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Kaleb: Destroyer of Peace and Serenity

My second child is sometimes a bit of a mess. He doesn’t really know how to be quiet. Given that, we should have known better when we decided to bring him into the forest with us when we stopped in Bear Creek Park to look for the rare and elusive Greater PeeWee.

However, what are we going to do with him while we look. Besides, he is very interested in “legendary” birds, and I am trying to keep him interested in looking for birds so it will be easier to drag him along with us.

Only, he did kind of ruin the experience for us. We were trying to walk softly through the woods as not to scare the birds away, and he was clomping behind us. No matter how I tried to quietly explain how to roll from heel to toe to make as little noise as possible, he insists on shuffling loudly and then lifting his feet heavily. His brother says he is about as quiet as an elephant in the forest. He’ll never sneak up on anything.

It is frustrating though, when you are trying to listen for little noises, like cheeps and peeps. Some of the bird noises are at such a frequency that Jason can’t hear them. In a way, you would think Jason and I would make a great birding team, because I can hear the birds better, yet he is better at making them out visually. However, I don’t know how to identify them on sounds alone yet, and he is no good at identifying at sight. So it is kind of like the blind leading the blind out in the forest, followed by the loud, when the three of us are out together, and we get little accomplished.

Jason was trying to show me the place in the park that he has discovered as a peaceful escape during his lunch break. He wanted me to understand the tranquility he finds there, and let me see and hear all the birds that surround him in his lunch walks, but mostly we just heard kids in the park nearby screeching, Kaleb clomping, and the thumps he was making with a stick he picked up along the way. He is forever picking up sticks and wacking the trees and bushes with them, playing at swordmanship.

We didn’t see the Greater PeeWee today (although I almost had a visual on a bird that MIGHT have been it). We did hear a Barred Owl out there, and saw a handful of robins, warblers, and kinglets, but it was nothing compared to the experience Jason usually has out there. I’ve decided we should go back in the early morning or late afternoon sometime and just sit for a while…without my noisy second child…in order to see this ordinary-looking bird that happens to be living way outside its normal range.

GNP: Logan Pass to Hidden Lake Overlook

July 20, 2014
On our last full day at Glacier, we decided to head out to Logan Pass and take a short, popular hike to Hidden Lake. We knew there would be plenty of other people walking this same trail, so 1) it seemed safe enough to travel in twos and 2) we should get there first thing in the morning, as the travel books say the parking lot is typically full by ten am.

The travel books described this trail as an easy hike through alpine wildflowers in their peak during July and August. In my mind, the hike was going to be like this:

In reality, it had been a rough winter, I am guessing. Logan Pass had just opened up for hiking about three days prior. In fact, snow plows were trying to clear Going-To-The-Sun, which leads right past the parking lot, in the week or two prior. So, this meant our hiking reality was really more like this:

So the “easy three mile hike” to the overlook and back took us much longer than anticipated. If you went all the way to Hidden Lake and back, it would be a six mile hike, but the trail was closed at the overlook due to bear activity. No one was going down to the lake today.

It was worth the slipping, sliding, and snow frustration for the view of the lake from the overlook, though.

We encountered a bit of wildlife on this trail. There were a handful of mountain goats, including a couple of cute, cavorting kids. We witnessed a momma-baby kiss between hoary marmots.

The people were interesting. Some were more prepared than we were, in hiking boots and maybe a smaller pack, but some were dressed in shorts and flip-flops, which I thought was completely crazy. I think if I was dressed like that and saw the trail, I would turn back around and come back when I was more prepared. One lady was walking along the trail, near where these little streams were, looking down at her phone and not even looking ahead of her. A mountain goat was walking straight towards her, completely unperturbed by the impending collision, most likely certain the person would yield the right of way, but it started to seem like she was not even going to look up until I got her attention and pointed the goat out to her. Good thing it wasn’t a bear, I suppose.

How could one help but look up and around them, with these stellar views all around? There’s a time and a place for technology, but there is also a time to put it down and have an experience.

Although I enjoyed our experience, I think I would have liked it better if it was later in the season and there was less snow. It seems like we are always a month off of the best season for everything when we go on these road trips. I think some part of it is because we are planning our trips around times when the kids are with their dad, at least part of the way. At least that seems to be the reason why we are always heading west instead of east. However, we aren’t going to keep going out of our way like that unless their dad starts keeping up with child support, so we’ll see where the road finds us next vacation.

Glacier was one of those places I always wanted to see, though, kind of like some of the other iconic national parks we have visited together, and even though we didn’t get to see it all, we did get a sampling during this trip. This was not even the last stop of the day. In the next post, I will talk about the St Mary area, and some of the waterfalls we visited there, after enjoying some huckleberry ice cream at the local souvenir shop. Also, there was a special show that we attended later that night that was a highlight for me of the whole vacation. Stay tuned.!

