Thither & Yon

I understand some people plan their vacations years in advance. I admire that kind of organizational power, but I do not have it. I thought I was doing pretty great when I started planning my late-summer road trip in May. Three months notice! What couldn’t I accomplish in three months?

Any kinds of plans for Glacier National Park, that’s what.

In 2021, the advanced reservation system for backcountry camp sites went live on March 10. On the first day, they received 17,000 applications. Seventeen THOUSAND. In day one.

I know this because by the time I got to their reservations page on May 15, they had posted that fact in big, red, capital letters at the top of the page, along with a note telling me I could still try for a reservation, but that I would have to pay for the privilege and that I should brace for disappointment.

I did both of those things, and submitted an application for five different backpacking itineraries. I also checked the boxes on the form indicating my flexibility on dates, routes, and order of nights.

Six weeks passed before I received my thin email of rejection. I had been braced, but I was still disappointed.

No matter! Half the backcountry sites are reserved for walk-in hikers. I would simply walk in with my list of plans and sort it out once we arrived.

“You’ll want more than five backup plans,” my friend Emily, Princess of Glacier, told me when I appealed to her for advice. “And be in line by 5.”

“5 What? 5 A.M.? But I though the office doesn’t even open until 8?!”

“Right,” Emily agreed. I groaned.

We arrived at the backcountry office at 6:15. We’d gotten so lucky with campsites in so many other parks. I knew Glacier would be more competitive, but we’d turned up in the Tetons at 12:30pm and gotten a great itinerary. I really believed it wouldn’t be as bad as the website and the princess had claimed.

People in sleeping bags lined the sidewalk outside the backcountry office.

People had camped overnight in front of the backcountry office in order to be first in line.

I looked at my five-option plan and sighed.

“Do we need more plans?” Dustin asked.

“We need more plans.”

While we whiled away our nearly two hours as the ninth group in line, we poured over maps and the open campsite chart. We were completely incapable of making any new plans. Any site we had dreamed of reserving was already gone, taken by people in sleeping bags who had walked in days ago with many-night itineraries. Any site still open required either a death-march to reach or existed in the least interesting corners of the park.

A helpful ranger came by while we waited and pointed out a suggestion we had missed. It required two nights of staying in less desirable sites, but those two stops would allow us to reserve the sites we really wanted on nights four and five. The plan was brilliant.

Our turn in line arrived at 8:20. We marched into the office to be told that the less desirable gateway sites were gone. So was everything else.

“Is there any other way to get us to Lake Ellen Wilson in the 13th??” I begged. That was four days’ notice. How could there be nothing?

“Lake Ellen Wilson isn’t available until the fifteenth,” he said. Someone in line ahead of us had snagged the one campsite I’d really had my heart set on. It didn’t matter that the gateway sites were gone, because so was the jewel.

We spent another fifteen minutes looking for something – anything – we could realistically hike to that was on a trail worth seeing. The ranger made some half-hearted suggestions, but we could tell even he wasn’t impressed with the remaining options.

We walked out of the office three hours after arriving with a same-night reservation for the campsite at Poia Lake. Poia had been the first stop on one of our preferred two-night itineraries leading through Redgap Pass, but with all second-stop options gone, we could only hike out to the lake then back to the car, totally missing the part of the hike we really wanted to see.

At least we had someplace to sleep that night. We had no idea where we would sleep on the following four nights.

Our seven-mile trek out to Poia Lake was lovely in a very generic way. We could have been home in the Black Hills. We saw bunnies and squirrells and a couple very stupid grouse. The lake was a lake.

The Poia Lake backcountry campground consists of four campsites. We had reserved the last available site but wound up having the whole campground to ourselves. All three other sites remained empty.

“This was someone else’s less-desirable site,” Dustin pointed out. “They just wanted to reserve Elizabeth Lake a day early.”

This realization did not make my pouch-dinner taste any better, nor did the fact that I’d have happily been one of these site-wasters myself if it had worked out for my own agenda.

We slumped seven miles out of the backcountry the next morning, having experienced nothing of what makes Glacier such a magnificent park, and slunk back to the backcountry office.

“What are the odds that someone canceled a stay at Lake Ellen Wilson since you saw us yesterday?” I asked the same ranger who’d tried to help us the day before.

“Hard zero,” he replied. We rolled our way through plans C-M again anyway, and were once again slapped down at every turn. We settled for another lame site, choosing it for the sole virtue of having a short (3-mile) hike-in. We would have to come back again tomorrow and try to secure sites for the rest of our stay.

Back in the car we ate sad peanut butter sandwiches and stared glumly at the list of hikes we wanted to do.

“It’s going to be tough to hike ten miles to Grinnell Glacier here, drive thirty miles, then do another three-mile hike to sleep,” I said, resenting the seven miles I’d already hiked today.

We considered other hikes nearer the campsite. We considered other campsites nearer the hike. No combination worked in a satisfying way.

“This is really stupid,” I concluded. “I want to go home.”

I genuinely meant it. I was tired, and this park just wasn’t working. 36 days into our 40-day trip, I melted down.

The problem was, we couldn’t go home because we had a reservation at Sperry Chalet on the last night of our trip. Not only are those reservations really hard to come by (Dustin haunted the reservation calendar for a month and finally snagged someone’s cancelation), but we’d pre-paid. Non-refundably. A really large amount. It was to be the crown-jewel treat of our trip. Without being able to sleep at Lake Ellen Wilson on Tuesday, our Wednesday hike to Sperry would be grueling.

(Life lessons learned the hard way: don’t schedule your coolest, most expensive, least-refundable event on the last day of a long trip.)

“Let’s go see if the hotel has any openings,” Dustin said. “No hike-in necessary. We can relax this afternoon, do Grinnell Glacier tomorrow and not worry about getting to the backcountry office early or having to save energy to hike to a campsite late. Might be worth the absurd price?”

The moment we found a room at Swiftcurrent Motor Inn, everything about our visit got better. Our menu did not – we still ate our pouch food on a picnic table – but we got to eat it exactly when we wanted and not at the end of a pointless hike. We had a real sink to wash our dishes. Best of all, we had a leisurely morning and got onto a trail we both really wanted to hike (albeit at the inevitable “we-slept-in-a-real-bed” hour of 10am).

The hotels in Glacier do not come cheap. We paid nearly $200 for exactly what you imagine a motel room to be. But the price of not buying the room was quickly becoming the destruction of this leg of the vacation. I nearly let my expectation of getting to do amazing multi-day backcountry trails control the shape of our visit, even after it became impossible.

We will try the Glacier backcountry again another year – a year in which I have six reminders set to submit my itineraries the very instant the application goes live – and in the meanwhile, I will try to take this lesson to heart: do not miss the trees for want of the whole forest.

And now, please enjoy some photos of how we spent the rest of this afternoon.