The Other Side

I got last Friday off from work, and intended to put it to good use. We are buying a home in downtown Missoula that needs, well, "work," and figured that now might be the last chance to head out of town without worrying if I had finished caulking around windows or wondering if the primer had dried in the bedroom.

But driving home from work on Thursday, knowing my bags were all packed, I started to feel guilty: Laura had to work on Friday, and I could not see not taking her along.

I had been planning three days of, of course, skiing: one in the Flathead near Kalispell and two in Glacier National Park. We've both been to Glacier, but not for years. I could ski, I figured, while she hunted moose and grizzly with a Sony.

So instead of leaving on Thursday evening I woke up early on Friday and hiked Lolo Peak's false summit.
Mon
The false summit of Lolo Peak can be seen from all of Missoula. With the May 15 opening of the Mormon Creek Road the approach to the summit is cut from 12 miles to 3 miles. I was drinking coffee in my kitchen at 5:45 and atop the peak by 10:45.

Missoula in the upper right:



North summit Lolo Peak, an easy morning climb:



At 4 we headed north through Seeley-Swan and by 9 had set up in a closed campground just shy of the Continental Divide.



We woke to clear skies and calm weather and bee-lined to Glacier's east side for St. Marys. The road is plowed 9 miles to the Jackson Glacier Overlook. I biked 2 miles to the Piegan Pass trailhead and skied from there while Laura stayed below with the Sony and the plott hound.

Climb:



Watch out:



The upper pass is blown free, and I leave my skis behind to climb the last bit. The transformation from the valley behind to the valley below is like passage from The Known World to The Other Side. There's few views on Earth that compare to it:









Ski down, bike down, and meet Laura. Skip rocks into Lake St. Mary in the afternoon:



Nothing says camping like an empty beer bottle and 2-foot-tall bag of tortilla chips:



Chalet du Nissan:



Rain and snow overnight. Up at 5 to check the weather: heavy. Skies clear a bit at 7 and Laura drops me off again at the gate:



Three miles later, step off the bike onto a head-high snow bank:



Later, a 100-yard long tunnel has drifts all the way through it, the entrances marked by scores of prints:



Progress is halted just shy of Logan Pass by whiteout conditions and a 30-foot tall corniced snowbank. Nice view, though:



On the way home we see a black bear and grizzly fight over a deer carcass and a bald eagle on a fence post.

Today we sign for the house.

More From Around the World

Here are some more images I scanned from our first around the world, in 2002-2003.

A crisp fall day at 11,000 feet outside the Potala Palace, boyhood home of the Dalai Lama, in Lhasa, Tibet. The Chinese were converting the old city opposite the palace into a sort of mall.



Detail at a temple in Kathmandu.



Luang Prabang, Laos -- a spectacular and beautiful city.



Detail from a wall at Angkor Wat, Cambodia. At Angkor Wat you tend to look at the big-picture palaces, but the detail of many of the public area carvings is astounding.



Yacht harbor in Monaco. Earlier in the day we had been in Milan, coming out of the Italian Alps and headed to Barcelona. We could not for some reason buy a ticket to Barcelona so we got one to Monaco. The train was leaving for Monaco and the departures board also listed Innsbruck and Salzburg -- not cities on the way to Monaco. I went back to the ticket window and the seller pointed at the platform and told us to run. I said, No, I want to go to Monaco. He said, Yes, Monaco! I said, No, Monaco! We went back and forth like this for a while. Turns out the Italian word Monaco means Munich -- Monaco, the principality along the French Rivieria, is something different. Anyway, we made it, had dinner, walked along the harbor, felt very out of place, and got a ticket heading on to Barcelona.



We took a local train to Sighishoara, Romania and this guy sauntered in to our cabin. He insisted on chatting with us although we shared not one word in common. As we were approaching Sighishoara he started pointing to his stomach, making scissor-cutting motions, and asking for money. We tried to ignore him. We tried to ignore lots of annoying people on our trip. It never works.



Easter morning at Mt. Cook, South Island, New Zealand. We were biking and camping, and it was cold. Somehow Laura arranged an Easter egg hunt around the tent.



A memorable day. We were on a camel trek in southern Morocco and Hamil made "le pain du desert" -- bread of the desert. He made dough and buried it in the sand and stacked rocks atop it, then built a fire atop it and let the coals burn. Bread done, he pried the coals and rocks off. It was about 110 degrees when I took this picture. Hamil spoke five languages, including Arabic and Hebrew, but not a word of English. We got by in French.



Diwali festival at the Paropakar Orphanage, Kathmandu. Diwali is the festival of lights -- a combination Christmas, New Years and Halloween. Laura volunteered at Paropakar, playing games with the boys. They invited us to the festival, where the boys were given gifts of fruit and incense.



Temple near Kathmandu.



Laura in southern Morocco. One of the best photos of the trip, taken on a magical afternoon with a sort of stillness which does not exist today.



Laundry day in the Nepalese Himalaya. We were lucky to find spigots and concrete pads where we could do laundry. We'd usually use a special bar of soap we could buy for a buck or so. It had an abrasive agent which really scrubbed clothes clean but also wore them down quickly. This was on about the tenth day of a three-week hike around Annapurna.



Me looking quite emaciated after three weeks of hiking in the Himalaya -- and about to board this hulk for the eight-hour rumble back to Kathmandu. This bus was anything but "Peace and Heaven."

Skiing

I think the woes of Montana's winter are by now well-known, but when everything is new, even a bad year holds plenty of adventure.

