Be a survivor in Glacier National Park By Marc Silver OK, so maybe I'm not exactly at the top of the world, but it sure feels like it. I've just spent five hours on a 6.7-mile trail that rises 3,300 feet-kind of like trudging up an endless stuck escalator. My feet ache, and that's not all. My legs are under attack. As the orange sun slips behind distant misty peaks, bloodthirsty bugs come out to dine on tourists like me who've made the trek to Sperry Chalet, perched on a mountain ledge in Montana's Glacier National Park. Why go on a vacation that yields such pain? I was inspired by the reality shows taking over American TV. I wanted to know if my family could overcome obstacles, just like on Survivor and 1900 House, the PBS show that put modern folks in Victorian digs and watched them suffer. Above all, I wanted to leave my drab daily life far behind and find adventure. Hiker on Logan Pass (Photo by Jim Lo Scalzo for USN&WR) Glacier is the perfect park for challenges and thrills. Voted the best place for backpacking by Backpacker Magazine readers, the 1,600-square-mile tract has 730 miles of trails. The climbs can be steep, the drop-offs precipitous. Grizzlies lurk in the woods. Although visitors won't get cash prizes as Survivor contestants do, they are rewarded for their efforts. With glaciers, abundant wildlife, and stupendous views, the park is "a paradise from a bygone epoch," Backpacker declared. Best of all, we could spend the night at Sperry Chalet. Built in 1913 and back in business after a hiatus in the '90s, Sperry has never bothered with such guest amenities as electricity and hot water. As the sun set on a warm Friday night in July, my wife, two kids, and I entered Glacier for a weeklong visit. The glaciers that crept through tens of thousands of years ago carved huge, jagged mountains and vast, glistening lakes. One of them, Lake McDonald, was just warm enough for a dip. No need to jump in fully dressed, especially if you're wearing leather chaps and boots, like the beer-swilling fellow we saw one night. He sank like a stone. Glacier National Park (Photo by Jim Lo Scalzo for USN&WR) Rough riders. I sympathize with beer boy's near drowning. City slickers often err in the great outdoors. I thought a two-hour horse ride was just the way to pass the afternoon before our Sperry Chalet hike. How was I to know we'd wake up with bowed legs the next morning? Plus, our butts hurt. At 8 a.m., we began climbing. And climbing. And climbing. The park service says the hike to Sperry Chalet is "strenuous." My notes indicate a better word would be "sucky," as in "Dad, this hike is really sucky." That's partly because you gain about 500 feet per mile. But also because the dusty path is mined with dung from horses that carry tourists and supplies to and from Sperry. Evil, aggressive flies dug into our calves. Did I mention that I left the insect repellent in the car trunk to lighten our backpacks? I did bring pepper spray. The Glacier area is home to some 350 grizzlies and at least as many black bears. The fear of these animals certainly adds to the heightened reality-show ambience. You can't just hike; you have to make noise while hiking, since bears don't like to be surprised (although frankly, who does?). In the rare event of a bear charge, a pepper-spray blast might drive the animal away. A sign on a tree soon made me forget all about bears: "WARNING Mountain Lion frequenting this area. Be Alert." For four miserable hours, we clambered through a dense forest that offered no vistas. Maybe the lichens were lovely, but we were too busy to look, swatting flies and reviewing mountain lion etiquette (stand tall and throw stuff at an attacking cat). Finally, we emerged into a sweltering sun with no sign of our destination. Daniela, my 11-year-old, burst into tears. "There is no Sperry Chalet," she declared. Then we saw it-a rugged, two-story stone building with a peaked roof, high on a lonely bed of rock. It seemed we had another four hours to go. But a mere hour and we came upon stone steps-the last leg of our epic journey. A mountain goat and her frolicking kid banished Daniela's bad mood-and added to my list of worries. Goats have horns, they're territorial, and we were in their space. At 6,500 feet above sea level, Sperry Chalet is a Shangri-La. Mountain bluebells and yellow lilies bloom all around. Silvery Lake McDonald sits far below. The air is so clean and piney that my urban nostrils went into shock. The only sounds are the rushing of waterfalls and the buzzing of horseflies. "Who needs the Matterhorn?" a guest gushed. "This is the most beautiful place on Earth." The Great Northern Railway built the chalet, one of eight in a back-country network for hearty travelers of the early 20th century. They would come to the park by train, then go from chalet to chalet on horseback. The rise of the auto ended the chalet era. The only two left are Sperry, with 17 rooms and a meal plan, and Granite Park, just a hiker's shelter. But rustic doesn't mean cheap. Sperry charges $50 a night for a room-and $100 per guest for three meals. Over the hill. Sperry almost didn't survive