girls' weekend in two medicine

i had a beautiful weekend camping in Two Medicine with some girlfriends from Swiftcurrent. we had veg food and delicious lattes in East Glacier, then a lovely campfire and lots of wine at our campsite. slept all morning (i love to wake up in the woods), hiked the cobalt lake trail, picnicked and skinny dipped at a spectacular swimming hole somewhere off the beaten path, took a nap in the forest.

i feel better now having used my tent somewhere besides Babbfest.

Babbfest

i wonder what the tourists think when they drive through Babb, MT during Babbfest, unsuspecting, looking a place to eat lunch or for the road to Many Glacier. there are maybe 500 people living in Babb in the summer, but during music festival weekend the one road through town is lined with tents and trailers and various oddities. you can distinguish a "fester" from a tourist based on any of the following characteristics: homemade quilted pants, blonde dreadlocks, jaunty hippie dance, PBR in one or both hands, hand-rolled cigarettes, larger-than-normal pupils.

Babbfest '09 was extremely hot, and i spent the greater part of the weekend wading in the lake or playing banjo in the shade of my tent. clear sunny skies, however, were perfect for playing with my NEW CAMERA, and the evenings eventually cooled off enough for hours of ridiculous dancing.

tip your housekeeper

it is my observation that guests who tip are also those who leave their rooms the cleanest. guests in the stained, the hairy, the beer-soaked rooms leave nothing for your trouble, no solace for your discomfort. sometimes, kneeling in front of those particularly gnarly toilets, I wonder, “What brought me here, to this crusty toilet bowl? I have a goddamn degree.”

but I am here because I love the mountains, and I love the people who choose to live in them. and because cleaning rooms is honest work. and right now it feels good to be doing this kind of work.

my fellow housekeepers are teachers and engineers and linguists in their home countries. they came to montana to work on their English and have learned such important words as washcloth, bath mat, disinfectant, ice bucket liner, maid service requested…

please friends, throw them a dollar.

the mountain that conquered me

on monday marc and i attempted to summit Mt. Gould, which is a badass peak at the back of our valley. we climbed it from the back side, cutting up off the highline trail, where the mountain looks a little tamer. it's a gnarly mountain though, and we kept getting cliffed-out...until we gave up.

we did achieve some sort of vista (from Gem Glaicer on the Garden Wall), and i ate my lunch on a cliff at the top of the world.

on the way down i tossed my pack down a cliff to make my descent easier. it landed wrong, rolled of the lower cliff, and rolled down the mountain. marc and i found it alright, but my camera did not survive the plummet, which is why i have no photos of yesterday's climb to Snowmoon Lake/Falling Leaf Lake.

new on my to-do list: buy new camera. and try Mt. Gould again.

when swiftcurrent gets bored

1) i made some mean sangria with fruit smuggled out from the restaurant. 2) canoeing or swimming or fishing in swiftcurrent lake every day of the week keeps us cool and clean and happy. 3) bluegrass band/costume party at the local watering hole. 4) Brian is a whore and i am a LiteBrite. 5) this is Rosemary. i found her in a motel room, added some embellishments, and now she circulates around camp.

shangri-la

this weekend i finally hiked over Shangri-La, the far superior bushwacking way to get to Iceberg Lake. my friends and i climbed a runoff up the shoulder of Mt. Wilbur, to alpine meadows and Shangri-la Lake (and also a massive grizzly bear). after one more section of uphill, there is a goattrail across the scree field over Iceberg Lake and the most beautiful view of the Ptarmigan wall imaginable. skied down the scree field, slid down a snowfield on my ass, drank some whiskey, jumped in the lake, hiked home on the trail. i love having a backyard full of trailheads.

cracker lake

the hike to Cracker Lake is mostly awful, but the payoff is out of this world. i will never swim in bluer water. i wish i could live on these shores.

fish story

very glad i brought a fishing pole this summer. my czech friend Ondrej and i have been trout fishing in Swiftcurrent Lake. i have yet to catch a fish, but the scenery doesn't suck.

wine box luge

going-to-the-sun road opened this week, so i took a carload up to Logan's Pass to play in the snow. we fashioned sleds out of wine boxes from my trunk. they didn't work as well as i had hoped, and i'm pretty sure my slovokian coworkers now think i'm insane. next time we'll bring plastic trays from the dining room.

summit!

summited Mt. Altyn on Saturday. most incredible view of the Many Glacier Valley.

i left my heart at Rising Sun

"team clean" has disbanded. we finished cleaning Rising Sun this week, and i am at home at Swiftcurrent for the rest of the summer.

