Day 33: A walk in the woods

5:30 am departure from the hostel in a rented Subaru Forrester (that's the standard rental car in these parts) with Les the photographer from Virginia. Stopped at East Glacier Lodge to pick up a young Mennonite couple on their honeymoon. Les had met them by chance a couple of days earlier, when they were inquiring about ways to get into the park without driving. Les offered to drive them: after all, his name is Mr. Chauffeur! (It really is, pronounced that way, but spelled differently.) That evening he and I had met in the hostel lounge and he had invited me to join the group. Well, we all set off at 5:30 am to catch the early morning light, and we ended up staying out all day, returning the rental car at 8:30 pm!

This is what the Rocky Mountains look like at 5:50 am!

It was a long drive just to get into the park and to the trailhead where the road ends at Many Glacier. Here the honeymooners went off for a hike on their own along the Swiftcurrent trail while Les and I tackled the Grinnell Glacier Trail. We didn't make it all the way to the end because the top part of the trail was still closed due to snow, but we did reach a viewpoint up around 6500 feet in elevation with an amazing view of Grinnell Lake and the snowfields on the mountains around it. And bighorn sheep! There were quite a few people on the trail, which was good, because having seen grizzly bears from the safety of the tour bus the day before, I was not anxious to meet one in person. I was equipped with Bear Spray - a large canister of pepper spray that shoots up to 10 metres away - but hoping not to have to use it! As it turned out, we saw deer, bighorn sheep, and all sorts of rodents ranging from squirrels and chipmunks to prairie dogs and marmots, but no bears. On the way down we met a ranger who told us six grizzly bears had been sighted in the area just the previous day - and I'm glad we didn't know that until we were on our way down and out of the bush!

Beargrass

Les on the trail

Me on the trail

Chipmunk on the trail

This is where we turn around!

Deer crossing a stream near the trailhead

We took our time on the trail, so it was 5 pm by the time we met up with our Mennonite friends back at the car park. It was interesting talking to them on the way back: I had been seeing a lot of Amish and Mennonite people (hard to tell the difference - even they said that!) on my trip, especially on the trains, but had no occasion to strike up a conversation. Now I finally had an opportunity to ask all the questions I wanted! On the whole, they seemed to be perfectly ordinary people, aside from the fact that they have no electricity or cars in their community. And their 19th century style of dress: she hiked in a beautiful long dress with a Laura Ashley-style fine floral print, worn over running shoes and with little white bonnet; he wore a green shirt and pants with a button-up flap and suspenders in place of the usual zipper. They had cut the zippers out of their North Face fleece-lined jackets and replaced them with press-studs. Which are actually a fairly new invention... you'd have thought they'd go all the way and use buttons made of horn! 

Anyway, I asked the couple about their daily lives, and he said he worked in farming and construction, while she worked in a bakery run by the Mennonite community in Missouri (their community moved there from Pennsylvania because it was too crowded) which also serves people from outside the community. They speak Pennsylvania Dutch, a dialect of German, at home but learn English at school. The schools in their community go up to grade eight. They use motorised farm machinery, but have it pulled by horses. They have some customs we might all learn from: when two people get married and set up house together, the whole community gets together to help them build a house. And they have telephones, but they don't keep them in the houses where they live; they have a separate building where you go to make a telephone call. An excellent idea!

Sorry, no pictures: the Mennonites and Amish don't use cameras, and they don't pose for pictures, and I respect that. Though Les did sneak a few candid shots and they pretended not to notice! I hope he will send me some, but I won't be posting them here; I don't think they would like that at all!