That Can't Happen!

 

Relaxing on the hammock when we finally made it to Florida in February

We were on our way back from Montana, and Glacier National Park in September of 2024. We made it to Indiana, and a very bumpy part of I-70. In the side mirror I noticed that the camper seemed closer to the bedrails of the truck than I remembered! I watched it for awhile, until I was sure, before telling Mark. He said "that can't happen", but we pulled into a rest stop. He checked everything that he could see. Everything that was visible looked ok. He raised the hitch to the highest notch to give more clearance, and we continued down the road. We made it back to Newcomerstown with no further issues. 

 The next day he started investigating the area around the hitch. After he loosened part of the front panel, he found that the metal around the hitch box was cracking in 3 places, and the welds were breaking. How does metal crack we asked? That can't happen!  That's the part of the camper that should be the strongest. It connects the camper to the truck while we're driving down the road. Once we saw the problem, we felt very fortunate that we didn't have a catastrophe while we were driving, and we knew that we couldn't move the camper again as it was. 

Mark made many calls and asked a lot of questions to the camper manufacturer, the frame manufacturer, and the insurance agent (who said it was wear and tear,  so not a covered expense). He contacted camper repair people, some helpful,  and some not so helpful.  Then we waited. Keystone, the  camper manufacturer, said that they would pay for a temporary weld, so that we could get the camper to a licensed repair company. After that work was done by a great welder in the Newcomerstown area, we safely pulled the camper to Indiana and waited. It was such a major repair that the frame manufacturer (Lippert) had to do it. The good news: even though the camper was out of warranty, they covered it. Our camper frame was now better than new. 

Unfortunately, our new camper roof that was put on in the spring was showing some wrinkles, most likely from some frame flexing from when the frame was cracked. 

After we park we could see wrinkles

The good news is that we did make it to Florida for February and March! But when we were ready to head south and pulled in our big slide,  it made a whirring noise. The slide was all the way in and we could travel, so we just didn't open that slide on the trip down. We decided that it would be better to work on it in warm weather. Luckily Mark is very handy and was able to fix it himself when we got to our Florida campground. Then after that Mark found that we had water dripping from our underbelly! That can't happen!  The water should be in the holding tanks! He cut a flap in the underbelly cover to see where the water was coming from and found that the gray water tank (the tank for the shower and sink water) had slid out of place! That can't happen! (He still has no idea how it did happen!) But again, being creative and handy, he was able to fix it!

Mark underneath the camper

We enjoyed Florida, keeping busy,  visiting friends,  swimming,  and working as little as possible. We worked 6 days out of our 2 months, for the restaurant where we worked the year before. We made it back to Ohio with no more issues.

The park in Inverness, Florida

Line dancing  class

Visiting with Sue on Amelia Island

Another great Florida "second summer"!

The Blackfeet Reservation, Glacier National Park

"I'm sitting in the dappled sunlight, looking at the pine trees and listening to the breeze blowing through the aspens. This rugged, isolated, beautiful place can't help but change each being who travels through here."

We spent this past summer working at Glacier Park Lodge in northwestern Montana, on the southeastern edge of Glacier National Park. We approached the area from the east through flat barren plains. Then out of nowhere the mountains appeared, rising up from the earth, carved and molded by glaciers over the last 7 million years.

We lived and worked on the Blackfeet Reservation, where we heard the ancient stories of a proud people, who still occupy part of their native lands.  Unfortunately, those lands are no longer home to the great herds of buffalo, iinnii in Blackfeet, which is a synonym for life itself. When the buffalo were eliminated from the west, the Blackfeet way of life ended. On June 26, 2023, a small herd of buffalo was released near Chief Mountain. These bison are genetically related to a small group that was saved from slaughter in 1873, bringing hope for the future to the Blackfeet nation. 

Members of the local Blackfeet nation came to bless the opening of 
Glacier Park Lodge for the 2024 season

We attended the opening ceremonies of
The North American Indian Days in Browning, Montana,
which is about a 15 minute drive from Glacier Park Lodge

The regalia worn by the dancers was beautiful and intricately made

We were in the small town of East Glacier Park, with its one gas station, a few motels, some restaurants and souvenir shops. The "res dogs" roamed free and seemed like they were having lots of fun.  The staff made sure they were well fed and loved. One in particular liked to sneak into the lodge and hang out at the front desk, or anywhere else that the staff didn't ask her to leave.  The dogs were mostly very well behaved and only asked to be pet by people who offered them attention.  We also saw free range cattle and horses on our drives.