my oasis right now

(gdfp)

swiftcurrent

i am moved into my cabin at Swiftcurrent, at last! we were given less than 12 hours notice to move out of our rooms at the Many Glacier hotel, so i packed everything in trash bags and drove it up the road to Swiftcurrent. the property is still mostly deserted, which i like a lot, and i am happy to be away from the frat party at Many Glacier. i slept incredibly well in my beautiful new cabin and woke this morning to snow. our "team clean" will spend the week at Swiftcurrent, enjoying the calm for a while, then head to Rising Sun to open the final hotel.

spelunker

today i finally got up on some mountains. my friend mark and i climbed up the back side if Grinnell Point to look for the old Josephine mines that we had heard about. we found the mine and followed it to the end with headlamps on, until i stuck my face up against a bat and screamed and ran out of the cave. twas a fantastic time. i love the mountains.

many glacier

for the last two weeks i've been living in the many glacier hotel, in a beautiful hotel room with a rad balcony overlooking swiftcurrent lake and grinnell point. the hotel is spooky though (The Shining is based on the many glacier hotel's winter caretaker), and i am sometimes compelled to sleep on my friend cindy's floor instead of in my own beautiful room.

during the day "team clean" is still deep-cleaning dormitories and making up hotel rooms. we are a close-knit and dysfunctional family, drawn together by a mutual preoccupation with hospital corners and shiny toilets that no one else in this valley could possibly understand.

tales from the west end

finished cleaning Lake McDonald Lodge yesterday!
the Dew Drop Inn, my new haunt on the west end
Avalanche Gorge

i have fallen a little in love with the west side of the park these last 2 weeks. we're finishing up our work here, and on tuesday we head east of the continental divide and start cleaning out the Many Glacier Hotel. i'm feeling pretty good about my new career in housekeeping. my knees and fingers are bruised, and my lungs are full of comet, but there's something meditative about the whole business. and Glacier is undeniably the most beautiful place on earth to be scrubbing baseboards.

not a flatlander!

emma and i made it to the mountains, and emma got to see some of glacier national park, and i am at home. i wanted to show emma Swiftcurrent, and driving there was like driving through patagonia (or so i imagine). still pretty wintery up here.

right now i am working with a small opening crew, going through and cleaning out all the hotels in the national park that have been dormant all winter. we're based on the west side of the park for the next few weeks, which is warmer and greener than where i usually work on the east side of the continental divide. i have been living in an abandoned motel on Lake McDonald. this is my view:
i could never tire of waking up to that.

keep missoula weird

spent a few days couchsurfing in missoula. our host is building a couchsurfing empire of sorts, off on a mountain pass north of town. there's a homemade mini-golf course here, chickens and cats and dogs, and emma and i have our own room in the "guesthouse" that's being built for some hypothetical couchsurfing convention. it's odd here but comfortable. the best kind.

missoula is beautiful, in the same way that Telluride, Colorado is beautiful (the first mountain town i ever fell for, followed by many). it even smells good here, like beeswax.

tomorrow we head north, towards Glacier Park and into the snow.

buffalo gals

north dakota is behind us now, and i am feeling western again! the sky is bigger here. there is a spring in my step.

camped in teddy roosevelt national park last night and awoke this morning to the sounds of buffalo chewing and snorting. laid soundlessly in the tent until they moved on to greener grass, then packed very quickly and headed to MONTANA.

remember those signs posted all over yellowstone park? of buffalo goring visitors? i do.

go west, young woman

it is my project tonite to make roadtrip mixtapes because friday i head west for my second montana summer. my friend Emma is coming along for the drive, and because she has never seen montana or the rocky mountains (and i always want my favorite people to see my favorite places), we have decided to stretch the not-too-long drive to glacier national park into a beautiful adventure. here begins Emma's education of The West:

1. goodbye Minneapolis
2. i hear rumors of the world's largest buffalo in Jamestown, North Dakota and i feel that any "world's largest" roadside spectacle is worth the stretch break
   
3. here we camp at teddy roosevelt national park in the north dakota badlands and celebrate MAY DAY.
   
4. here we couchsurf a few days - if the folk of Missoula, MT will toss us a futon.
   
5. East Glacier Park, Montana, where Emma catches the Empire Builder train back to MPLS and where i check in with HR for my summer job in Glacier National Park!
   
6. Swiftcurrent, Glacier National Park. this is the eventual destination, where i will live until september. hopefully emma and i can get into the park and onto a mountain, but i fear snow may keep us out.

(you can see the virtual version of our route here. be excited.)