“Episode 9 – Glacier Park in June
They say Glacier Park is glorious in July or August. The same park across the border in Canada is called Waterton. Sightseeing, fishing, camping and hiking and canoeing/rafting without par, and of course the unparalleled Going-to-the-Sun Road. In September the cool down starts, with the onset of Winter’s pure white frigidity shortly thereafter and lasting at least until June 10, 10:30 am. We arrived June 9th.
Our Train 8, the eastbound Empire Builder arrived at East Glacier, MT mid-morning on Thursday, 6/9/05. The station was open and staffed. It is a beautiful example of what a Great Northern turn-of-the-last-century-now-fully-restored-and-used-by-Amtrak station should look like. The structure is original, just updated to meet all MT State building code requirements, i.e., should be made of trees. When we left Seattle, one of us had the brilliant idea (borne of need since there is no baggage handling at West Glacier) to send our bulk luggage on to East Glacier, keeping just an overnight bag for the night at the Belton Chalet in West Glacier. We got off the train along with a bunch of other folks and when they dispersed, we collected the forwarded bags from the Station Agent, who gave us a quick tour of the baggage room (still just like it was in 1904) and history lesson, including some of the noteworthy carved inscriptions and artistry left on the bare fir log walls by earlier agents or patrons. I got some good GN and Amtrak postcards and we walked the 200 yards across the not-yet-blooming-but-at-least-level garden grounds separating the station from the Glacier Park Lodge. It was magnificent, crowded and busy for 11am. When it was our turn at the front desk we got nothing but bad news. “You’re too early for check-in, the room won’t be ready until 11:30 (later, 12:00, 12:15, 12:30, etc.)” and, “You’re too late for the Going-To-The-Sun Road tour, but the road is closed today, anyway. It was reopened after yesterday’s snow storm but there was a big avalanche this morning that buried it and they will have to blast ‘er open again. You should have come in July!”
It was too early for lunch, so we wandered around the GPL admiring the place. The main lodge is open in the center like a hotel with a massive atrium, only no skylight, with guest rooms on the second and third floors, a huge dining room on one end of the main floor and breezeway connecting an annex on the other end. The primary structural supports are giant Douglas fir trunks, probably 5-6 ft in diameter at the base and 5-6 ft in diameter at the top. Not much taper on these monsters. The whole lodge was hung on about 16 of these, and if we’d moved the furniture to one side, you could almost have painted a regulation football field on the floor. Everything was decorated in 100% American West. There weren’t just moose and elk heads hanging on the walls, there were entire buffalo, GN big-horn sheep, and stuffed grizzly carcasses to photo op with. I took pictures and got postcards. Also got a book about the GN/Glacier Park history and sat down in a really comfortable chair in the enclosed breeze way from the main lodge over to the new (c1909) annex, to read while they got our room ready. Dad was writing postcards on an old desk until he and, as it was later relayed to me, several of the other guests were disturbed by prodigious snoring. When he succeeded in shaking me awake and quiet, I checked on the room and it was ready – on the 3rd floor, of course, – no elevators, of course. (And no elevators means no wheeled luggage carrier, which meant the only way to get your stuff up to the room was to carry it up the stairs the old-fashioned way because one of us was too cheap to hire a local coolie.)
After carrying and unpacking, Pop’s coolie was hungry, so we came back to lunch in the main dining room. We waited for just a minute or two and got preferred seating at the north-facing window looking up the snow-covered eastern slopes of the Montana Rockies. I think I got the house special, chili. The waitpeople were all east-Europeans just like on a cruise ship, here to make a fortune, practice English, and party. East Glacier, MT could not have been their most sought-after party spot, but the ones we talked with liked the area and many were repeaters, returning for the 6-8 week Summer season that started in July.