On our free time, we had the privilege of exploring Glacier National Park, which the Blackfeet people call "the backbone of the world."  We hiked about 300 miles on over 30 different trails to pristine lakes, roaring waterfalls, and beautiful wildflower filled meadows. 

This is one of our early sesason hikes. The peaks are still snow covered.
 In the middle is my co-worker and friend, Kendra,
and our hiking buddy (and "personal trainer" - she walked fast), San, from Thailand!
We are at Grinell Lake.

    This is Sinopah Mountain at Two Medicine Lake. This was the closest part of the national park to where we were living for the season, so we made many trips to this area. We hiked the trails, looked for moose and picked a few berries!

Rockwell Falls is in the Two Medicine part of Glacier.
I think I hiked the 7 miles roundtrip to these falls 4 times over the summer.
 By the end of the summer there was very little water flowing on the upper part of the falls.

One of our favorite stops on the Going to the Sun Road was
 Saint Mary Lake and Wild Goose Island.  

   

Hidden Lake with Bearhat Mountain behind it.
On one of our hikes to this lake, the clouds were so heavy
that the lake was literally totally "hidden," but we still had a nice hike!

Aren't these 3 cubbies cute!!!

Mark really wanted to see grizzly bears!!!! Glacier didn't disappoint us!! We headed out on a long hike this day, just the 2 of us at first. Luckily we were able to hang out with a bigger group of hikers when we saw these beauties! Mark asked a grizzly expert where we could find some grizzlies. He said Siyeh Pass trail, and sure enough, they were there!


A  bear hug!

                      

Siyeh Pass was also a beautiful hike, unfortunately we encountered
30 to 40 mile an hour winds going up the switchbacks,
so we didn't go all the way up to the highpoint of the trail.


Going to the Sun Road views


On the Highline Trail


The fields were full of fireweed


This was late in the season, and the
clouds were hanging low

More amazing animals


This big guy was hanging out beside the trail. We watched him eating, then he lay down for a rest. We wondered if we would have noticed him if he had already been lying down!

 
See how well he's camouflaged!

This gorgeous guy is molting, he's shedding his winter fur coat!

                                                     

The mountain goats were soooooo cool! 

This guy was hungry, and not at all afraid of people!
He was way too close to us with his big horns!
Did you know that each of his horns can weigh 15 pounds!

The huckleberries, thimble berries (they look like red raspberries, but the plants don't have thorns) and service berries (saskatoons, an important berry to the indigenous peoples) were plentiful most of August and September. I developed what Mark called " hand to mouth disease"! As we hiked my hand kept grabbing berries and putting them in my mouth. I called them grab and go berries, because if I stopped too long to pick them my fellow hikers would become impatient with me. So I became skilled in grabbing them, and I just kept going most of the time!

Yummy huckleberries!

The service berries ripened gradually. They were growing all around our campground, so I could pick a few each day!

The Glacier Lilies were dainty and beautiful!
I was so surprised when we found these still blooming 
at higher elevations later in the summer! We identified about
70 different wildflowers over the summer!

Here we are in Waterton, Canada.We were fortunate to have the day off when the lodge offered an employee shuttle trip to the Canadian part of Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park

This is Medicine Grizzly lake. I love the bear grass flowers!
This was a long hike to a remote lake. We passed only a handful of people!

                                 

We are on top of Scenic Point. It was a big hike, but we had perfect weather, not too hot and not too much wind. We thought about doing this hike on many other days, but the weather needed to be just right to accomplish this one without turning back.

Another beautiful day. It was early in the season
and there was still a lot of snow to hike over to get to Iceberg Lake,
in the Many Glacier part of the park.

Avalanche Lake is one of the most popular 
moderate hikes in the park. Its only about 4.5 miles 
roundtrip, but trailhead parking is very hard to find! We circled around about 3 times before finding a spot! We were lucky this time! The hike was great until the clouds let loose on us on the way back!

Having a little break.
 We took the boat across Two Medicine Lake to start the 5 mile hike to
Upper Two Medicine Lake.

Here we are at Bowman Lake, it's in the remote North Fork area of of the park. You need to drive over about 15 miles of rough dirt roads to get to this area. Mark didn't want to drive our truck up there but we lucked out. Two days before we were supposed to depart for Ohio, one of the shuttle drivers decided that he wanted to go up there. He needed some of us to go with him to justify thr trip. Kendra and I looked at each other (we had just been talking about how we weren't going to get up there) and volunteered to go along. Mark came too!

