Thursday, May 29, 2008

Apgar Village, Montana

Glacier National Park

I have tears in my eyes because they can hardly behold the beauty of this place! How could it possibly be that I have drunk in so much wonder today. Should you ever decide to come here, it is a long road up here to Glacier National Park, but the rewards are rich and plentiful for the trouble you take to get here.

After our wonderful lunch yesterday, we drove through Yellowstone National Park, making stops at various visitor centers and famous sites, but the kids were so tired from getting up early that they slept through most of it. Cole saw more than any of the others but he was begging to play the beloved DS Lite after it had been withheld since sometime before we hit Jackson. I felt it was sacrilegious somehow to let a child play a video game in a national park, so I said he couldn’t play until we got out of Yellowstone. This was of course a mistake because he then began to wait impatiently for our departure from the park. Finally, since he couldn’t play DS, he too fell asleep. They have taken in a lot, those four, so I let it pass. Only Taido and I saw the Yellowstone Canyon and its waterfall that inspired Thomas Moran and many others to paint gorgeous landscapes of the park. And only Taido and I saw the frozen Yellowstone Lake, surrounded by snow and ice. It is still winter in much of Wyoming. There were buds on the trees in Jackson and in the entire valley that led up to Yellowstone, but once we hit the park, winter truly prevailed. The trees looked perfectly dead. There were no flowers or fields of green. Snow was piled up along the park roads and the air chilled us to our bones when we did stop and get out. We spent several hours driving through the park, mostly just because it is on our route between Teton and Glacier. We were fully aware that we were missing most of the magic of Yellowstone by passing through without a hike or a night’s stay, and we may have done our children a great disservice by not helping them experience it better, because they all remarked that it was boring. Except for the northern entrance visitor center animal exhibits. So as we pulled out through the northern entrance and into Montana, Taido said, “Boys, start warming up your thumbs.” It was about 7pm and Taido was hoping to cover as many miles as we could between Yellowstone and Glacier before dark. The boys played DS nonstop, one watching and one playing. And Mary Polly and Simon watched Hello Dolly on my laptop. I swear at one point Simon was dancing in his seat like a waiter from The Harmonian Gardens. So great.

While the kids had media-fest, Taido and I took in our first breaths of Montana air. Lush green valleys and hills dotted with cattle filled the horizon as our rig made the descent from Yellowstone. We dropped in elevation so much that the snow disappeared and all of a sudden it was as though Aslan had come to Montana but not Wyoming. When we started checking weather in towns in Montana, I realized that apparently even though Montana is further north, it is much warmer here because of the drop in elevation. Night lows in the 40s instead of 20s and 30s were going to be a very welcome change.

Around 9:30pm, as the sun was getting low, we pulled through a Walmart Supercenter where I ran in and grabbed my staples, carrots, apples and edamame, as well as a loaf of French bread, a rotisserie chicken and grapes. We had our very late dinner in the van as we drove to the Missouri Headwaters State Park. The sun finally dropped on the horizon as we pulled off the highway, and it was good and dark as we pulled into a campsite a few miles later. We all fell into our bags and immediately went to sleep as soon as we got set up. Simon walked into the camper, threw his blanket on the floor and lied down face first on it. He was so tired that he hardly blinked when I lifted him into his sleeping bag, or when I lifted him with his sleeping bag still around him and handed him to Mary Polly to hold in the van at six this morning. After Taido told me to wake up the kids, he said, “I promise we’ll let them sleep as late as they want tomorrow.” Simon slept all the way to Butte where we stopped for a delicious breakfast at the Great Harvest Bread Company on a welcome tip from the Moon Guide to Montana, a book I picked up at the Valley Bookstore and read intermittently in the car as we drove today. This morning I read the sad history of Butte, Montana and its mining woes before we pulled in and drove its streets that have clearly seen better days. The Great Harvest Bread Company is still in its glory days though. We sampled scones, muffins and breakfast sandwiches, along with wonderful coffee that helped us pop our eyes open a little wider and enjoy the Big Sky Country for the rest of the morning.

We chose a less traveled route to Glacier National Park, because after recording our gas mileage all the way so far we have determined that the rig gets the best mileage at around 60-65 mph anyway, so it doesn’t hurt us on time to take smaller highways. We drove up Highway 83 through Seeley Lake which was gorgeous. I probably said about 100 times, Look at how pretty that is! or It’s just so beautiful! Finally I stopped pointing it out and just enjoyed it. We saw very few other vehicles and passed little civilization. It just amazes me how wide open and gorgeous this state is and that so much of its beauty is hardly even beheld by human eyes. For days I have been marveling at the different wonders God has made in this world, and today I thought a lot about how so much of what He has made is only for Him to see. The pleasure of laying eyes on every beast, every tree, every flower, every waterfall, every mountain crevice in all the miles of forest and hills we drove through today, or that we have driven through since leaving Little Rock, is His. And what’s more, if I am seeing His glory in the glimpses I am having as we drive along, how much more is He able to see the wonderful displays of His glory and power. And though I see now, one day how much more will I see when He is able to show it to me. To think that the wonder of what I have seen today is just a fraction of a glimpse of all that there is makes me excited. It is a lot to take in. And I’m pretty sure the children have missed it. The drive did not impress them nearly as it did us. It kills me to think that they are already beginning to take the incredible scenery for granted, but then again I don’t remember having any great revelations about my family’s great drives through the country when I was their age.

When we arrived at the park around lunchtime, we drove first to find our campsite in Apgar Campground. After much discussing and weighing of very small differences among the choices between all the children, we popped up in site A56. (Cole still holds stubbornly that site A36 is better.) All of the sites are charmingly set in this forest of imposingly tall hemlock, cedar and lodgepole pine trees and just a short walk from Lake McDonald which overlooks the mountains, though they have been shrouded in clouds since our arrival. Still, despite the clouds, the high was 73 degrees F today in Apgar. Downright balmy after where we’ve been, so we were just happy to shed our jackets and jump on our bikes to ride the cutest bike path EVER to Apgar Village, where the visitor center is located, as well as an ice cream shop and several gift shops, one of which is housed in the original one room schoolhouse from this little village’s days gone by. As I rode the path behind Cole and Mary Polly with glimpses of the lake and the mountains to our right and impressive pines on our left, I was so thrilled I started crying and laughing all at once. It is so beautiful that I became downright giddy. And on the way back from the village we had to stop to let six deer cross the trail in front of us, right in front of us. We stopped our bikes and silently watched them slowly walk in front of us as they grazed on the small spring shoots from the trees. This campground just opened a week ago, so we are perhaps the first people these deer have seen in a long time. Our squeals are breaking the long silence that this park has kept through the winter. Somewhere on the road as we came in, a hotel sign said, “Welcome back!” The few who make this place their home all year long seem ready to welcome the throng of visitors of whom we are some of the first.

We came back from our bike ride amazed and delighted, a spirit which, at least for me, penetrated Cole’s fits about collecting firewood and a rain shower falling on our dinner so that we had to crowd under our awning and gobble down our barely still warm quesadillas without guacamole because though I know there is an avacado buried in one of those dang tubs in the van, I couldn’t seem to find it when I collected the things for dinner. Never mind the avocado though. When the crisp air smells richly of pine and spring blooms, and you can ride your bike in the late evening sun through a forest that is just awakening from its winter slumber, so much else seems inconsequential.