Monday Sep 3 continued
Not too far after Thompson Falls I took a left to head north back up the next valley, which has a completely different character. I’ve spent the last two days in pine trees as far as the eye can see. Then I hung a left to turn east up the hill, and boom! I am in dried grass-covered hills as far as the eye can see. There was a sign right after the turn-off said “Hot Springs 21 miles“. Hmmm …, I thought. 19 miles later there was a little store and a road to the left for Hot Springs and a little sign for Camas Hot Springs. I pulled over and gave it a thought – two miles ain’t far to check out the possibility of a hot spring! Blessedly there was just good enough phone reception to google it.
WHUFU page for: Camas Hot Springs
Pretty funky. The lesser of the two hot springs in the eponymous town, but it's the first one I came to, so it's the one I went to. I enjoyed it immensly!
The other is Symes, which looked to have a small pool and a hotel! I am intrigued for some future trip!
tonight:
You could not imagine a more, um ... modest setting. a run-down community center with a concrete tub enclosed in barbed wire to the right of the door. That's the hot springs!
The water felt really good, a nice temperature. People were friendly and there weren't that many of them, so it was pretty awesome.
No showers, which is unfortunate.
It turns out the town has a few hot springs, but I didn’t know that yet. The place my directions sent me to was very unlikely looking. As described in the inset, it looked abandoned from the road. My co-soakers were a couple of families – a mixed group of Native Americans and white folks – who would come and go, out to the parking lot to chill in the shade of their RV or pickup truck, then back, then out again to get a sandwich… A nice grandma chillin’ in her car told me there was another place in town, so after I was well-soaked I drove around a little and found it.
Symes Hot Springs was its name. It also was pretty funky. But funky is actually kind of a plus (up to a point :) – fancy just means more stupid rules and more $$$ to sit in the same hot water. There appeared to be a small pool and a couple of tubs and maybe even showers. There was a derelict building and a handful of cottages calling themselves the Symes Hotel. Looking back, I definitely should’ve stopped right there for the day and spent the night.
All the more so since the rest of the day was kind of sucky. Route 28 continued north for a while, then turned east to run into Flathead Lake, a large, natural lake which is a vestige of Glacial Lake Missoula. It’s big and very scenic, but very poor in services. As I complain in the Spot description below, there was really no place else to go but a non-descript state campground that cost $28. I would have been WAY better off having a real American adventure at the Symes Hotel and driving past that dump tomorrow morning.
WHUFU page for: West Shore Flathead Lake Campground
Preposterously expensive for non-state resident visitors. Pit toilets, no showers, no services of any kind really, for $28. Flathead Lake is just a rumor, a faint glimmer between the trees. What is very real is the traffic noise, where US 93 loops around Loop A of the campground. The only other choice for 50 miles are upscale RV Parks and the Kalispell Walmart.
My cobbled together meal of leftover Caesar salad and a rubbery Safeway salmon fillet is being harassed by a battalion of those nasty food-bees (are they yellowjackets?). Oh, I just had a flashback to a previous trip, where a restaurant used lightly poisoned salmon to lure the annoying creatures to their doom. So I guess salmon really excites the yellowjackets.
Sadly, no yellowjackets were harmed during my meal, although I would have dearly loved to.
Tuesday (Sep 4)
Nothing interesting or fun here to make me want to linger on my $28 parking pad this morning. There is not even phone service. So I head off to Kalispell around 11.
I got coffee and wifi at City Brew on US 93 in the suburbs which was quite nice. The vibe they were clearly aiming for was “Starbucks but with nice servers”. They were extremely eager to serve and be pleasant. Which reminded me that many Starbucks barristas nowadays seem to be arrogant and un-eager to serve.
There will be no more civilization for the rest of the day after Kalispell, so I stopped at a downtown shop called the Split Rock Cafe. It was also extremely welcoming and pleasant. The owner (or at least manager) was opened the door for me! I think I like Kalispell! I got a hot sandwich to eat now and a cold sandwich to eat later, and both were quite good.
My plan was to head to West Glacier and drive the Going to the Sun Road, which the slightly cheesy name for the very dramatic road that traverses Glacier National Park. That is not going to happen because of wildfires. The park is closed after the Visitors Center at the entrance on the western side. On the eastern side the road is open to Logan Pass. All the campgrounds in between are also open, so that is my plan for tomorrow. Hopefully get there early enough to snag a campsite and enjoy the park for the day. [spoiler alert: Did not happen. Dream on fool!]
The default speed limit in Montana is 70 mph. So even a two-lane mountain road such as I am driving on US 2 today, is posted as 70. It would be insane to go 70 on this road, but it’s kinda nice to know that if you creep up there to the high 60’s on a straightaway, no evil CHP is going to jump out of the shadows and nail you. This is libertarianism I can believe in!
WHUFU page for: Devil Creek Campground
The place to go to when you can't go to Glacier NP. On US 2 which skirts the southern edge of the park. Nice campground, recently renovated, but somehow they couldn't get the brand new parking pads level.
tonight:
Nothing particularly interesting here, but the campground itself is nice.
Sites 12 and 13 are the best from my p.o.v - great views of the valley, even the cross-continental Amtrak trains rumbling along the side of the mountain across the way. The downside is the road noise is very loud.
