Leaving the mountains

We’re back in the USA now. Even when you cross the border into the middle of nowhere and the back of beyond, which seems a fair way to describe Montana, you get the same stern faced examination from customs. I’ve figured out now that part of their training must be to simply ask you a string of questions to which the answers are unimportant, just to see how you react, and on the off chance that you blurt out something about how much you hate the infidel. I’m pretty sure that when the border guard asked me how I met Kate I could have said I bought her at market in Siberia, and he wouldn’t have cared – as long as I didn’t start avoiding eye contact or sweating profusely. I didn’t test my theory though.

Once we were back in the USA I spent a while searching my IPod for the song of the same name, before I realised that I was looking for “Back in the USSR” by the Beatles, which is not quite the same. The next best song I could think of was Born in the USA. When I asked Kate about Bruce Springsteen on her Iphone, she asked whether he was the guy who played at the Sheaf just before we left. I said I thought that was unlikely.

Actually, Kate’s knowledge of all things pop culture and music is proving to be almost as bad as my own. When I suggested a game of 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon o our last hike, not only had she not heard of the game, she had no idea who Kevin Bacon was.

“You know, the guy from footloose”

“Footloose? – is that a movie or something?”

You may be wondering why we would want to play a game like “6 degrees of Kevin Bacon” anyway. The answer, like so many things in this part of the world, has to do with bears. A bear is at its most dangerous if you surprise it. If the bear hears you coming, it will generally get out of your way before you get anywhere near it, but if you are walking silently around a corner and happen upon a bear, it may be startled and tempted to attack. Accordingly, it’s important to keep talking and making noise as you walk. However when you have 22km day of walking planned, it’s difficult to keep the conversation going for the entire time. Hence games like the Kevin Bacon one, just to keep you talking.

Having found that pop culture based games were of limited use to us, we found other topics to talk about. Kate gave me an extensive briefing about the rules of the Americas Cup, which remain a mystery to me. As I understand it now, the holder of the Cup gets to decide a venue and accepts a challenge every couple of years. There is a series, called the Louis Vuitton series, which, ostensibly, decides which boat gets to challenge. But, the holder is obliged to accept a challenge from anyone, and in the recent series, Oracle, the challenger, simply ignored the LV series and made its own challenge. If this is possible, why is there a challenger series? Apparently there is no answer to this question.

One way or another, it worked, because we made it to our campsite without any bear incidents. There is always a balance to be struck here – you want to see a bear, but not get killed by it. Unfortunately, when you are hiking, ensuring the latter generally means making sure of the former. So no bear sighting either.

We were in Banff, on a hike recommended to us by the parks service as ‘just about the only option at this time of year’. The entire hike followed Lake Minnewanka, first out to LM22 (the campsites are named for their distance from the trailhead, then back over two days, camping at LM 9, with the plan to head up to a pass and lookout after setting up our camp. By the time we got to LM (however (still bear free) the previous day’s walk was taking its toll, particularly in blister form, and the weather was swinging around too. We also noticed, to our pleasant surprise, that the camp site was completely empty – we knew there had been three other groups booked into this site, so we had expected to find a few people already there. An empty campsite seemed to good to give up, and with a shower coming through we decided we might try for the pass the next day and took shelter in the tent instead.

It was only about thirty minutes later that we were woken up by the inquiring voice of a Park Ranger

“Hello? Anybody there”

I assumed that he wanted to check our camping permits, so I started fishing around for ours, when he told me that he wasn’t here for that.

“We’re evacuating the campsite due to a bear incident” he told us.

As it turned out, the reason the campsite was empty was that, no more than an hour before we arrived, a grizzly bear had torn open the tent of two Swiss campers staying there, and all the other campers had already been evacuated.

So, for the second time, our planned two-night hike became a one-night hike, but, to be honest, it wasn’t all bad. We were facing a 10km walk back along a track we’d already covered, carrying packs that seemed to be getting heavier. Instead, we jumped in the boat on the lake that took us right back to our car, which in turn took us back to a shower and a proper bed, courtesy of the local YMCA. I’ve never stayed in a “Y” before, but, other than the range of community outreach flyers at the counter, it seems like any other hotel. Fun to stay at? Really depends what you make of it.

Kate and I couldn’t quite agree on the Swiss campers. I felt that, given they were actually unhurt, they should count themselves lucky to have seen a grizzly bear so close up. Kate did not agree and forced me to admit that I would indeed have been terrified if a grizzly tore open our tent.

The bear incident, combined with the unremitting rain (we are now into our 25th consecutive day with at least some rain) dampened our enthusiasm for Banff and the Rockies a little, so we decided it was time to move on, first to Glacier National Park in Montana, but shortly thereafter 800km south to Yellowstone.

At Glacier all we wanted was to do one day walk and move on, so we went into the information centre to check out the options. Our first walk of choice was closed because it was still waist deep in snow. Second choice was closed because there was a carcass there that bears were feeding on, and the third choice was ‘open but not recommended’ due to excessive bear activity; it was being patrolled by a grizzly mother with two cubs in tow. Kate pointed out that, as the bear always attacks the smaller person, this was really her choice, and there was no way we were going on that walk. I couldn't fault that logic, so we joined the rest of the park on the only trail that was open.

I actually preferred Glacier to Jasper and Banff. There is only a small, poor quality road into the park, which contains campsites with cold water and little else, apart from the obligatory railroad built hotel from the early part of the century. In short, far more of a wilderness feel than Banff, which has chef hat restaurants, multiple Starbucks and McDonalds and even a Louis Vuitton boutique in the park. And on our walk we added moose, accompanied by two calves that can’t have been more than a few days old, to our list of spotted wildlife.

Nevertheless, we’ve had our fill of that part of the world, and we are now on our way to Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, which, I gather, is still mountainous, but a different eco system and, importantly, a different climate.

I’m blogging from the car, which might give you a clue as to how straight to roads are. Kate is driving, but if I had to, I think I could just about set the cruise control and blog as I drove. There are very few turns to negotiate.

Once you leave the mountains, it’s a fairly dramatic change in scenery. Montana contains less than a million people. From the map I would say it looks at least the size of France, so you can imagine it’s fairly sparsely settled. While the mountains are still in the distance to my right, apart from that it is green fields, dotted with the occasional herd of cattle, as far as the eye can see. Over the gentle hills it’s occasionally possible to see the road for many kilometres in front of us, and there is rarely another car in sight.