Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Plus I knew if I didn't make it to the top by 11:00 a.m. rangers would scoop me up and
take me off the mountain because by then the tourist automobile traffic was heavy and
made cycling dangerous both for cyclists and drivers. Route 2, which goes around the
southern end of the park and over Marais Pass, is a lesser climb and a far less scenic,
more mundane ride.
“You've come all this way and you're
not
going to ride Going-to-the-Sun Road?” my
lunch companion said.
I couldn't refute his logic. The follow-up question was in my head: What are you do-
ing this for in the first place? Just to get it over with?
He sent me to Glacier Cyclery, a few blocks away, where the owner, Ron Brunk, a tall,
slender man who seemed near my age, said the previous weekend he and his wife had
had nothing else to do and had ridden up to Logan together on a tandem.
“It's a very doable ride,” he assured me.
Doable?
Mr. Brunk advised me to call the lodge at Lake McDonald in the park and reserve a
room for the next night, then leave from there at dawn. A couple of days earlier, while
I was still making up my mind about my route through the mountains, I'd called the
lodge and was told it was full. On Mr. Brunk's suggestion, I tried again, and—lo and be-
hold!—a vacancy.
Fate, I thought. And between fits of coughing, I made the reservation.
Is it corny, or clichéd, or simply predictable for me to say that reaching Logan Pass has
been the high point of my cross-country trip in more ways than one?
Of course. But what the hell. There are just so many reasons to feel like the king of
the world when you're standing, well, on top of the world, chilled by your drying sweat
and waiting for your heart to stop drumming.
Lake McDonald Lodge is ten miles inside Glacier Park, a serene and bucolic ride from
the park entrance along the southeast shore of the lake with postcard views of snowy
peaks in the distance. It's a cheery resort campus, with a capacious central lodge and a
handful of satellite buildings, a cross between a luxury hotel and summer camp. I had
dinner sitting at the bar in the lodge restaurant, where a professor of Native Americ-
an studies at the University of Montana—I wrote his name down and lost it—told me
I shouldn't be fearful of stopping in Browning, the first prairie town beyond the park,
largely populated by Blackfeet Indians, even though I'd been warned about staying there
overnight by several bicyclists who said they'd been hassled or even threatened by local
