We were awakened this morning by a series of explosions, or
so it seemed. Bam! Bam! Bam! on the roof
of the trailer. Upon investigation, I discovered that a squirrel – one of the
black ones we see most – was at the top of the evergreen beneath which we are
parked, snipping off cones and letting them drop. At intervals, he would run
down the tree to gather all his loot and take it off to his secret hideout,
before returning to start the whole process again. We have named him the Mad
Bomber.
Right now, we are in town for laundry and Wi-Fi. Unfortunately,
we both managed to leave our cellphones in the tent trailer! This is what comes
of not using the handy checklists I wrote up during our first week. [Editor’s
note: The Wi-Fi was never obtained this day due to an outage at the visitor
center. Our cellphones would have come in really
handy.]
This is our first laundry in two weeks (we did a load at
home when we dropped off Rigby) and our first laundromat. We have not used many
laundromats in our day, but we’ve managed to figure things out. Yay, us. Visits
to the laundromat never became routine to us during previous extended trips. It
will be interesting to see if they do this time around.
Our laundry is fully funded by quarters I found during my
big cleanup/cleanout effort at home before we left. I have a medium-sized
treasure box (one from my colletion) full to the brim with quarters. I think
we’ll use about 30 of them today, but that will wash and dry sheets, towels,
and most of our clothes.
We are stationed now at the Avalanche Creek campground in
Glacier National Park. On Saturday, we drove up here for a hike and instead
discovered that there were campsites available, so we scurried around buying
supplies and retrieving the tent trailer. Now we’re in the Avalanche Creek
campground, about 18 miles up the Going to the Sun Road. It’s a nice
campground, very woodsy and reasonably quiet, despite housing many campers.
It’s located right next to the Avalanche Lake trailhead, a 5-mile roundtrip
hike up to an alpine lake, so we got up yesterday and did that one.
It’s a really gorgeous hike, with the creek on your left for
a lot of it, tumbling over red and blue and golden rocks and through the deep
pools and bowls it has carved for itself over centuries. The rangers claim
there’s only 500 feet of elevation gain. We think they’ve underestimated a bit.
But it was very worth it. The lake is really pretty, with towering cliffs on
three sides of it and long, narrow waterfalls pouring down the cliffs from
distant glaciers to feed the lake. Spectacular!
Unfortunately, we had a bit of a mixup on the way down and
got separated from each other. I went ahead to make a pit stop at the pit
toilet, and then Frank missed the sign for the toilet when he came through so
he didn’t realize he’d passed me. I waited for him for about 15 minutes, then
hiked back to where we had split up. It seemed impossible to me that he was in
front of me – it was a really brief pit stop! – so I did some additional
doubling back and re-hiking trying to find him. He was waiting for me down at
the trailhead. With all my extra steps (my Fitbit registered more than 21,000
before the day was out!), he waited a long time and got pretty chilled (he had
the water and I had the extra layers). It was pretty stressful for both of us,
and we have resolved never to split up again, or if we do to have an agreement
that once separated we should both just saunter back to camp, assured that the
other will be along shortly.
We rested and recuperated for the rest of the afternoon, and
all in all it wasn’t a bad day, but we both wish that gorgeous hike hadn’t been
marred. Maybe we’ll do it again in the coming days – I’d especially love to do
the lower part again where the creek is so, so beautiful – and reclaim the
memories.
I do think we’ll be here for a while, or if not here then
over at Many Glaciers on the east side, which multiple people have said is
their favorite part of the park. I haven’t checked the latest news on the fire
yet – that will obviously factor in – but the other day the ranger told us that
Many Glaciers is unaffected and worth the drive around on Highway 2. She also
said there’s a chance that Going to
the Sun will reopen at least up to Logan Pass this week, and Frank really wants
to share that drive with me.
After that, I have a hankering to see more moose; Canada
beckons. Or maybe we’ll be tired of being cold at night and head south.
Only the Shadow knows. Probably I should give up on predicting our future path
in these blog posts since by the time I actually post them, the plan (or my
hankering) has changed.
