BEAR AFOOT IN THE PARK

GLACIER NATIONAL PARK, Mont. — Wild-eyed militiamen aside, I find the Montanans to be a kind and admirable people. They say what they mean, nod hello as they pass you on the trail, give good directions and generally cling to habits lately considered quaint in Southern California. But the next time you meet a Montanan, ask a question about bears.

It doesn’t matter what the question is. If your Montanans are like the ones I’ve been meeting these last few days, between hikes and scenic drives and lake floats and, yes, bear sightings, you probably will hear the word griz. As in grizzly bear.

I hear the sin of pride in this word.

With that casual syllable, the Montanan is telling you: I live with danger and spectacle. I drive without conventional speed limits, and expect to experience multiple seasons in a day’s weather. I commonly encounter animals larger than myself. In fact, I’m on a nickname basis with them. And every morning, I wake up to this.

This, of course, would be the jagged peaks, Technicolor lakes, trout-rich rivers, storied sky, implausible mountain passes and yawning miles of ranchland that are Montana’s landscape.

Now that I think about it, maybe we should be grateful that the Montanans say as little as they do. And maybe, the next time you’re hungry for marvels of the wild, you should look beyond those usual park suspects at Yosemite and Yellowstone to the northwestern corner of Montana.

Here sits Glacier National Park, abutting Canada, and about 25 miles north of Kalispell and Glacier Park International Airport. It has no Old Faithful and no Half Dome, which, along with its northerly location, may help explain why it drew 1.7 million visitors last year, compared to Yellowstone’s 3 million and Yosemite’s 4.1 million. But Glacier includes some of the most scenic mountain roads, nostalgia-rich railroad hotels and plentiful wildlife in the Lower 48 states. Though it fills with visitors in July and August, the place can feel largely empty on some days in June and September, and entirely empty and snow-covered the rest of the year.

The park has a Rocky Mountain skyline crowded with peaks of up to 10,466 feet (Mt. Cleveland), at least 48 glaciers (all slowly shrinking, some accessible by trail), about 600 lakes (fishing allowed) and about 1,500 square miles of woods thick with cedar, hemlock and pine. Its leading man-made attraction is Going to the Sun Road, a 50-mile engineering folly that connects Glacier’s western and eastern ends by climbing, diving, twisting and tunneling through the most ridiculous, road-unfriendly terrain in the middle, including the Continental Divide at Logan Pass.

Building the road took 12 years and cost three workers’ lives before completion in 1932, and even now, snow makes it impassable for nine months of the year. Why was it built? Solely to stimulate tourism. (So much for Montana’s image as a repository of uncontrived American frontier culture.) To see it, you can drive yourself or (easier on the nerves) go as a passenger in one of the convertible red “jammer” (as in gear-jamming) cars that cover the route every day in the summer.

Though Glacier got nearly twice its usual snowfall last winter (ensuring plenty of white peaks and vigorous waterfalls this summer), rangers expect Going to the Sun Road to open any day now. Prospective visitors should call the park (see Guidebook, L13) for an update on road conditions.

When I arrived May 28, the road’s highest pass, Logan, was still blocked by deep snowpack. But I still covered 39 of 50 miles, and found that just about every one is spectacular. And there’s a sort of consolation prize for those who arrive before the entire road is open: Near the road’s scenic and high-altitude Loop turnout, rangers open a mile or more of the road to pedestrians and bicycles only.

Because it’s 50 miles to cross the park on Going to the Sun Road, and 56 miles to trace the park’s fringe on U.S. Highway 2 between the park’s east and west entrances, having a car is a requirement for most Glacier visitors. But there is ample opportunity to leave it behind, if only for a day. Shuttle buses are available in summer, and the jammer tours make it far easier to enjoy the views. (The 1930s vintage jammers, which hold up to 15 passengers, also offer shuttle service among major park landmarks. Prices range from $2 to $61 per person, depending on the length of the trip.)

If you time your travels carefully, you can take a morning Amtrak train from West Glacier to East Glacier, a panoramic route that wends past the tiny hamlet of Essex, then return in the late afternoon. Fares run $17 to $24 for an adult round trip. Or, for $8, you can get a 55-minute cruise on Lake McDonald aboard a 1928 tourist boat. Summer boat and canoe rentals and tours also are available on St. Mary, Two Medicine and Swiftcurrent-- lakes.

All those options, of course, are only halfway measures. Possibly the best reason for going to a park is to be extracted from motorized vehicles altogether. Glacier has about 1,100 campsites ($10 to $12 nightly) and 730 miles of hiking trails, including the wheelchair-friendly, half-mile Trail of the Cedars boardwalk loop near Lake McDonald. Of those 730 miles, I have covered approximately five: I had a great time on the two-mile Avalanche Lake trail, which is probably the most admired path on the west side of the park, and on the one-mile St. Mary Falls trail.