This is a view from Mark's epic hike of the summer! You know,
one that I wasn't willing to do with him! It turned into about a 20 mile 
hike, with too much elevation gain for me! 
 He hiked out and back on the Highline Trail from Logan Pass and
 up to Granite Park Chalet. On the way back, he took a very steep spur trail to
 get this view of Grinell Glacier from above.

Another view of Sinopah with some fresh June snow on top.
This one was taken from the campground area at Two Medicine 

We worked at Glacier Park Lodge. The main lodge was built in 1913 and the annex was added in 1914. The lobby is beautiful, with 40 foot high Douglas Fir tree trunk columns towering up to the third floor. The builders knew when to harvest the trees so that the bark would stay on for over 100 years! The railroad originally built the lodge and Amtrak still brings guests from the east and west to stay there. Of course the historic building comes modern day inconveniences. Things like no elevators, no air conditioners, almost no cell phone service (poor wifi) and no TVs or refrigerators in the rooms. Some of these things made it very challenging for me and my co-workers as we checked people in at the front desk. We sometimes wondered why people didn't research the lodge, or read the reviews. Mark worked in the gift shop, where, by the way, they had the only air conditioning in the lodge.

This was the view from the lodge. The center peak
is named Dancing Lady

This is the lobby, I'm behind the front desk.You can see the
Douglas Fir trees behind me.

This is the garden in front of the lodge. 
They asked for volunteers to help replant and we were happy to go help when we had spare time. The master gardener was a wonderful lady, and one of my co-workers transferred to the gardens, so we had fun getting our hands a little dirty with them. Also, for each hour we volunteered, we got a raffle ticket for a free night stay and dinner at one of their other properties in Whitefish, Montana.
I was the lucky one who won the raffle, and we had a great mini vacation!!

This little guy hung around the campground and dorm area
for a month or two before moving on. We finally got a peak
at him while we were walking home one evening.

The Kids came to visit and my favorite hike

Here we are at Two Medicine Lake

Anthony and Ben at the Lake McDonald Cascades

Jess and Kari at Virginia Falls

Jess and her mom, Heather
at Lake McDonald

The Grinell Glacier Trail. This was a big hike and absolutely my favorite hike!!!
It's over 11 miles out and back with over 2000 feet of gain. When I asked the kids what hikes they wanted to do Kari said "Grinell Glacier". I was very hesitant to take them all on such a big hike, and I wasn't even sure that I wanted to do it myself.  So the week before the family came, we got a group of co-workers together and up we went to see what it was like. Now, I will say that not everyone went all the way up (as I said, it's a big hike). We made it up to the upper lake and glacier and it was just WOW!! We hiked around the glacial lake for a couple more miles, it was so gorgeous! That first day there wasn't any ice floating in the lake, and the weather was great! We had a few more clouds and more wind on our second visit with the kids, but it was still so beautiful! So wonderful, in fact, that when I found out that 2 of our friends hadn't had a chance to do the hike, we did it for a third time. This picture is from that day!

This is one of the red pools that we encountered near the lake.
The red color either comes from an algae with a red pigment, or from mineral deposits.
The glacier in the middle of the picture is Salamander Glacier,
and the actual Grinell Glacier is off to the left of the picture.

On our first two trips up to Grinell Glacier we had to walk

 through this refreshing waterfall. On our final hike, it was unfortunately drying up, and we stayed dry. Everyone on our hikes made it up to this point. 

(Notice how the ledge drops off!)

On the trail.

This is the view of Grinell Lake on the way down from Grinell Glacier. 
The colors were amazing. It's called glacial blue from the presence of "glacial flour" which are fine particles of pulverized rock which absorbs and scatters the sunlight. So this hike has it all, glaciers, mountain lakes, multiple waterfalls, and sometimes big horn sheep and mountain goats!!!                                    

 We have come to the end of our time at Glacier National Park, where "the rivers sing and the mountains dance".
 The lodge has closed, and we will be looking forward to our next adventure.

On our way back east we made a quick stop to explore Thoedore Roosevelt National Park

The buffalo were kind enough to pose!

A beautiful badlands area

These were super cool rocks are called
cannonball concretions.

We will spend some time in Ohio with family before heading south.