The Road That Beckons: Glacier Then and Now

September in Glacier is special. Cold mornings, cool nights and somewhat warmer days let you know change is in the air. We've been coming to Glacier National Park for nearly 30 years and the Park is certainly far more crowded than we remember from the "good old days", whatever that means. There's an ad running for I think some brand of ice cream who's tag line is "The good old days are being made right now" set to a catchy jingle. I cringe when I hear it because I can't imagine anyone looking back on the Covid pandemic as "the good old days" but I give kudos for a clever advertising campaign.

When we first came to Glacier it seemed there were more bears than people. We'd head up to Logan Pass at the top of the Going to the Sun road as evening set in to watch for bears in the open landscape above timberline. More often than not we'd catch sight of a grizzly meandering through the nearly empty parking lot itself before crossing over to the Highline Trail. Now I don't think a bear of any size could squeeze between the cars sardined into the parking lot even as the sun goes down and the stars begin to shine. On our first couple of trips to the park hardly a day would go by without a bear sighting, sometimes multiple in one day. This trip we've seen one lone bruin high up on a rocky slope as we were descending from the Pass. I guess the rule of inverse proportionality is in effect - this trip everyone is carrying bear spray, and it seems no one is seeing a bear, where back in the day bear spray was still new and largely unproven and you really had to keep a sharp eye out for big furry critters coming down the trail.

On our first trip to Glacier we took a shuttle up to Logan Pass at the crack of dawn where they dropped us off with hardly another soul around. Our plan was to hike the Highline Trail to the Granite Park Chalet, spend the night, then continue down to Swift Current where we had left our car. I remember it was cold and dreary as we started out and we couldn't have seen a bear if it bit us through the fog but as the day warmed up the clouds lifted and the trail was bathed in bright sunshine. We were carrying backpacks as the Granite Park Chalet was fairly rustic and you needed to bring your own sleeping bag and food (nowadays I understand they provide food service and linens for a fee for those preferring to hike unencumbered by a pack). It wasn't too long before faster day hikers caught up to us and let us know that they had closed the trail behind us due to bear activity near Logan Pass. We couldn't have returned to the Pass if we had wanted to. As we kept hiking (its a several hour hike to Granite Park Chalet) we noticed a group of folks who had passed us earlier all standing together nervously eying the trail ahead of them. Someone in their party had seen a grizzly off the side of the trail so there we were stuck between bears behind us and now bears in front of us. Back then I don't think any of us were carrying that newfangled stuff called bear spray so the only recourse we had was to continue hiking to the Chalet as a larger group and make as much noise as we could to let the grizzly ahead of us know where we were hoping he or she would stay clear.

Suffice it to say we all made it safely to Granite Park and settled in for a beautiful evening watching the sun set to the west. The Chalet had a nice second floor deck from which tourists used to throw food scraps to bears who had become acclimatized to handouts. That ended pretty quickly when a couple of campers at the adjacent Granite Park campground were attacked by a bear on August 12, 1967. Two young women were killed and a man mauled (if you're curious, Google Night of the Grizzlies or read the book of the same name by Jack Olsen). I came across the book at the Chalet the evening we stayed there and read the harrowing account of what happened which is why to this day I'll never camp at the Granite Park campground even though the events chronicled in the book are more than fifty years in the past.

One interesting thing did occur during our stay. Darkness had settled over the Chalet when we saw several miles back on the Highline Trail a little pinprick of light bobbing in the gloom. We asked a ranger who was stationed at the Chalet what the light was and he said, in a not-too-pleased voice, that he was going to have to go see for himself. He dutifully set off in the pitch black with a flashlight and a crowd of us watched his light slowly make its way back along the trail toward the other light still bobbing in the distance. Eventually the two lights met a mile or two away from the Chalet and then both lights made their way back towards us. Eventually the ranger arrived with a solitary hiker in tow. The hiker had apparently ignored the bear closure signs at the top of the Pass and thought he could hike to the Chalet then back down to the Going to the Sun road before darkness caught him. When the ranger intercepted him he was using a little penlight to follow the trail and to make noise he was holding his car keys and jangling them ahead of him as he walked! The ranger was livid but had no choice but to put the errant day hiker up for the night (he slept on the cold hard stone floor) before rousing him at the first sign of daylight and sending him down the trail to the road with a stern warning not to repeat his prank again. This year the smart grizzly would likely have distanced themselves as far away from the crowds on the Highline as possible.

Your Red Bus awaits!

One thing we did this trip that we had not done before was take one of the Red Bus tours that has been shuttling tourists through the Park since the 1930's. Our driver, Rich, was a treasure trove of information and we lucked out by having beautiful weather during our tour. It was in the 30's when we set out but seemed to get warmer as we and the sun got higher and it wasn't too long before Rich stopped and rolled back the fabric roof allowing for an even more stunning perspective of the park. I was just happy to leave the driving to someone else as taking your own vehicle to the top demands you pay close attention to a steep, narrow, and winding road (for those familiar with Colorado, think the west side of Independence Pass).

Just outside the northwest boundary of Glacier National Park lies the little town of Polebridge, Montana. We had visited Polebridge more than twenty years ago so were curious to see the changes that the intervening decades had wrought. In the early '90's Polebridge was a forgotten backwater hamlet that few tourists ventured to see. The road back then was dirt (it still is) and rough (now well maintained, as far as dirt roads go) so it took some effort to visit. Polebridge today has, like so many places, been 'discovered' and we were surprised (though we shouldn't have been - after all we are from Colorado!) by the number of new homes all along the road. The town itself still has a funky vibe that almost feels Alaskan with fancy new homes sitting side by side Yurts, old cabins and all sorts of off-the-grid accommodations.

The Polebridge Mercantile was doing a booming business and we treated ourselves to some of the delights from the bakery (huckleberry bread, huckleberry brownies, etc. - Yum!) and sat on the adjacent picnic tables watching loose horses graze within petting distance. We asked the locals what was generating all the new growth since our last visit and were told that Canadians from Alberta and British Columbia had snatched up lot of the property pre-Covid at rock-bottom prices before Montanans realized the value of what was in their own back yard. I'd love to see Polebridge in the winter as the view from the town is as good as any you'll get within the Park. And yes, on several mornings the high peaks were featuring a fresh new blanket of snow and freeze warnings at lower elevations were becoming the norm.