Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
my stomach marshals during the digestive process defy gravity, leaping up my esophag-
us like salmon eager to spawn and inflaming the back of my throat. At this point, I can
count on an uncomfortable fit of coughing after every meal.
I've been plumbing the cash register racks at every pharmacy and convenience store
for effective lozenges. My favorites are fiercely minty ones, Halls Ice Blue, but they aren't
easy to find. In any case, I've been leaving a voluminous trail of cough drop wrappers
behind me. In motel rooms and trash barrels, I mean, not on the side of the road.
Even if I'm going to cough, I have to eat, and I arrived in Whitefish just after midday,
so I took my miserable self out to lunch, where I didn't recognize it at the time, but my
luck and frame of mind were about to change. Around the corner from the motel was the
Buffalo Cafe, a busy joint at lunchtime, renowned locally for its burgers, omelets, and
beer choices. I sat down at the counter and the guy next to me was slurping up a bowl
of soup that looked good, so I ordered it—beef barley, and yes, delish!—and that started
a conversation. He was an ex-New Yorker (I never got his name) who came out here for
the fishing several years ago and stayed. A guy about my age, with a graying ponytail,
he wanted to know what brought me there, and I told him, and he began asking about
how I was going to get through the mountains, and I said I was going to head for Route
2 and go over the Marais Pass, and he just snorted.
“That's ridiculous,” he said, and I knew why and I was ashamed. I was being a chick-
en.
Whitefish is half a day's ride from the western entrance to Glacier, possibly the most
arrestingly beautiful of all our national parks, and the most direct route west to east
through it, called, famously and aptly, Going-to-the-Sun Road, is one of the more celeb-
rated bike rides in the United States.
Fifty-one miles long, it begins in the town of West Glacier, proceeds pleasantly along
the wooded southeastern shore of Lake McDonald, providing intermittent glimpses of
soaring peaks, and then, as if a giant had stepped on the end of the road, mistaking it
for a seesaw, begins ruthlessly, if gorgeously, climbing to Logan Pass. There, at 6,646
feet, the road crosses the Continental Divide, and makes a thrilling, winding descent that
spills you out on the other side of the park.
I had read about it and was simply intimidated. I knew that it had just opened a few
weeks earlier for the summer, the pass having been clogged with snow until mid-July.
Maybe it was my dark mood working, but I envisioned an endless, impossible grade that
would leave me gasping and feeling entirely ineffectual, completely not in control of a
venture that, after all, was supposed to be a way for me to seize control of my life story.