It’s noticeably colder here than it was the last few nights at a similar longitude and altitude. The sun just went behind the mountain (still an hour to actual sunset), and the temp is mid 50’s. Symbols on my Montana map tell me that the train track on the far mountainside are for the Empire Builder, the Chicago to Seattle Amtrak line. That pleases me greatly for some reason. The view would be spectacular on the train up there looking down at me.
Wednesday
Soooo cold last night! Temps at dawn were 30°/53°. Propane miser that I am, I turned off the heat as soon as the outside temp started creeping up. So an hour into daylight the spread was a chilly 33°/48°. Sure enough, when the sun finally hit the van it got comfy quickly.
Cross the Continental Divide at Marias Pass (a mere 5,520′). There is a giant parking lot campground right there that is not in Allstays!
Actually, looking at the Glacier Park map, the mountains are not really that tall in an absolute sense, Logan Pass – 6646′, the surrounding mountains are all 8-9,000′. I guess it is the glacial sculpting that makes them appear so dramatic. But it’s quite a bit farther north than “my” mountains, enough that they do have actual glaciers … but to my original point the Sierras and the Colorado Rockies are quite a bit taller.
About 15 miles after the pass came the little tourist trap town of East Glacier, where I finally got phone reception for the first time since Kalispell yesterday afternoon. The place recommended by Yelp was super busy with crabby tourists. Not to mention they lied about having wifi, my pet peeve. So I made the excellent call to bail on the place BEFORE they brought my coffee. I walked next door to a much more modest place that DID have wifi … and nice people, and no lines, and an all around better vibe! Very pleasant time there. Onward to Two Medicine.
WHUFU page for: Two Medicine Campground
Typical National Park campground, the parking pads aren't even close to level, the roads are very rough, but they're amazingly low cost and you are in a spectacular place!
This is the place you go when you know the main part of the park will be full by 11.
At the east end of gorgeous Two Medicine Lake, spectacular mountains all around.
tonight:
#73 is in B Loop, in the second row of sites facing the lakes. There is a nice little gap between the trees where you have a pretty good view of sunset.
A real fun place to stay. My neighbor was a chatty fellow from North Carolina who’d been in the area fishing with his buddies all summer. He picked up his wife at the Kalispell airport yesterday and they are going to take 4-5 days to drive back to North Carolina. He invited me over later “for a beer”. We all had wine as it turns out, but in the semiotics of a guy-to-guy invite it’s a bad signal to say “come over for a glass of wine”. :) People are weird. Anyway in was nice to hang out and talk to other grownups for a while. I am instinctively stand-offish, so the only time I do this is when my neighbor is unusually gregarious and does the work of bringing us together. Too bad for me.
I went for a nice sunset walk around the edge of the lakes, down the trail a bit, and over to the gift shop / coffee shop, which looked quite nice … except it’s already closed for the season. :(
Thursday
Since the propane is already turned on I decided to make my version of breakfast this morning. I sipped black tea and nibbled on my collection of leftover cookies and brownies and nut bars. The meal (snack?) was kind of a retrospective of coffee places I have been since Oregon :) The day started out so under control and mellow …
Two Medicine is a cul-de-sac in the southeast part of Glacier Park. So I exited that part of the park and headed north to the big-time part of the park, the Lake Saint Mary entrance. Halfway there the day started devolving – road construction! There was a long wait, then then our parade of RVs picked our way through four miles of active road work, then the most brutal part, for the remaining 12 miles of mountain road to the park entrance you are in a moving traffic jam of behemoth big rig RVs. Once at the park the clot of big rigs kind of dispersed and traffic mellowed out.
I drove straight up to Logan Pass because that’s as far as you can go right now. It is a place where I have memories. I had an epic time here in 1975. We camped (got a motel? Don’t really remember) In the flatlands. The next morning we drove our yellow Saab(!) along the valley to the foot of the trail, then hitch-hiked up the mountain to Logan Pass. We walked the Highline Trail to the Park Chalet, and spent the night. In the morning they fixed us a trail lunch and we hiked back down the mountain to the trailhead where we’d parked the car. I wish I remembered more details about which trails etc, but I definitely remember it as an outstanding two days of my life! Two days, almost 30 miles, 2000′ elevation change, and all we carried was a credit card and day packs. In my imagination that’s what people do when they go to Switzerland in the summer. It felt very Alpine. :)
Due east from the Lake Saint Mary entrance the road follows the southern edge of Lower Lake Saint Mary. For some reason I am exhausted. There was nothing exceptionally wearying about the day, but I have noticed that busy National Parks just suck the life out of me. That’s one for the therapist as to why that is, but it is. The nasty smoky air probably didn’t help either.
Anyway… the restaurant the ranger kid at the gate recommended is out here on the far side of the lake, so I stopped there. I sat down, then almost walked out because the lady was dawdling at the cash register instead of taking my damn order. Yes, I am THAT crabby! But a kid from the kitchen happened by and sensed a storm a’brewing and got me settled down. I ate a bison burger and took a caesar salad to go. They were both quite good, but the salad was tiny for $11. A nice lady customer wanted to look at my Sprinter, which normally I love to show off. But I told her I was in a bad mood (true) and I must have looked it because she hustled away quickly. Sad!
No matter how carefully you engineer your days to be awesome, they will not ALL be awesome.