as an inn. In 1993, the park service shut the place because of environmental concerns. "The waste disposal was over the cliff," explained Barb Warrington, whose parents ran the chalet before her. The park built an outhouse with four lemon-scented composting toilets and two cold-water sinks. Sperry was back in business in 1999. Now it's true you can't take a shower at "1913 House," but otherwise, life is good. We strolled to a pond (but skipped the 3.5-mile hike to Sperry Glacier for obvious reasons). Then our kids played cards on the rickety beds in our stone-walled, wood-beamed room, while my wife and I drank in the view. The stresses of the 21st century seemed 6.7 miles away, if not farther. So did the gadgets of daily life. Maya, 14, found out you can go a day without blow-drying your hair. "We'd like a TV very much, but there's nothing we can do about it," Daniela offered. Once the sun sets, flashlights offer the only illumination. All you can do is go to sleep in an exceedingly tranquil hotel. Hiking isn't the only path to Glacier's wonders. After descending from Sperry Chalet, we drove Going-to-the-Sun Road, the 52-mile highway that crosses the spine of the Continental Divide. The road winds past one heart-stopping vista after another-and some heart-stopping graffiti. The words "N'Sync sucks, Eminem rules" were etched into a patch of lingering snow. "At least it's meltable," laughed a ranger. So are the park's 37 "named" glaciers, holdovers from a mini-ice age that lasted from the 1400s to the 1850s. They've been shrinking since then. Park glaciologists believe global warming could wipe them out by 2030. Some rangers think a park name change is in order (although "Glaciated National Park" doesn't have the right ring, if you ask me). You can see a glacier or two from the road, but this vacation was dedicated to derring-do. I wanted to walk on one of the disappearing glaciers, but they're not exactly easy to reach. Even if you take a boat ride to the start of the trail to Grinnell Glacier, you've got a steep 3.5 miles to go. I figured I had to outwit my kids to get them to agree to another forced march, er, long hike. To my surprise, they were as eager to see hoary ice as I was. We joined 40 glacier lovers on a guided hike, led by affable park naturalist Dave Benson. On TV's Survivor, players vote each other off the island. In real life, survival means knowing your limits. Hikers gradually voted themselves off the trail, worn out by the climb and the sun. By 1 p.m., the band had shrunk to 15-with the worst yet to come. To get onto the 200-acre glacier, we had to cross a rushing stream fed by glacial melt. In early summer, hikers placed a dozen boulders in the water as steppingstones. The sun had melted a lot more ice since then. "The water's too high and fast to lead you safely across," Benson, 30, said. Groans of disappointment. But he would head over anyway, and-get this-we could follow if we wanted. So this was it: our Immunity Challenge. Eleven brave souls inched across largely submerged rocks. My unsurefooted wife didn't dare try. My daughters and I made two false starts. That ice-cold water was calling my name, whirling like those crazy circles in Hitch****'s Vertigo. "No can do," I said. Then my kids looked at me with eyes as big as frisbees and clown frowns. I grasped a walking stick and grabbed my 11-year-old's hand for extra security. It would make a better story if I had fallen in, but no such luck. Benson has seen only one hiker take a tumble-his aunt. She got soaked to her waist. Glaciers rock! Standing on the glacier was the highlight of our trip. It was so . . . cool, in every sense of the word. But it wasn't pretty. The top is littered with stones plucked off a cliff by oozing snow and ice. The bottom is rocky, too. Like little boys, glaciers pick up all sorts of things as they crawl along. If they stop moving (which happens if they grow too thin), they cease to be glaciers and become stagnant ice masses. Hiking down, we were spent but giddy. We had met our challenges, and found our rewards. As it turns out, that's a Glacier tra***ion. In Through Glacier Park in 1915, Mary Roberts Rinehart wrote of her sometimes harrowing horseback trip and what she felt when it was all over: "A sense of achievement; of conquering the unconquerable; of pitting human wits against giants and winning." With our great hiking feats, we felt like winners, too. But someone was poised to outdo us. At the foot of the Grinnell trail, we saw a teenage girl and her grandmother. Grandma must have weighed 200 pounds, and she wasn't very tall. She was shod in orthopedic sandals. "How long to that glacier?" she asked. "A couple of hours," I replied. "Not bad," she said to her granddaughter. Spying my wife's walking stick, the old woman said, "I gotta get me one of those sticks." Would they make it? "I see people I think will never get to the glacier, and they do," said Benson, our guide. If grandma and granddaughter succeeded, they would definitely be Glacier's ultimate survivors. <font size=4 color=green> Angelique</font> éu?c s?a ch?a b?i - Admin on 08/05/2001 06:05:44
