Browning, Montana

The wind blew especially hard during the night and the rain started sometime around daybreak. The ‘plops’ on the tent kept Matthias and I inside for a little longer than we otherwise would have stayed. Eventually, the rain stopped and we exited the tent to heat up some oatmeal and pack up before walking back to the car. A few raindrops fells on us as we walked along Glenn Lake, but the weather improved the rest of the way. The sky to the south was hazy due to, we guessed, the fire around St. Mary. (Notice the haze in the attached picture!) We wisely took a longer break on the way back and conserved a little more energy for the steep push back up the hill to the car. We arrived sweaty and tired about four and a quarter hours after leaving our campsite. It was our first successful overnighter in Glacier; we would do one more before leaving the area.

Our plan was to head back to St. Mary for a shower at KOA. Then we would figure out the night’s sleeping arrangements. From a distance on our approach to the town, we could clearly see that the fire had spread during the night. Less than a mile from St. Mary, a man was standing guard at a road block; the town of St. Mary was being evacuated. The hard wind during the night had increased the affected area to 3,000 acres! St. Mary, the guard explained, was a ghost town and was currently being fire-proofed, (whatever that means exactly, I don’t know.)

We followed the detour along Highway 464 deeper into the Indian reservation to Browning, Montana. For about 10-miles along the way, we passed through the thickest smoke from the fire; the yellowish haze made the landscape surreal. We had identified a hotel in Browning in our guidebook just in case, but once we arrived in town, we decided to push on further to East Glacier, which would put us in a better location for the backcountry hike we had planned the next day. East Glacier existed, obviously, to provide services, meals and accommodations to the Glacier NP tourists. Due to the St. Mary refugees as well as other displaced tourists whose plans had been affected by the St. Mary fire, there were no rooms available anywhere in the town (or at least not at the 8 or 9 hotels we checked with.) We popped into a local laundromat/internet café to check our email and called ahead to the hotel back in Browning. We reserved their last room.

The rest of the day was administrative. We ate dinner at Taco Johns, cleaned our clothes at the laundromat across the street and bought groceries at IGA a couple of doors down. Highlights included the clean hotel room with the firm beds as well as the nice girl at Taco John's that gave us free drinks. Lowlights included the drunks, beggars, stray dogs, and other scaries around Browning. Nevertheless, it was a nice evening. Back the hotel, Matthias and I watched the Angels take on the Red Sox at Fenway. He read, I blogged.

Matthias and I were very lucky to have driven the Going-to-the-Sun Road just the day before it closed. With St. Mary evacuated and closed, there is no longer a way to access that road from the east.