High up the trail to Grinnel Glacier, at the sharp edge of the Continental Divide, I spotted a group of hikers clustered on a slab of rock, pointing and peering through binoculars with a mixture of exhilaration and apprehension.
I rounded the bend and stopped short. I turned to my wife, Brigid, who was crossing a snowfield below, and began waving my arms over my head.
"There's a bear about 100 yards above you," I mouthed. A grizzly bear!
Liam, our 10-month-old son, bundled on my back, placidly sucked the pacifier I'd tied with a leather shoelace to his backpack, blissfully unaware that I was mentally calculating how fast I could rip off the backpack and roll into a ball with him in the middle and play dead.
We'd carefully read the pamphlets about the dangers of hiking in bear country, titled "Enjoy Them at a Distance," that Park Service rangers hand out as you drive into Glacier National Park in the northernmost reaches of Montana. We'd even bought a bear bell, ostensibly to warn bears away. It was something I swore I would never do, thinking a sleigh bell in the wilderness a touch ridiculous, but relented when Liam, gleefully jingling it, refused to let one go at the Many Glacier Hotel gift shop just hours before.
We knew that if this griz felt like it, he could line-drive from his perch, grubbing for roots and insects, to where we were in 10 seconds flat.
Slowly, Brigid picked her way across the snowfield and, with a rush of relief, made it to our now huddled group.
"Good," boomed a burly hiker from Alaska. "You make six. Grizzlies never attack groups of six."
We watched the massive, honey-colored bear in awe, one of 200 in the park. The bright sun glinted in the high altitude's thin atmosphere. We were standing just under the Garden Wall, the steep and ragged-edged Continental Divide that was carved by glaciers, massive rivers of ice, thousands of years ago. The fierce Blackfeet Indians who once roamed this land called it the Backbone of the World. Ancient and elemental.
All around us, steep, icy waterfalls plunged what seemed like ceaseless miles into turquoise-colored, glacial lakes below, each one nestled in the thick emerald green of ancient forest. Yellow and orange glacier lilies carpeted alpine meadows, and the silky white tufts of bear grass, which sit on tall spiky stems, waved in the breeze.
By the time the bear had lost interest in humans for lunch and lumbered off to higher elevations, we were lost in sheer wonder at what George Bird Grinnell, the father of Glacier National Park and the nearby glacier's namesake, called the Crown of the Continent. Spend a month here, the great naturalist John Muir once wrote, and become immortal.
Hiking with a baby
We had come here not necessarily seeking eternal life, but for the hiker's paradise we had heard about for years: 48 glaciers (some thousands of years old), 175 mountains (some 9,000 feet high), 563 streams and 730 miles of hiking trails in a reserve that reaches into Canada and spans more than a million acres. And it lacks the crush of visitors who crowd more easily accessible national parks such as Yellowstone and Yosemite.
But by the time we actually got around to planning a trip, we had a baby.
We wondered if we could still do an outdoor trip with a little one and decided on a compromise. While we met far braver souls backpacking, camping and car camping with several young ones, we found log cabins and a working farm to stay at, and took day hikes, replete with cans of formula, plastic baby spoons and jars of baby food. Liam, slathered in sunscreen, became adept at napping either in the car on the way to a hike or snoring on my back, the bill of his baseball cap pressing into my neck.
And, with the help of the Glacier Institute and the numerous educational material and talks in the evening, we learned that while we expected Titanic-sinking icebergs, the live glaciers here looked an awful lot like patches of snow, the key difference being that they moved. Grinnell Glacier, for instance, moves about an inch a day. We also learned that all the glaciers in the park are melting, a mystery that some scientists blame on global warming.
We flew from Washington's Dulles Airport through Denver to Billings, Montana's big city, and stayed with some of Brigid's relatives, then took a tiny puddle jumper, Big Sky Air (which locals refer to as Big Scare Air) bumping and knocking in the mountain winds to Kalispell.
We rented a car, stocked up on groceries in the town of Hungry Horse and then headed north to Glacier River Retreat, a small and relatively new group of log cabins perched on a bluff high above the roaring Middle Fork of the Flathead River, once a favored stretch for fur trappers. Each cabin has its own outdoor campfire and grill. And an enormous community hot tub in the middle is just the ticket for weary bones and muscles at the end of a hard day's hike.
