Picture this: you’re sitting in a building on the shores of Swiftcurrent Lake, enjoying a beautiful Montana afternoon. Except your enjoyment is twofold, because not only are you in front of one of the most beautiful views in the world, you also have a beautiful view right in front of you.
No, I’m not talking about my wife in this particular instance. Instead, I’m talking about the buffet dinner at the Many Glacier Hotel.
Let me reinforce that: Buffet. Dinner.
Elizabeth and I had burned a lot of calories by July 17, 2022. Avalanche Lake: 6 miles. Foys Lake: 4 miles. Piegan Pass: 9 miles. Virginia Falls: 4 miles. The Bear’s Hump: A mile straight up. And then Grinnell Lake: 10 miles. Through all of this, we’d been munching on snacks, cooking Backpacker Pantry meals over campfires, and visiting the occasional restaurant. But our plan to go to the fancy hotel restaurant in Waterton Lakes had fallen through the night before, so Elizabeth talked me into the meal here as a makeup treat. That wasn’t a decision to be taken lightly; as a person with a real salary and a mortgage just over 2 years later, this is kind of crazy to think about, but at the time I had no money. Like, no money. My final grad student paycheck wouldn’t arrive for another two weeks and my bank account was rapidly emptying (it would get as low as $100 by the end of the month). But you know what? You’re only 24 once, you’re only engaged once, and you only get to take a first adventure to a place like this once. So we feasted: roasted chicken and roast beef, mashed potatoes (so many mashed potatoes), carrots, rolls upon rolls upon rolls, and caramel cake as far as the eye could see. Recently I’ve gotten into watching through-hike videos, and when through-hikers reach a town they always have a feast. We weren’t through hikers but damn if we didn’t give it our best impression.
After dinner, we reposed on one of the many chairs inside the hotel. Sitting inside the Many Glacier Hotel’s ornately decorated lobby, staring out the window toward Grinnell Point, and drinking a huckleberry cream soda – I reached the peak of contentment on this trip. There were more exciting moments and there were more memorable moments, but I don’t think any moment surpassed the inner Zen of knowing Elizabeth and I had crushed this trip. Everything was looking up personally if I cared to look forward in time, which now felt like it was permissible just 36 hours from our departure away from Montana. My Master’s thesis defense had gone swimmingly a few weeks prior, and soon I’d officially have an MS in meteorology. My new job at NWS Norman started 2 weeks from the following day. And before then, Elizabeth and I still had a long weekend upcoming in Rehoboth Beach. Even leaving this absolute paradise didn’t feel like such a punishment when it meant being reunited with Scipio.
It was such a feeling of bliss, and I should have known it couldn’t last.
But first there was a sunset to enjoy from the back porch of the Many Glacier Hotel. Elizabeth and I had already seen what sunset looked like here 5 nights prior after our moose encounter. That took the pressure of photography off, which was good, because our goal was a little bit more personal; we wanted a Christmas card photo. So by 8:30 the sun began to sink below the continental divide in the background…
And by 9:00 the lighting was ideal to try and get our Christmas card picture. Elizabeth struck up a conversation with a random person who was also out enjoying the evening and convinced them to take our picture.
The funny thing is that I don’t think this picture (which is a nice shot of the two of us in a place we loved!) was the one we used on our Christmas card. Oh well, you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.
We hung out at the Many Glacier Hotel for a while longer, soaking up the last daylight and trying to stretch out those magical moments before we had to return to Oklahoma. There were a couple of trip footnotes that occurred – like the couple we talked to who was there because the guy was about to begin a late southbound section hike on the Continental Divide Trail (the trail begins on the border of Glacier and Waterton Lakes and heads south past the Ptarmigan Tunnel, past Many Glacier, and then up through Piegan Pass before heading into the south part of the park). Then there was the bear that somebody spotted a few hundred yards to the north on the other side of the Many Glacier Road, darting back and forth among the trees in the gathering twilight. For Elizabeth and myself this made 6 bears seen on the trip – along with the one near Siyeh Bend/Piegan Pass, the one near Rising Sun, and the three in the Many Glacier Valley that same morning. Six bears in one trip!
At length, the two of us decided to make the drive back to St. Mary to get some sleep before our last full day in Montana. The drive back was uneventful and it was truly dusk by the time we got to our campsite. I idly checked my phone (funny how our campsite was one of the best places to get cell service in the entire region), and found an email waiting for me from my thesis advisor.
I don’t really know how to write this next part. This blog highlights all of the cool stuff that Elizabeth and I do with our lives; a lot of times, things seem redundant because every post is “this place was cool!” It’s self-selecting bias, of course; every post is about cool things because I blog about the cool stuff I do. But that doesn’t mean that the point of this blog is to avoid when less-fun things happen. It’s real life. Even the most amazing week in the world is going to have its clunkers. So I’ll preface this by saying: up until I checked my phone, this was one of the best weeks of my life. But everything afterward? It was ruined pretty good.
That e-mail from my advisor was essentially a notice that she’d reviewed the edits to my thesis, and she didn’t find them sufficient. If I didn’t make some serious improvements on the paper in the next week and a half, she was going to hold me up from graduating.
Talk about a kick in the gut. To think that I’d defended my thesis and was on the back end of the hard work, and to be here in part celebrating that hard work – only for one of the bigger rug pulls out there – it was galling. Was it fair? That’s a tougher question. No doubt I hadn’t hit the marks that my committee had outlined for edits in the last 3 weeks since the defense. On the other hand, I’d turned in portions of my paper months in advance and had received little in the way of guidance. The amount of edits suggested for a three-week period were rather grueling. And was this the right time to email? Who knows. I pride myself as someone who sees every side of conflict and can view things objectively, and two and a half years later I still don’t know how to feel about this particular piece of advising. At the time, though, I was crushed. There were 11 days until all of that work to become a Master of Science became null and void, and here we were stuck at a campsite in St. Mary, Montana for the next 36 hours. To Elizabeth: I’m so sorry for ruining your night along with mine that night.
Eventually Elizabeth succeeded in calming me down enough to get into our tent and get some sleep. You’d think after something like that, the universe might just let us rest, but nope.
Thunder audibly rumbled around St. Mary village at 2:00 am. Elizabeth had been feeling freaked out by bears for days and saw in this an excuse to just pack up our sleeping pads into the RAV4 and sleep there for the rest of the night. I was too emotionally drawn out to argue. We spent a long night tossing and turning in the backseat.
Eventually, the sky in the east started to lighten. There’s a lesson in there if I was willing to endure it. After the dark and stormy night, the sun still rose. Life moved on.
We had one day to go in Glacier National Park.
