An old friend smiles. The Many Glacier Valley is awake.

I have waxed and waned relentlessly about the mandatory onboarding week I have to complete every season for Red Bus Driving. It’s policy. It’s procedure. It’s 99% the same as the prior summer. But we all know the corporate world: liability. You have to tell people what they don’t want to hear so they can’t say they didn’t know. Ugh.  

But those five days of misery give me two days plus of childhood bliss. Spending those hours reconnecting with my first and only true love. Those mountains in Montana that captured me at age nineteen. And will still have a hold on me till my dying day.

Mid-May in Glacier Park is a glorious time. At least on the east side. It’s lonely. It’s quiet. A sleeping titan. A giant from eons past that must reluctantly awaken for three brief months and tolerate the hornet’s nest known as mankind.

There is nothing open. Not lodging. No restaurants. The NPS still has all of the trash cans and dumpsters locked with a “pack it in pack it out” sign prominently displayed.

Little to no hiking or climbing, as the snow is a month out from cooperating. The few people you see are just day trippers or…. onboarding employees. Most of them are foreign students on a J1 work visa. Finding out for the first time their summer job is in …. the middle of nowhere.

But if you have a place to lay your head and you can stretch out (so not your car), and decide to drive into the Many Glacier Valley, it can be kinda magical. Even if you’ve seen these same views for over four decades.

The Great Northern RR at its grandest. The opulence of the Gilded Age. The millionaires of the East Coast elite and Midwest industrialists would come here for weeks at a time. A remote place that is expensive to get to signals money, status, and membership in the upper tiers of the civilized society of the day.

When I look down at this 100-year-old view, captured so many hundreds of thousands of times in photos, I smile. Why? Because only a few have seen the grand portico empty of all people and vehicles. As if a ghost town. Abandoned. Yet soon, EVERY guest must enter through its doors.

Louey Hill had it right. Location. Location. Location. Damn the high winds. Screw the engineers. Money talks …. and we know what walks.

Only a man with an eye for symmetry would build a hotel that had amazing views into TWO separate spectacular glaciated valleys. Each full of ridges, aretes, hanging valleys, and just … yeah.

With a 5k valley floor and up to 10k peaks in your face, you sometimes need to just turn around and remember where you came. Less than a dozen miles behind you lies the northern Great Plains. Yep. A couple thousand miles through the heart of America.

Montana is called Big Sky for a reason. 200 miles by 800 miles. Fourth-largest state. A million people. One area code. Many people are just here to play for a little bit. But for those who are here to live, it is a home like none other.

GoatBoy out. A little pensive. Smidge anxious. So many questions. So few answers. This is going to be a different kind of season. But aren’t they all?