Friends, Glaciers, Bears, Trees, Chipmunks, and Trains

My friend Casey and I had a weekend in Glacier National Park. A couple of days isn’t a very long time. Still we packed it in hiking close to 20 miles.

My flight got in Friday afternoon, a few hours before hers. I rented the car and checked into the Izaak Walton Inn, midway between the West and East Glacier National Park entrances. While I waited for her I took a solo hike, well, I started to take a solo hike. I was going to head from our cabin up to Kelsey’s Cliff, about a half hour trail straight up the mountain where you get a view of the whole Izaak Walton Hotel compound below and the railroad tracks and the BNSF trains which look like little toys. I headed off with only my bear spray, rented an hour before at the airport. Ten minutes in where the brush ends and the trees begin, I saw him. One hundred feet down the trail, on all fours, very big, and very black, just looking at me, was a bear. I gave a little completely un-panicked holler. Woo-hoo, Mr. Bear. Woo-hoo. The same call my grandma used to get my grandpa’s attention from the house to the barn. It can be quite loud. Mr. Bear reacted to my “woo-hoo” by turning and running down the path away from me. I never turned around, but backed myself down the path, while completely un-panickedly figuring out how the heck to get the safety off my measly little can of bear spray, which I had been told has seven seconds of spray. Thirty dollars worth of false confidence. I think that pepper spray makes those bears sneeze. He turned back to look at me two times before disappearing. My occupation with the “woo hoo” and the bear spray safety thingy did not allow me to take a photo. You will have to trust me.

Make new hikes and keep the old, that’s my motto. I met a new one, the hike to Grinnell Glacier, eleven miles round trip with an elevation change of 2000 feet. Casey is from Houston and everything is a little faster there than in the Minnesota suburbs. I mostly kept up until the last .4 miles. I’m learning I could use some oxygen and a sherpa at about 7000 feet altitude, but I’m better than two years ago, slow and steady wins the race. By sixty I should be ready for the big mountains. Grinnell Glacier did not disappoint. I’ve never seen anything like it. The light. The temperature. The colors. The chipmunks.

If Grinnell Glacier was the silver hike, then Avalanche Lake was the gold. Oh, that I could conjure the photo of the Stephens family on the picnic rock in 1974 or so. But, I do have photos from 2011 and 2017.

I often hear wisdom and gain healing among the ancient cedar trees, but, this trip was not about me. Casey spent the summer in Uvalde as the attorney investigator for the Texas House Committee on the Robb Elementary shooting. She gave her heart and her mind. She helped bring some light to the dark facts, some small answers to a hopeless question. I hope that the ice cold glacial water rinsed some of heaviness away. Maybe the rocks that have been there in the lake for God knows how long and those ancient cedars brought some eternal perspective to an inexplicably tragic moment. Maybe the mountain is bigger than all of us, bigger than good and evil, only changeable through the rushing river of time, and very, very slowly at that.

Me? Now, having breathed the mountain air and fought the brave fight against the hungry glacial chipmunks with my trekking pole, (yes I made it through the bear scare only to be attacked by chipmunks which I may or may not have provoked by leaving my sandwich momentarily unattended and letting some gorp slip out of my hand in their direction) AND having finished a summer with ten groups of guests at the cabin, international and domestic travel and piano institutes, I’m ready for my favorite month of September. A time for new beginnings and fresh starts. New pencils and paper. Piano tunings. A baptism of the year. The routine. God bless a routine. Self discipline and growth. Saturday mornings at home. Fall leaves, candles and dish soap. Smiling piano kids. Even marching band. A final year of eight years of marching band.

Calvin and Mary are seniors. The calendar is all colored in. I’ll take you along the Kotrba train this year, it’s already left the station.

Wait for it. . . yes there are four helper engines. I might need all of them to get the Kotrba train over the senior mountain. God Bless.