A slap on one cheek and a kiss on the other. Glacier may be fickle, but she is fair.

After spending the night with my new roommate at the barracks in the campground, it was time to get serious. About hiking, that is. One of these days I should start working on my commentary. Or just make it up as I go.

As in the past, I threw all my gear in the back of the car so I could just prep at the trailhead. This does two things. One: it keeps all my sticky and stinky clothes out of a small shared cabin. Two: I make a lot of noise when I am suiting up, and generally my roommate will still be sleeping. Pulling out and bagging food, stuffing the backpack for the day, lacing up the boots and kicking in the toes, and tons of just general banging around. I guess just call it a common courtesy that was ingrained in me as a child. Thank you, Mom and Dad.

As I finally get to drive down the Many Glacier Valley for the first time in what seems like forever, I was kind of thinking it would be like that old Journey song from middle school, ‘Open Arms.’

A classic 80’s love song about lovers separated and reunited. But as you can see, it was anything but. Mt Gould was buried in a tempest of clouds. Grinnell Point was almost invisible. Mt Wilbur was nowhere to be seen.

It felt like a tornado firestorm. I was on my own personal ‘Highway to Hell.’

I had to drive the extra mile to Swiftcurrent. I have never in my life seen the Iceberg Trailhead parking lot empty. Or even more so the ENTIRE front parking lot was devoid of every car but my own. True, it was still in the six o’clock hour in the AM, and it was definitely a hunker-down morning. But there are always some hard cores that just won’t give up. Not today. With the sheets of rain hitting the pavement so hard the raindrops explode and are instantly whipped into seafoam cotton candy-like mist.

Now there were plenty of cars next to the Swiftcurrent cabins. Where those poor tourists have to walk thru this maelstrom to a common bath and shower house. BUT, all of the cars at the motel were employees being quarantined for covid from down the street. Kind of funny how they are housed better than the paying folks.

The campers in the Many Glacier campground looked like a cross between a Portland homeless camp after a typhoon, and a mash pit re-enactment like a Summer Love tribute concert. This morning is also the reason their children will never camp in a National Park again. Of course, if the parents knew they were staying across the parking lot of a temporary shelter for plague victims, the future therapy bills would be much higher.

I decided it would be better to spend my time in the hotel lobby of Many Glacier. It was well before the ungodly early hour of 8 am and was amazingly empty. Maybe two or three people scattered here or there. I log into the employee Wi-Fi and was quite surprised at the speed.

Looking through the endless walls of picture glass single-pane windows from the early 1900s, I could see all of my old friends out there in the prime mortal mist of the raging storm. Or at least the half of them that were not obscured by clouds. The rain was truly hammering the aged timbers of this old lodge. I can only imagine what kind of sounds they make with the heavy snows of winter and even higher winds.

I pace around the lobby, enjoying rare solitude in such a very public place. Watching the onslaught of the elements outside creates a savage kind of beauty. That’s when I saw the first leg of a rainbow starts. There must have been a hole in the storm clouds behind the hotel. After all, there is always sun on top of the clouds, regardless of how thick and dark they appear from below.

I started watching it grow. I looked around the lobby. No one else was looking at the windows, just down at their phones. The second leg appeared. The sun was growing a little brighter now. A shimmer on the whitecaps of Swiftcurrent Lake was forming. The arc was beginning to fill in. Such an angry yet beautiful contrast was growing from the swirling chaos.

And suddenly there it was. A fully formed rainbow going from the Grinnell Valley over to the Swiftcurrent Valley. My two favorite places in the park, are connected with a cascade of light forged from the power of a late spring storm. With the shadow of the massive of hotel backlit on the water, I walked out onto the treacherous rain-slick balcony to get a quick picture.

I wanted to share it with someone. It was like looking into another space and time.

There was no crowd rushing to the windows. I looked around. What strangers were approachable? I look back. No. NO. It was fading faster than the Wicked Witch of the West after a bucket of water. And then it was gone. Total elapsed time two minutes. Maybe three.

Everybody was still looking down at their phones. It was my rainbow. So personal so private and such a beautiful setting. So worth every drop of rain that would fall on me today, on the trail and otherwise.

I’ve said this before in a prior post, Glacier has a lot to give, and she gives it freely. As long as you’re willing to look, listen, and taste all that is offered. But she can also take. And on a day like this, the take was pretty big. And even in all that chaos, all of that wind-whipped misery, you still get a little wink. The brief portal to another world. That kiss on the cheek takes away the sting.

So this is an indoor day where you keep your boots dry. Listen to all the tourists complain about what a crappy afternoon it’s going to be and when there is nothing to do. Then smile softly to yourself and think of your rainbow. Let go of the hurry and worry, the hustle and the bustle. All of the things that make the supposed real world real just don’t apply when you are HERE. In this place. At this moment.

I had some pretty big ambitions for this weekend between Jammer training. Bang out maybe 20 trail miles in a Swiftcurrent environment. Maybe take on a ten-miler out of Rising Sun. The Going to the Sun Road is now open up to the Jackson Glacier Overlook. Why not a quick trip down to Deadwood Falls?

Some days the best choice is a cup of coffee, and putting your feet up on an ottoman in a historic lodge built in 1915. Let the end of the Gilded Age just settle over you. Just soak in the history. The atmosphere. The wet tourist milling around you, shaking like old Labrador retrievers that just fetched their favorite tennis ball out of a lake. No artist could ask for a better canvas upon which to capture people in words and narrative.

Tomorrow, I hike. Today I paint.