The Animal Whisperers: Glacier National Park Part I
If just sharing a train with NPS park rangers can make me incoherently giddy, you can imagine how incapacitated with joy I was to be stepping foot in the mecca of the national parks system, Glacier National Park:
It’s a rainy, foggy, and- by my estimation- perfect day for exploring this brave new world. And, as we are about to find out, bravery is what it takes to survive in East Glacier. There are only three establishments in town, one of which is a Budget car rental, our first stop of the day. Only instead of a car rental place we find this:
“Uh-oh.” I say.
My mom looks over at me. “Uh-oh?” she says, “That’s what you have to say for yourself? Uh-oh?”
It’s possible that I was in charge of booking the rental car.
“Haha! Wow, what an adventure, right mom?”
She glares at me.
We walk into the general store next door to inquire about what happened to the Budget office. Behind the plywood board is the human equivalent of a basset hound puppy. The puppy, who’s name is Joe, bounds over to the counter and tells us that today is the first day Budget is renting cars this season and they’re still getting up and running. He gestures behind the counter to the board. “We smashed this section of the wall out last year to have a view of the mountains but never got around to putting the window in.” He punches the board, which appears to be attached to the wall by some staples at the top and nowhere else. The board swings straight out like a poorly fitted doggy door.
“Doesn’t it get, like, realllllly cold here in the winter?” I ask.
“Oh yeah. Real cold. I’ll be glad to get that window in.”
East Glacier: Home of the really brave or really stupid.
“I used to work at a Budget location in the middle of nowhere,” he says. “I got so bored there I used to just sit and watch a ton of, hold on a sec…”
He is distracted by a high pitched noise or something else my mom and I are not physically equip to discern.
“…youtube videos. Mostly of old Budget commercials. They were pretty interesting back in the day.”
My mom and I catch each other’s eyes. We both thought that sentence was going to end with “porn” and neither of us can think of a place more in the middle of nowhere than East Glacier but Joe is now telling us about Budget commercials from the 80’s in a credible amount of detail. As he prints our paperwork I catch sight of an empty door frame across the room that leads from the general store to the restaurant next door. I appear to have overestimated the number of establishments in town by about two thirds.
Joe has listed me a driver using my middle name but we figure we got off light as far as potential miscommunications are concerned so we take the car keys and head through the empty doorframe to the restaurant for pre-park-exploration breakfast. We’re seated by a manic, wide-stanced waitor named Benjamin who’s enthusiasm for his craft greatly outweighs his abilities. “Do you think it’s the same guy from next door just wearing a different shirt?” I ask my mom. “Yes,” she says, “I really do.” It takes about 15 minutes for Benjamin to take our order and another 45 to bring us our food but it’s worth the wait. My mom’s jaw drops when her short stack of pancakes arrives and one of the locals at the table next to us bursts out laughing.
“We call those ‘circles of torture’ around here!” he says.
Half an hour later we have our check and Benjamin has enthusiastically given us an insider tip on where we might see a mama and baby moose hanging out in the area so we leave both obscenely full and totally charmed. As we head toward the park proper it begins to snow. I LOVE snow! And moose! And national parks! We’ve been sitting on a train for 24 hours, and I am READY TO ADVENTURE! Ahead of us on the right is the sign that marks the official entrance to the park and right next to it, exactly where Benjamin predicted, is a mama moose and her baby.
Minutes later we see a herd of elk, mule deer, and two wolves. One wolf trots across a meadow following the sound of tiny bird peeps and before we know it the wolf is scarfing down a little white bird. David Attenborough’s voice runs through my head. “A young wolf approaches an untended nest. Where the mother is we do not know. Lucky day for the wolf.”
We see a flock of blue birds, some little prairie dog-esque creatures, and big black and white birds. We see wild horses, two cranes flying in perfect synchonicity, and a large bald eagle- the second of the trip- and we haven’t even reached the wildlife apex of the park- Many Glacier:
By the time we get there the snow has stopped but the fog hangs low and a big, chocolate brown moose takes us by surprise. It’s barely fifteen feet away. Within two hours we’ve seen four moose, a herd of mountain goats, a herd of big horn sheep, and two huge black bears, but we still hadn’t seen grizzlies.
Mike, a photographer from Texas, told us that we had *just* missed a mama bear and her two cubs and we berate ourselves for watching a stupid moose stand stock still for the last fifteen minutes thinking we didn’t see it. “This is grizzly country,” Mike says. “I’ve been here since 4am. Trust me, they’re here.” We end up spending most of the afternoon walking or driving around the little valley in tandem with Mike, his dog Joplin, and a couple from eastern Montana named Lynn and Greg. “Ten eyes are better than two!” Lynn says as we all scan the cliffs for eagles. Over the course of the afternoon, the fog lifts and the snowcaps glisten with sunlight. The five of us make up the bulk of the human beings in the valley today and we are happily outnumbered by wildlife but there’s still no sign of grizzlies.
Just as we’re getting ready to call it quits we see a truck pulled over to the side of the road, camera out so we pull up alongside. Down by the bank of the river a mama grizzly bear and her cub are tumbling around, enthusiastically engaged in afternoon play. The sun is shining, the mountains are lit with a soft afternoon light, and we watch in awe as the grizzly mom and cub chase each other around in circles through the meadow.
Mike and I slide down an embankment for a closer look, peeking through the dense trees and bushes for a perfect opening. The baby grizzly looks in our direction.
“Well, that’s the cue to go,” says Mike. If bears make eye contact with you it’s a move of aggression and while I think the baby bear would be ok with being friends and maybe cuddling for a while I acquiesce because death by mama grizzly bear is not how I wish to part from this world. We climb back up to the road to discover that a storm is moving in from the west. It begins to snow again but on our way out of the park we’re treated to one more grizzly sighing- a young, collared male- and one more black bear and a moose. Mike, who’s been stopping behind us as we spot the last three animals pulls up alongside us. “You two must be animal whisperers to spot these guys in the snow,” he says. “Just doing our part for Team Ten Eyes,” we say.