Our Eggcellent Adventure

Thursday, July 17.
We almost didn’t want to leave the comfort of the Konkoville Motel, but we were on a mission. After a cozy hotel breakfast of the most delicious muffins, possibly some fruit and cereal, coffee and milk, we finally pulled out and headed out to the Idaho wilderness.
We were searching one of the oldest active geocaches (of course), Eggcellent, hidden June 21, 2000. This was literally within a month of the game’s inception, and just a few weeks after the oldest cache hide. This one is REALLY off the beaten path…so much that it has only been found 47 times before us in the fourteen years that it has been sitting out here. I’ve been eyeballing it on the map for a while, though, and I thought, what is the next time we are going to be in Idaho…we should go for it while we were here. Plus, it was kind of a double shot kind of deal, because along the way, we could pick up a find on another grandfather cache, Two Roads. This one has been out the same amount of time, with almost three times as many finds. I guess that is the difference between a difficulty 3, terrain one/short walk versus a difficulty four/terrain four, the other difference being about two or three hours in the approach.

We had some discussion about the best way to approach Eggcellent. I had studied the maps and made a plan, but as usual, Jason looked at my plan really late in the game and decided to change it all. He didn’t think the route I picked would actually get us there, and so after some back and forth, he suggested we contact the cache owner, who was nice enough to write us back with some very specific directions. This was mostly helpful…although, when we got towards the end, things got a little hairy. In case you ever find yourself in the center of western Idaho, very close to the Washington border (nearest cities include Moscow, Lewiston, and Coeur D’Alene, although none of those are THAT close by), and you are wanting to find this cache, here are the directions the CO gave us. Be forewarned, though…you will need a vehicle that is capable of off-road, all wheel terrain and towards the end, you are going to have to trust your gut and use your spidey-senses to find the way to the cache. I am not even sure the last “road” is even a road? It is more like…tire tracks along a stretch of grass next to a wild, dark forest.

Hi. Here are some waypoints that will help with getting to Eggcellent: Turn off Hwy 8 onto NF1963 at: N46 45.837 W116 14.831. Turn on NF1445 at: N46 44.633 W116 15.974 Go Right at: N46 44.031 W116 14.330. Turn left on Rd at N46 42.518 W116 13.190. Right on Rd at N46 42.434 W116 12.957 Turn Left at N46 41.920 W116 12.694 (This road goes to ground zero. Stay on it till you get there. You will get real close and then seem to get further away but the road goes out and then comes right back to ground zero. As you drive to GZ, the cache was on our right. We actually stood on it several times while searching.)
There may be some gates closed and if there are, you will need to park and walk but the last cachers didn’t have any problem.

The initial entry into the forest made us really happy. The views were great and the road wasn’t too bad. We didn’t see anyone in the hours we were out here. We had smiles on our faces and were enjoying the flowers and the dark coolness of the woods. Each turn took us to a road that was a little smaller and a little rougher. When we reached the last turn, down the last road, we started to doubt whether or not this was actually the way. We ended up backing up and taking another right, which led us to an area that had been burnt out by logging operations. We turned right here by these flowers and parked the Subbie by the burn out spots, and then started walking down the road.

Now we come to the part of our adventure that we are still “arguing” about to this day. So, there was an animal in the woods just to the left of those flowers. A very, very big animal. I wanted to take a look at it. I am fairly certain that the creature making all the noise in the woods was exactly this here (NOT a picture we took. This one has been floating around the internet for some years):

Anyways, Jason wouldn’t let me go look and see. Instead, he grabbed two small logs, and began banging them together rhythmically, talking loudly, even singing a bit of a loud chant/song. The thing in the woods grew silent, and maybe disappeared, and with it went my chance to see a really awesome wild animal. It had to either be a moose or a bear, and all I wanted to do was look…maybe get a picture from a distance. I still feel a little bit cheated, but he says we are better safe than sorry.
After this, we walked down the road about a third of a mile, going around a corner and then finding the cache in the woods to our right, almost directly across the road from where the giant animal was walking. The whole walk, I kept expecting it to walk out in front of us, and it made me feel vulnerable and excited at the same time. It turns out we could have driven right up to the cache, and perhaps maybe even the road we were originally on would have gotten there from the opposite direction. Found it, though, and made it back to the parking area. Then, despite Jason’s caution about the wild animal, he had me stand right there by the flowers where we had first heard it moving around, by myself, and take videos of him driving the Subbie down the burned out hillside that we parked at. Hilarious.
We took lots of videos on the way out, and when I find them, I will upload them. This is something that we did a lot of in our 2010 road trip and haven’t done much of since, and it was fun to revisit this. For now, a lasting picture of the road out:

Lewis and Clark: Lost Horses of Lolo Creek

On the ninth day of our journey, we made our way north from Pocatello up Highway 15, then Highway 90, crossing the border between Idaho and Montana twice as we skirted around the southeast edge of Idaho. We meandered into Anaconda, MT to get some of my precious Taco Time for the third time so far along the trip (I developed an obsession with their crisp meat burritos when I lived in Oregon, and they only have these out west). We ate our lunch over the hood of the Subaru in a cemetery on a hillside that looked out over the entire town. Then we took a short walk to find the cache there before getting back on our way, heading towards Scenic Route 12 at the edge of Lolo National Forest, a route that would take us west towards Orofino.