Tom and I put in a beautiful set of tracks high above Lookout Pass in March.



Come spring, the sun came out. Here's the view from my office window. That's Downing Mountain in the background.



Two weeks ago I took Laura to Bozeman to put her on a flight to Atlanta. I did some skiing along the way, and the next weekend when I went back to fetch her.

Near Big Sky:



Beehive Basin, Madison Mountains



Buffalo Jump State Park:



Bridger Mountains:



Mt. Blackmore, Gallatin Mountains:



And as a parting shot, the plott hound at work:

The other Round the World

Laura and I went around the world in 2008-2009. It's a bad habit we learned back in 2002-2003, when we did the same thing. We were both living in Utah. I quit my jobs, sold a lot of stuff, and put the rest on a trailer that I hauled down to Texas.

We left June 2 and flew to London. We hopped and skipped across Europe, Turkey and Morocco for three months before flying to India. Stuck, we went to Bangladesh, where we got stuck again and wound up in Nepal, where we spent two months. I went to Tibet and then we flew to Bangkok. We moved around southeast Asia for several months before flying to New Zealand, where we bought used bikes and camping gear and spent three months circumnavigating the South Island. We sold the bikes and went to Tahiti, where we island hopped on freighters for a month. We flew to Los Angeles and took Amtrak to Houston, and that was a year.

We each had a camera on that trip, but we used film cameras. In all, we took about 800 photos -- a lot, but a piddling compared to the 18,000 or so we took on our 08-09 trip, when we both had digital cameras. Anyway, we printed our photos and put them in albums, occasionally assaulting visitors with "Would you like to see our trip photos?"

I've got access to a scanner now, so I thought I'd post some.

November, 2002: A hike around Annapurna, Nepal



August, 2002: Hamil loads our camels after a lunch break outside Zagora, Morocco



September, 2002: Laura in an old Bedford taxi in Calcutta



September, 2002: Quite an amazing photo, considering the circumstances, and difficult to this day to look at. We took a Trooper from Calcutta to Dhaka. We left at 6 a.m. and had three flat tires. We were left alone to walk through the border into Bangladesh. They kept us in a room where Laura got a marriage proposal, and the bus left without us. A boy came with a bike and pedaled us to a new bus, which poked across the Bangladeshi countryside before loading onto a boat which crossed the Ganges in the dark, surrounded by thousands of other boats, in what I can only describe as a scene out of Dantean novel. We arrived, with Laura now quite sick, in Dhaka at about 9 p.m.



November, 2002: The morning of our flight to Bangkok, at Amar Hotel, where we stayed for several weeks in Kathmandu, often the only people there. Amar is on the left.



February, 2003: A minibus ride from Medan to Bukit Lawang, Sumatra.



February, 2003: Me looking quite sweaty in the jungle in Malaysia.



January, 2002: One of my favorite photos. Laura on a perfect beach in Ao Nang, Thailand.



August, 2002: Dolomites, Italy.



November, 2002: Another amazing photo -- downtown Lhasa, Tibet, with Potala Palace, the boyhood home of the Dalai Lama, in the background. Lhasa sits at more than 11,000 feet above sea level.



June 2003: Round the world, completed. Laura in Atlanta with Jimmy and Bill.

Urban Wilderness

One of the great things about Missoula is that I can wake up on a Saturday, have breakfast and coffee, and make plans for a day in the mountains.

(This is the view my boots have all day long)



One of the main factors that finally won me over to the Smokies and life in Waynesville was that I could drive 30 miles from my house and been in deep wilderness. Some of my best days there were on the Smokies' long trails -- 17 or more miles with 3,000 vertical feet of gain and a bike shuttle or hitchhike to round the day out, plus an evening's worth of limping around in pain from the exertion.

(Bass Lake)



There's that same kind of challenge in western Montana, only you don't have to go looking for it, like you do in North Carolina, and purposefully set yourself on to a punishing mountain. Here, you have to make a conscious decision not to overexert yourself.

(The remote headwall of South Fork Lolo Creek)



With three major ranges converging on the Missoula Valley, it's almost hard to narrow down your options.

(Tom pushing off from Little St. Joe, the Bitterroot Valley more than 5,000 vertical feet below)



Two Saturdays ago I drove to the Bass Creek Trailhead and set out on skis up Bass Creek. Eight miles and five hours later I was at the mouth of Bass Creek Lake. I skinned across the lake and climbed the east face of Bass Creek Peak, turning around short of the summit when I experienced signs of snow instability. I made it back to the truck at 6 p.m. exhausted and limping.

(View into the Great Beyond)



On that trip I saw exactly one other skier -- Tom, a recent transplant from Maine, who told me he got to the trailhead at 6 a.m. This, I figured, was someone I needed to get to know.

Last week I picked Tom up and we went back to Bass Creek Trailhead, but this time bushwhacked up a steep ridge until we found a trail and put our skis on. Six hours later we traversed across the summit of Little St. Joe, 9,033 feet, and took in the nearly monochromatic expanse of rock, snow and tree that make up the background of the surrounding few thousand square miles. From here, we could see into the heart of the Bitterroot and off into Idaho. The Bitterroot Valley, brown under the effect of a warm winter, slumbered more than 5,000 vertical feet below.

(A phalanx of rock, snow and tree: the view from Little St. Joe south into the central Bitterroot)



We got back to the car at 7 p.m., making for an even 10-hour outing, and I was so sore that Sunday was for the most part a loss.