On any hike, you stand a good chance of glimpsing the park’s enormous wildlife population. Glacier has elk, deer, moose, bighorn sheep, wolves, coyotes, mosquitoes (especially at dusk around the lakes) and an elite corps of white-coated mountain goats, some of which I saw on a high black rock peak above Avalanche Lake, heedlessly hopping from one narrow ledge to the next.

Most famous, though, Glacier has bears--so many that the park’s general stores peddle $1.99 strings of bear bells that hikers are supposed to wear to ward off surprises (even though many park veterans say their sound isn’t loud enough to do any good). The park service estimates a population of at least 200 grizzlies and 500 black bears, and the park visitor center keeps an annual tally of sightings reported to rangers. In the first five months of this year: 56 griz (sorry; couldn’t resist); 35 black; 11 of unknown type.

Most visitors leave without seeing a bear, but it certainly takes no great expertise to encounter one. Within my first three hours in the park, I found a mid-sized bear foraging by a roadside near Two Medicine Lake, not 25 feet from my car; a panoramic evergreen valley sprawled behind it. I stayed inside, with the engine running, and shot photos from the driver’s seat.

Well, I thought to myself, I’ve peaked too soon. It’ll all be downhill from here. Then the next day, skirting Lake Sherburne on the road from Many Glacier Lodge, I caught sight of a black mother bear leading two brown cubs across the road behind me. Idling on the shoulder, I watched the threesome snuffle amid the trees for a few minutes, then disappear deeper into the forest.

Over the next two days, I mentioned these encounters to a local picnicker from the town of East Glacier, a waitress at Serrano’s restaurant and two park rangers. All four responded with the same question:

“Griz?”

But black bears and grizzlies can be any color, and I hadn’t studied up on the larger size and humped backs that distinguish the more ferocious grizzly from a mere black bear, so I didn’t know. That’s when the Montanans looked at me a bit strangely, as if I’d just been to see a James Bond movie but couldn’t say whether it starred Pierce Brosnan or Sean Connery.

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Unlike any other U.S. park, Glacier also has a foreign sibling next door, Canada’s 203-square-mile Waterton Lakes National Park, which includes more glacier-carved mountains, much stronger winds and the spectacularly and impractically sited Prince of Wales Hotel. The latter stands seven stories tall on a gust-buffeted hilltop, occasionally joined by grazing bighorn sheep, giving a sort of alpine mirage effect. On summer afternoons, the scene grows even stranger, when high tea is served near the picture windows of the hotel lobby.

Glacier and Waterton have been closely linked since 1932, when U.S. and Canadian officials declared that the two territories together would be considered Waterton/Glacier International Peace Park, with cooperative management programs and easy border crossings for tourists.

I made the easy 80-mile drive up Chief Mountain International Highway from East Glacier one afternoon, stopping near Babb, Mont., for a hearty chili-cheeseburger at the Two Sisters Cafe. In the heart of Waterton Lakes, on a lakeside plain beneath the stately Prince of Wales, lies the pleasant, tourist-ready town of Waterton. It would have been an ideal idyll for a couple of hours if it hadn’t been raining intermittently. So I did a quick drive-by.

Rams and ewes roamed the town and country freely, apparently aware of their protected status. An old Mohawk gas station rented out bicycles built for one and two. And among homes and businesses, handsome tidiness was endemic. Even the roadside motels and the Waterton liquor store had pleasantly landscaped frontyards. Just don’t buy your gasoline on the Canadian side. It works out to about $2.50 per gallon.

The Prince of Wales may stand out, but Glacier has its own quirky collection of old lodges, the most notable of them put up in the days before World War II.

Though they still open every summer, several of these hotels are basically crumbling artifacts. Studies by the Park Service and Glacier’s concessionaire, Viad Corp. of Phoenix, estimate it would cost at least $80 million to renovate the five lodgings within Glacier, and another $25 million to add Waterton’s Prince of Wales and the Glacier Park Lodge at Glacier’s eastern edge.

Who will do the fixing? The park service pleads poverty, and since the concessionaire’s contract expires in seven years, Viad has little incentive to invest in sweeping renovations either. Viad and the park people are looking for compromises. Meanwhile, the lodges, which boast some of the smallest bathrooms you’ll ever pay $100 a night to use, get a little more rustic every year.

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Still, these are some of the most memorable lobbies in the national park system, with mounted buffalo heads, stone fireplaces of Citizen Kane proportions and 40-foot bark-skinned interior log columns.

