The clouds hung over the mountains like a warm blanket on a rainy afternoon. Not a threatening affair but one that gave a sense of security. Billy, Rob, and myself had embarked on a pilgrimage to Glacier national Park. What we were hunting wasn’t big game but instead the escaping flora and fauna of Autumn retiring high up in the rockies.
I look out at corpses of hay bales left for dead. Covered with ghostly sheets of October snow. When the sun comes out in a day or two it will pull back the vail to expose the bale’s golden hair.
As I search the passing by landscape I find a blending and converse worlds of old single wide trailers with smoke flowing from the stacks and on the other side of the U.S. Hwy two grand castles of log cabins of the newly transplanted wealth from the fleeing city dwellers of LA or Seattle.
In less than an hour us three will disappear into the tapestry of burning Reds and pumpkin Oranges that are Glacier National Park. The tourists are all gone. Left now are the true adventures of the open wild. Anyone of us who have been touched by wilderness’s tap of aliveness will not soon forget the charge of the wild that envelopes our slowly decaying soul of stress. If we are lucky, we will keep with us this awakening of nature’s compass that points to our true north. Stripped of our everyday worries of the mundane. We now have the adventure coursing through our veins. We have caught the spirit that will not soon leave us.
I watch as October snowflakes fill the sky over Mcdonald Lake. In the summer months the scene would be one of clattering tourists. But now in the late October theater, There is silence. I watch as a Bald Eagle surveys the water surface for fish.
Bald Bigfoot 