There is so much more to a name. Circle tour over Mt. Allen.

Original: 8/15/2023

Ah, let’s take a trip up Mt Allen near the Many Glacier Hotel. At 9400 feet, it is a monster. And from all the information I can find, it is the largest mountain by volume in the million acres that make up GNP.

Like most of the peaks in the Many Glacier Valley area, this one was named by George Bird Grinnell for an old Yale classmate who was in his company on a pre-park hunting trip in the 1890s.

However, this Yalie chum, William H Seward III, was modest and declined the naming offer. So, George B., instead of going with what the locals called it, decides to go with William’s wife’s maiden name: Allen.

Really? Come on. Georgie, you could have done so much better than that. Like Black Eagle Mountain – the Blackfeet name.

Now, for you history buffs, Seward might sound a little familiar. Yep, William’s granddad was the original William Seward. He was known for some of his achievements as Secretary of State under Lincoln (and then seldom remembered successor, Johnson).

But he probably stands out most for ‘Seward’s Folly.’ That’s right. The one, the only, the guy who bought Alaska from Russia on behalf of the good old USA at two cents an acre.

I’ve come across a lot of that in Glacier Park. It’s not that George B. Grinnell was intentionally rewriting Blackfeet heritage. But more to do with his guide, Appekunny, could have been better.

It would be best to remember that Appekunny was a white fur trader named James W. Schultz who married into the Blackfeet tribe. So you can only expect him to know some of the mountains and landmarks.

When George started to do a deep dive into valleys, he thought (with a degree of hubris) he was the first living man to explore them EVER. Without being born with several generations of Blackfeet heritage, Schultz didn’t know what he didn’t know.

Now, Schultz did try in the mid-1920s to reinstall some of the Blackfoot names on the mountains, lakes, and rivers in the Park.

Black Eagle was a famous member of the Piegan tribe from the 1870s and a more fitting name for this mountain than Allen. It’s better than your college buddy’s wife’s maiden name.

But it was not to be. Glacier Park was too firmly established, and the names had been on the map for too many years.

I expected this to be a long day, especially if I opted to do a circular route through the Cracker Lake valley instead of just a direct up and back from the summit.

And a long day indeed it was. Check out Strava if you don’t believe me:

You must climb about 700 feet in less than the first mile. The key is finding the correct avalanche chute to get you out of the forest.

And I was glad about that because I woke up something big sleeping in those trees. I never saw it but was close enough to hear and smell them.

Once you are out in the open (and in the right chute), it’s time to start looking for the correct goat trail that will traverse you around the cliffs to the two tiny lakes hidden in the cirque behind this great wall.

Now, there are two goat trails: the high one and the low one. I hadn’t done this climb for about 20 years and didn’t recall which was better. Only after committing, I found I could have chosen better.

Taking the high goat trail brought me to Schwab Falls (the outlet stream to the cirque), and I was too high. It is never fun to downclimb so early on a day when you will break 5000 of total gain.

The high trail was also washed out from spring runoff in the dozen-plus ravines and draws it crossed on the cliff faces. This led to awkward stretching with bad handholds to cross some sketchy gullies. Live and learn.

I follow up the falls (named after an early climbing partner of J Gordon Edwards, patron climbing saint of Glacier National Park). This brings you to a pair of wonderful alpine lakes in a secluded, intimate cirque: Falling Leaf and Snow Moon.

I should have crossed the outlet stream of the two lakes immediately coming into the valley. But I last came here a few years ago and thought it would be nice to check out the upper falls and cross the little land bridge between these two idyllic bodies of water.

There were a lot of animal signs in this last section of the dwarf forest, and I had to really fight my way through it. The trees were dense and loved to pick away at any exposed flesh. There hasn’t been a fire in at least the last century.

I didn’t mind chasing the morning shadows. I knew I would be in the alpine oven for the rest of the day once the full sun crested the valley walls.

It was a long, long climb up from the lakes. As I get closer to the ridge, I start seeing all of the peaks and glaciers of the Belly River area and beyond into Canada. I can even see the Iceberg Notch and Ipasha Glacier behind it.

Of course, the real goal is to top the ridge and then make it up the false summit of Allen directly ahead. The true summit is a little ways behind it. I can’t even see it from this vantage point.

This part of the climb was so remote and lonely. When the alpine brush faded, and the wind died, it was like walking on the moon.

Ok. So here we go. There is actually only ONE break that will get you through these cliffs. It is called ‘the Great Break.’ And if you miss it, things get nasty really fast.

Snow Moon and Falling Leaf are all but a memory now. I must decide whether I want to return from the summit this way. I’ll let the next set of cliffs help me decide.

While still looking for ‘the Great Break,’ I spy beyond to see the mighty north face of Mt Siyeh—a coveted 10,000-footer showing off her diorite sill. There are so many stories of climbing that rock.

