw several examples of blatantly sexualized and/or racist advertising throughout the trip, moreso than we expected. 
• The beer was almost uniformly excellent and cheap throughout the entire trip. Similar to Germany, the restaurant would generally have one light lager, one medium or unfiltered lager, and one dark lager, usually all three from the same brewery. With the exception of Pilsner Urquell, we rarely found the same beer twice; there are a lot of different, great beers. 
• Serving tap water in restaurants isn't a thing in either Poland or Prague, and bottled water and soda both cost significantly more than beer. 

Here are links to each day's posts: 

Day 1: Brzeg

Day 2: Brzeg

Day 3: Brzeg

Day 4: Brzeg to Warsaw

Day 5: Warsaw to Krakow

Day 6: Krakow

Day 7: Krakow

Day 8: Krakow to Prague

Day 9: Prague

Day 10: Prague

Day 11: Prague and Kutna Hora

Day 12: Prague

Day 13: Prague

Book Report: Slouching Toward Fargo, by Neal Karlen

Slouching Toward Fargo is not a great book, and it may not even be a good book, but it serves as a clear example of the type of book that I would only read while traveling. I read this primarily while on the way back from a work trip to Poland, when I was either on an airplane or in an airport for 16-18 hours, and I didn't really have any better options available to me. It passed the time, you know?

The book is structured as Karlen, a Twin Cities native and rock and roll journalist who's fallen out of the good graces of Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner, spending time around the St. Paul Saints in order to write a hatchet job of the Saints' co-owner, Bill Murray. He wrestles with the ethics of writing such a piece, and then ends up spiking the story altogether when he ends up thinking that Murray is a pretty good guy after all. However, in the course of making that decision, he's fully charmed by the Saints and gloms onto them for the better part of two seasons. Hilarity ensues!

The events in this book take place primarily in 1997, when major league baseball was stuck firmly in the malaise that set in after the 1994 strike, and Karlen makes a *lot* of hay out of the idea that the fun-loving, offbeat Saints are a vital antidote to the stodginess of MLB. And maybe that's true! It's kind of hard to tell now, 20 years on, when the Saints have moved from their homely Midway Stadium digs into sparkling CHS field, and lots of other organizations ape their goofy between-innings activities. I usually describe Saints games to people as "baseball for people who don't like baseball," since there's so much else going on to distract you from the often subpar on-field product, but Karlen claims that he finds the Saints style of play preferable to the majors. I think he's wrong, but who the hell knows?

Book Report: Spook by Mary Roach

Though most organized religions would claim otherwise, we have no idea what happens after we die. In Spook, Mary Roach trains her trademark curiosity and wit on the state of science (and, honestly, a lot of pseudoscience) surrounding the afterlife. It was good and well-researched, but I didn't latch onto any of the anecdotes or characters Roach encountered over the course of the book, and the afterlife isn't something that I've been terribly curious about, so I can't say I have strong feelings about it. We'll be discussing this at Boneshaker's Science Book Club on October 6, so if any incandescent insights come out of that, I'll add those here.

Eastern European Adventure, Day 13: Prague

We took the tram to the Modern Art Museum in the Holesovice neighborhood, and it was very nice, but a lot of it was closed for renovation. The parts that were open were exclusively Czech art, and Molly was struck by how many excellent artists were featured who made extremely relevant art, whom she'd never heard of because they weren't from the U.S. or Paris.

It was Saturday afternoon and we wandered around the neighborhood looking for vintage stores, but little or nothing was open for some reason. Even the stores that listed open hours for Saturday afternoon had signs up saying that they were closed. Then we went to Hillbilly Burger, and had a very good burger and some nachos with pulled pork.

We took the Metro subway to a different neighborhood thinking that maybe something would be open on Saturday afternoon, but again, not so much. We walked back to the hotel and took a breather.

Molly was craving some pasta, so we went to a fresh-pasta place (Pasta Fresca) in the center of the tourist maelstrom, which was actually decent, not crowded, and not overly expensive. We wandered around looking for souvenirs for a bit, got frustrated with that, and went back to the room where Molly packed and I typed, and then we finished watching the rest of 2001.

Previous Days:

Day 1: Brzeg

Day 2: Brzeg

Day 3: Brzeg

Day 4: Brzeg to Warsaw

Day 5: Warsaw to Krakow

Day 6: Krakow

Day 7: Krakow

Day 8: Krakow to Prague

Day 9: Prague

Day 10: Prague

Day 11: Prague and Kutna Hora

Day 12: Prague