I wasn’t anticipating how beautiful this road would end up being. Sometimes along our road trips, there are little unexpected jewels like this that end up being the places we love the most. If you ever get the chance to camp here, you should do it. We would in a heartbeat. We hardly saw any other cars out here, either. Also, we learned some things here about Lewis and Clark that have really stuck with me.

In August-September of 1805, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, along with the Corps of Discovery, had reached the Continental Divide south of the Bitterroot Valley. They were dismayed to see a mountain range in their path, rather than a clear path to the Pacific Ocean. They soon realized they would have to find a passage through the Bitterroot Mountains, hiring a Shoshone guide to lead them (“Old Toby”). They had acquired ponies from the Shoshone, and their current company included twenty-six hand-picked army troops, Clark’s slave York, interpreters Charbon-neau and Sacajawea and their infant son Baptiste, and two of Sacajawea’s fellow Shonshonis. They camped for a night at a place called Traveler’s Rest on the south side of Lolo Creek, taking some time to repair clothing and make moccasins before heading out for one of the most arduous parts of their journey. Although they were warned that the way was difficult, they didn’t realize how bad it was going to be, and it ended up being eleven days of physical hell before they emerged from the other side.

Their ascent into the mountains was so difficult that the horses even struggled to make it. Some of the horses slipped down the mountains, and as Clark reported in his journal, became “verry much hurt”. This saddened me as I read about it. Even though the party had been warned about the scarcity of game on the trail, they hadn’t quite believed it. They got so desperate for food that they ended up eating two of the horses. The paper that I read about it, obtained from one of the interpretative kiosks, mentioned that they had to eat the colts. I am not sure if in this usage, “colt” refers to the technical horse term of a “male horse under four years of age”, or if it is the colloquial usage of the word, referring to a foal (baby horse). In any case, I imagine that scenario was not pleasant to either the people, in terms of emotion or a practical loss of a usable living tool, or to the other horses, who probably watched and smelled their brethren being roasted.

They also ate some of their emergency rations, such as a portable soup they had packed, never expecting to use. When they emerged on the other side, they were suffering the effects of malnutrition, with weakened limbs, fatigue, body rashs, and diarrhea (I guess the colts didn’t set well).
They ended up coming back this same direction ten months later, making the crossing in reverse in terrible winter conditions, with snow six to eight feet deep. This time, they did actually enjoy a soak in the Lolo Hot Springs, a luxury that Clark did not want to engage in on the way out because the water seemed too hot to him. This time, the cold might have changed his mind, as he had written in his journal about leaving this area that he “experienced cold and hunger of which I shall ever remember.”

I thought quite a bit about Lewis and Clark starting around this part of our journey, and over the next week or two. I imagined what Lewis and Clark would think about our world now. This passage over the mountains that seemed so difficult over two hundred years ago was so simple now via automobile. Roads have been carved into the lands where they encountered wild game and hunting lands. Even though the cost of living and gas is high, our costs today are nothing compared to the sacrifices they made during that time period. We have it so easy.

With this ease of travel, we were quite comfortable in our climate-controlled vehicle, cruising along next to a gorgeous clear water river. I guess that is how this area got its name, the Clearwater National Forest. We were soaking it up. We stopped to walk down short trails leading to foot bridges. I was captivated by the trail registration forms that asked the user to describe how many and what type of pack animals they would be using along the trail, and signs describing changes to hunting and fishing regulations, the likes of which I had never really considered, with words like “bear traps” and differing minimum sizes for male and female fish. I would like to be the kind of person who takes pack animals up into these wilderness areas for lonesome adventures in the wild, but I am not sure I am that brave. There is definitely big game out there, some of those the kind that might eat you! I did also see some moose scat on some paths we stopped at along the way.

We were on this road for a few hours, and although we were soaking it up and enjoying it, we did get to a point where we were kind of over-saturated with the beauty. I think this phenomenon is fasctinating; the idea that there is only a certain amount of natural beauty we can take before we become bored with it and are ready to move on to something else. I first experienced this during our first road trip, at Yellowstone National Park. Anyways, we were glad to finally be getting off the road when we arrived in at the Konkolville Motel in Orofino. We were headed to this particular location for a specific agenda, which I will detail in the next post. If you are ever headed this direction, I highly recommend this little motel. We had a great time at this little inn, swimming in the pool and eating our grill-your-own steak dinner. It was less than a hundred bucks for the room and the dinner, plus free breakfast. We had such a nice time here that we ended up with a special bonus from our trip, one of those mementos that will last a lifetime. I will explain later 😉 Stay tuned!