Eighty Years in Montana

The most magical time I ever lived, I shared with a mountain, a glacier, and an eagle, miles from any other human. I shall never again experience the richness of being that alone. Glacier National Park’s unending beauties are best seen from its hundreds of miles of trails. Cracker Lake, in the Many Glacier area, is one of the less-popular destinations for tourists. There are no sweeping views of mountain ranges, no tremendous waterfalls, no spectacular passes, or a trail to elsewhere. I’d heard about this lake from Aunt Joe as a favorite jaunt of her family. I decided to make this trek. Cracker Lake had been a mining site before the region became a national park in l910. Copper was the lure that had miners scratching a road through Canyon Creek’s narrow valley between Allen and Wynn mountains. The miners built cabins, cut a shaft into the rocks, and assembled an eight-ton ore concentrator at the lake. On one of Aunt Joe’s family’s huckleberrying expeditions in the early l920's a violent thunderstorm trapped them and they spent the night in one of the leaky abandoned lodgings. Tremendous floods in l935 and 1964 destroyed the old road and most traces of human work. This sunny August day had a few cumulus clouds floating in a penstemon-colored sky. I started off from the back of the Swiss-styled Many Glacier Hotel. The hiker’s guide told of a 1200 foot gain in elevation in the six mile hike to Cracker Lake: an easy trail for my 35 year old legs. The canyon ends at the base of Mount Siyeh, a 10,014-foot peak whose “front side” faces Going-to- the-Sun Highway a few miles south. I had hiked the Piegan Pass trail across that face of Siyeh, and wanted to see this spectacular side, where a 3000-foot cliff forms the backdrop for its glacier and lake. Once around the shoulder of squat Allen Mountain, Cracker Lake Trail followed Canyon Creek southwest. I could hear the creek roaring down its rocky bed the entire hike, and saw it often. As I neared the lake, four people on horseback approached, returning to the hotel. The wrangler questioned my hiking solo, and said no one else was at the lake. Wonderful day! A trail not clotted with people, no tents to mar the scenery, no humans to spoil the quiet. I assured him he shouldn’t worry about my welfare. Shortly after leaving them, I walked over a small rise, and sighted the lake. The gletschermilch from Siyeh Glacier colored it the lovely soft turquoise typical of glacial lakes. Wind touched the surface in ripple marks that sped along then vanished, reappearing in another area as though played by a harpist. I stopped at a monstrous blue argillite boulder perched on a side hill about fifty feet above the lake. Sheltered from the breezes I ate lunch. Giardia had yet to enter my vocabulary, so I drank my fill at every stream or spring the trail crossed. At the lake’s upper end I found the mining scars, remnants of the ore concentrator, a cast iron furnace door, big slabs and sheets, bars, and bolts of metal strewn about by nature in her floods and storms. Above me I could discern the black mouth of Cracker Mine. The only trace of the cabins Aunt Joe had described may have been some board scraps I pushed through a stand of stunted willows at the lake’s end. Above me rose the huge terminal moraine of what had been a powerful glacier. Over that the awesome face of Mount Siyeh soared upward. I nearly stumbled backwards looking up the cliff to where it disappeared into the sky, out of sight of the mountain’s summit. Reading “a three thousand foot cliff” and seeing it are worlds apart. The old towers of the World Trade Center could be placed on themselves, topped with The Statue of Liberty standing on herself to match the height of Siyeh’s wall.