After lunch Pop went to the massive fireplace at the west end of the main lodge and made friends with everyone there. The lodge lobby stayed pretty crowded because nobody could get into the Park. Dad talked to one woman, a retired Fed like himself who explained she’d come to see the Going-to-the-Sun Road and wasn’t leaving until it opened. I went out to double expose a few rolls of film in town, at the station, and just a quarter mile west of the station, at the long trestle across a pitiful little stream 100 ft below. This trestle had an unusual appurtenance, a 20 ft high wind screen across the top of the entire span. I found out part of a freight train had been blown off the tracks into the ravine the year before. You could still see damaged areas where cars had hit the bridge, and where cranes and other heavy equipment had been used to clear the mess. So, to prevent it from happening again, BNSF added the wind screen on the north side, which eliminates any scenic viewing while crossing the ravine, but cuts down on potentially devastating wind shear thereby compensating in more useful ways. If I had only read a little more of my new book before snoring off earlier, I’d have found 2 (or 3) Medicine Creek less than a mile east of town, a RR photographer’s dream because it is bridged by a monster of a rickety old trestle, 10 times as long and high as the one I did find. We crossed it the next day. Of course, when you’re on the train crossing a RR bridge, you can’t see the bridge. All you see is how high in the air you are, with no discernible support, and how happy you are to not be falling. At least I have photos of 2 (or 3) Medicine in the book.
East Glacier is a little bigger than West Glacier, but neither is going to need to build a stadium for a major league baseball team anytime soon. West Glacier is snugged into the mountains. East Glacier dramatically marks the end of the MT rolling prairie and the start of the Rocky Mountains just a sharply as the period to your right marks the end of this sentence. No transition. If walking west, and step “x” is on the rolling plains, step “x+1” is climbing the first mountain (unless you know the way through Maria’s Pass). East Glacier supports a US Post Office, so I mailed some souvenirs home so we wouldn’t have to carry them anymore. After a careful accounting, I packed the Royal Gorge stemware in a mailing tube with mostly-clean undies to keep them from breaking. Everything arrived intact, and all travelers had sufficient apparel to complete the final days of the trip.
We had a fairly late supper (for us) and turned in early when it got dark. For such a large open place it was quite quiet by 10 pm. It was too cool to open either window overlooking the station, and we couldn’t turn on the wall heater in the room because it was adjacent to the bed/covers, and there wasn’t room to move the bed away. But we had plenty of authentic western blankets and spent a restful night, exhausted after 2 brutal days of doing nothing. Early to bed, early to rise, so we were among the first to sample the ponderous GPL breakfast buffet. I’d enumerate the dishes available if I could remember, but I am comfortable and mostly accurate in stating that if what you sought was an edible breakfast/brunch item, it was available somewhere in the dining room if you could locate the right serving table, though I never saw (or sought) the famed Rocky Mountain Oyster Bar.
After breakfast, we packed and checked out. This time our luggage was driven the 200 yards and left waiting for us to give to the Station Agent/baggage handler, a very friendly young lady who graciously searched her poster stock for any remaining Amtrak advertising posters. She found a beauty of the Empire Builder, but only had one bent, worn print of the Pioneer, a great train that used to run from Salt Lake City to Seattle through imaginably spectacular National Park-like scenery (also used on occasion by the American Orient Express) until Amtrak killed it. She apologized for its condition and gave it to me, along with several baggage tags. Gratis. The gratuity she got when checking our luggage was not for her great baggage handling abilities. GOD bless her generosity, and He has blessed her, with that job in that location.
Train 8 was about 30 minutes late. No matter. It was a beautiful warm, sunny morning and we were standing on the platform of a genuine Great Northern working RR station/museum, dutifully looking west into the famous Pass for our train. At about 10:30, Friday morning June 10, 2006, both Summer and the eastbound Empire Builder arrived at Glacier Park. I firmly believe the doors to our Superliner opened at the same moment Going-to-the-Sun Road re-opened. There are 3 main entrances in Glacier National Park; at East Glacier, Belton, and Canada. We had tried 2 of the 3 and had been stopped, praise the LORD, because He might want us to see it in July.
Last – Part 10: You can go home again.”
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