I found the Lake McDonald Lodge, near Apgar village at the west end of the park, the most comfortable, with just 30 rooms in its main building and an intimate ambience that reflects the property’s genesis as a hunting lodge in 1913. The main building does lack guest elevators, and park officials have been wringing their hands lately about the facility’s aged sewage system. But the first problem is no surprise in a historic building, and the second is unnoticeable to guests so far. I spent two nights at Lake McDonald, and it would be my first choice among lodgings within the park.

I spent another two nights at the Glacier Park Lodge, another 1913 building, a short stroll from a friendly little Amtrak station and the tiny, pleasant Blackfeet reservation town of East Glacier. The Glacier Park Lodge features a lobby full of tall tree trunks, a back patio well suited to evening cocktails, a nine-hole golf course and other large-hotel amenities such as evening entertainment and a swimming pool.

But upkeep efforts have left the place feeling a bit patched together. A lot of the recent plaster and drywall work looks like it belongs in another building, and whenever the old wooden floors give way to carpet or tile work, the work looks like it was done on the cheap. Also, though there are elevators, only hotel staffers are allowed to use them. That means that many or most guests, not being inclined to hunt around for a bellman, will end up dragging their luggage up as many as three flights of stairs.

The Many Glacier Hotel, also at the park’s east end, on the banks of Swiftcurrent Lake, has the same grand scale as the Lake McDonald Lodge and stands in a particularly prime area for hiking and wildlife sightings. But upkeep efforts there have lagged even further behind, and its condition is widely lamented. Though the 1914 building still opens every summer and rents its 211 rooms for $91 nightly and up, park superintendent David Mihalic acknowledges that “it’s an old hotel, and it’s starting to get dilapidated and frayed around the edges.” (The hotel, which opened for the season on June 6, was still closed during my visit.)

There are plenty of cheaper motel alternatives inside the park and just outside park boundaries, but the lodges do stand on unmatchable sites, and you don’t often get a chance to sleep in a 70- or 80-year-old overgrown log cabin.

If you don’t mind a little more driving, there’s also another prime possibility: the Izaak Walton Inn in Essex, an immaculately maintained 1939 railroad hotel about 25 miles from both park entrances. The hotel was built as a hostelry for railroad workers, but it now operates year-round as a retreat for travelers drawn by the novelty of sleeping in a vintage room or in one of the hotel’s four elaborately outfitted old railroad cabooses. If I had my trip to plan over again, I’d stay there at least one night.

Wherever you sleep in and around Glacier, you can count on changeable weather. The changes are most extreme at the eastern end of the park, but even in its western valleys, the swings can be dramatic. On my last night in the park, after a glorious four-mile hike to and from Avalanche Lake under mostly sunny skies, I settled down with my laptop in the Lake McDonald Lodge to make some notes. As I typed, the sky clogged with clouds, then let loose a startling bolt of lightning, accompanied by a wicked crack of thunder. Within seconds, it was raining like hell on this, the first full day of the lodge’s summer tourist season; the lodge’s electric lights were flickering, and whitecaps were dancing across the formerly mirror-calm lake.

As the booms, flashes and roaring downpour continued, we tourists wandered around wondering if the hotel had a generator, as did the hotel’s seasonal workers, who had arrived a few weeks before from various states with duller weather. But most of the park veterans, I noticed, were quietly going about their business, some with faint grins on their faces, as if they were pleased to be reminded that nature can soak us, kill us, whatever, whenever it chooses. This was meteorological griz, and they loved it.

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GUIDEBOOK

Park Possibilities

Getting there: Glacier National Park’s west entrance is about 25 miles north of Glacier Park International Airport, just outside Kalispell, Mont. Delta Airlines offers connecting service to Glacier airport from LAX, Burbank or Orange County; round-trip fares begin at $333. Alaska Airlines also offers daily connecting service to Glacier from LAX or Ontario or Orange County; fares begin at $336.

Glacier National Park’s entrance fee is $10 per vehicle for a seven-day pass.

Where to stay: Lake McDonald Lodge (c/o Glacier Park Lodge, P.O. Box 147, East Glacier, MT 59434; telephone [602] 207-6000 or [406] 888-5431). Open now to Sept. 23. Rates for two people: $119, main lodge rooms; $119, large cottage rooms; $81, motor inn; $70, small cottage rooms.

Izaak Walton Hotel (P.O. Box 653, Essex, MT 59916; tel. [406] 888-5700). Open year-round. Rates: $95-$159, three-night minimum for cabooses.

Prince of Wales Hotel (General Delivery, Waterton, Alberta, Canada T0K2M0; tel. [602] 207-6000 or [403] 859-2231). Open now to Sept. 24. Rates: $135-$175, more for suites.

For more information: Glacier National Park, P.O. Box 128, West Glacier, MT 59936; tel. (406) 888-7800