Well, I have found the break. It has been a long time, but I don’t recall it being this steep. I’ll know once I get fifty feet up it, which is the point of no return; you must fully commit to the route.

I’m not finding any rock cairns from prior climbers, but these steep walls see a lot of rockfall. You should wear a helmet on this route, especially if climbing with others. These cliffs were a lot more crumbly than I would have preferred.

After a while, the angle of the ascent starts to flatten out. The rocks turn into more stable boulders. I reached the false summit with amazing views of the east side of Glacier Park out to the beginning of the Great Plains.

Snow Moon and Fallen Leaf lakes are reportedly named by an early naturalist range in the Park, George Rhule. They are the English translations of the Blackfeet terms for September and October.

Now, this is supposed to be because there was a light dusting of snow on them when Rhule visited the cirque for the first time in the fall. OK. I guess. It just doesn’t feel well thought out to me. This is the same guy who randomly pushed the name Going to the Sun to the main road in the Park because it sounded ‘good.’

After all of that work, the true summit is a gentle and straightforward stroll. It looks like no one will even need to repel this summit cap (unlike Heavy Runner)

You get genuinely incredible views of the Grinnell Glacier complex and the Garden Wall from the true summit. It’s hard to believe that dead center is the Angel Wing.

Well over a thousand feet below and a mile away, the ‘Wing’ looks like a much more challenging climb than it really was. But Allen has commanding views of everything around it. The mountain is just that big.

Ipasha Mtn and Glacier, along with Mt Merritt and Old Sun Glacier. And to the far left…. That’s Mt. Seward.

That’s right. George B. STILL named a mountain after his college friend. He did it on a different hunting trip when the guy wasn’t around. I guess modestly be damned.

If Georgie wanted something done, it got done. After all, he basically willed Glacier Park into existence.

Appekunny Mountain with the red bands of argillite. You can barely see the square cap of Chief Mt rising. And… what I call the Yellow Mtn. Complex to the far right. I plan to climb those ridges and valleys before I leave this summer.

The summit cairn seems a little small for a monster hill like this. But I don’t think you quite get the traffic up here as with peaks that are a little lower and a little more accessible.

In the distance is the long ridge of East Flattop Mtn. I remember a twelve-hour day when I crossed that thing TWICE trying to tag Napi Point.

Random summit pictures. I brought the selfie stick, so I have to use it.

There are very few places in the park where you can get all of these lakes (AND the Many Glacier Hotel) in one shot: Josephine, Swiftcurrent, Snow Moon, Fallen Leaf, and Lake Sherburne.

There is just something about Grinnell Lake. The color. The location. You think of Glacier Park, you think of this lake. As I always say, there are still a lot of Glaciers in Glacier National Park. But you have to go where they are.

Paying homage to the diorite sill on the face of Mt. Gould and the incredible arete known as the Garden Wall.

It is a fantastic panorama on an amazing day.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFk-C-kHrzA

The one and only time I hiked to Cracker Lake was my first summer in the Park in 1985. I have not been back there again in almost 40 years. It may be time.

So, I decided to try something new. I will descend from the summit into the Cracker Lake valley, cross the outlet, and take the trail out.

Instead of backtracking the four off-trail miles I did from the Many Glacier parking lot, I will do 8 miles out. But since 6.5 will be on a well-maintained trail, I should be able to make some good time with less effort. Yeah, right.

Instead of banking to the right, hitting the head of the lake, and jumping on the trail, I kept jockeying to the left, thinking it was faster. I was very, very, very wrong.

I kept having to downclimb through worse and worse cliffs, which I could not scout from below. This shoreline of what I thought was just green grasses had at least ten thicket-fill drainages I had to climb down into and back out of.

The vegetation is perfect bear country. Bonus: the trail had been closed for over a month because of bear activity (sow and cubs). It had just reopened days before my climb. Great.

I finally reached the outlet stream and had to find a way to cross without taking off my shoes. The day was getting long and very hot.

The trail is through the brush to my left. I had to climb 300 feet uphill through the densest alpine Krummholz forest I have ever seen, leaving a lot of DNA on those sharp needles.

The trail miles out were so miserable that I took no pictures. Two plus hours of sun-exposed, gritty, sticky, dusty, steep, feet-pounding, and the most barren, worthless miles you could ever hike in Glacier. It will be another 40 years before I return to Cracker Lake.

I rolled into the employee cafeteria at Many Glacier and licked my wounds. And quickly drank a couple of jugs of really crappy Diet Coke from a dispenser that hadn’t been cleaned in years. All the while adding copious amounts of Electric Raspberry Propel to the half-flat soda because the taste sucks, which made it really. cheap on eBay.

I have five days to heal behind a Red Tour Bus wheel and tell stories. And then back at it again next week.

GoatBoy out!