Thither & Yon

The Conundrum: You want to collect Sperry Glacier, but it’s an 11+ mile hike to get there with more than 5,000 feet of elevation gain, and then you have to hike another 4.5 miles to sleep. (By way of comparison, hiking from the bottom to the top of the Grand Canyon was an 11-mile, 4,500-foot effort.)

Solution A: Sneak up on the glacier from the back side with a three-day hike through Gunsight Pass where each day covers about 7 miles. [You try this but your efforts to obtain a permit are thoroughly thwarted by guys in sleeping bags.]

Solution B: Just hike to Sperry Chalet seven miles up, giving up your glacier dreams. [Unacceptable.]

Solution C: Weep, give up completely, and go home because a 16-mile hike with that kind of elevation change on the last day of your 40-day hiking vacation when you’ve already got 220 miles and 40,000 feet of elevation gain under your belt is just too, too much. [Can’t do it – your chalet reservation is non-refundable and basically your entire share of a month’s mortgage payment.]

Solution D: No to all those other options. You need to collect that glacier, so you’re gonna suck it up, get up fricking early, and eat that mountain for breakfast. (Also several granola bars.)

Staying at Apgar Campground the night before allowed us quick access to the trailhead the morning of the final hike of our Epic Summer Road Trip Adventure. The morning was quiet, the parking still empty, and plenty of helpful signage awaited us at the trailhead:

Much of our trail would take us through a part of the park badly burned by wildfires in 2017. Much of our trail would also be haunted by Habituated Mountain Goats, which we were instructed to by NO means feed, pet, try to ride, or otherwise encourage.

You can’t fool us, Habituated Goats. Our salts are locked down and our goat-hazing hollers are well practiced.

Onward.

The morning was cool, for the middle of August, with a heavy smoke haze and a few loose clouds in the air. The downside of the smoke was obvious, but the upside was the ability to go without my hat for much of the morning’s hike. I really love my hiking hat, but the views are unquestionably better without a visor.

I was incredibly proud of my hiking effort. We made the hike from the trailhead to the Chalet in 3 hours and 46 minutes – an average of only 32 minutes per mile which is amazing for me (shut up, all you real athletes) considering the 3,000 feet of elevation gained on this portion of the hike. It was made easier by the fact that the gain was crazy-consistent over the seven miles, and also by all the other hiking we’d been doing for the last month. It turns out exercising really does improve performance!

Along the way, we observed so many beautiful and fascinating things, including this Imposter Huckleberry:

The sign at the base of the trail had not been wrong about the goats. This goat trotted down the trail, and when he spotted us, he didn’t even bat his long, long goat eyelashes. We stepped off the trail (which was incorrect hiker etiquette – we were going uphill so we had the right-of-way) and he trotted right past us without even a “thanks.” Goats and hikers wearing backward baseball caps. I tell you.

We saw exactly two other hikers on the entire trail, and not until we had the chalet well within our sites. The pair was working their way down after having spent a night there.

“Nice place?” Dustin quizzed them.

“Amazing!” the woman gushed. “Once in a lifetime!”

“Food okay?”

“Oh, you won’t even believe it!” she said.

“No toilets,” the man added helpfully. It’s good we already knew this. Might have been a harsh truth to pick up at this late hour. Also, I hope that’s not the main memory he was taking home with him.

We arrived on the doorstep of the dining hall building at 10:28am. I patted myself on the back, thoroughly pleased with my effort and its results. Yes, the glacier was still four miles away and up a really, really steep hill, but I had nearly an entire day remaining to deal with it.

We poked our heads into the open door. A woman sat behind a desk to one side, while other members of the staff bustled around in the kitchen. No other guests were to be seen.

“Can I help you?” she asked pleasantly.

“We’re here to check in – ” Dustin started.

“REALLY really early,” I added, helpfully.

“It’s okay if you’re not ready for us, we just wanted to stop in and see what we should do.”

“Welcome!” the woman said. “Would you like a glass of lemonade?”

At that moment, I wanted a glass of lemonade more than I’d ever wanted anything in my life.

“Your room isn’t quite ready yet, but you’re welcome to wait here, or go out and explore a bit. It’ll probably be about an hour.”

We assured her that of course it was no problem. We didn’t need a room yet anyway – we just needed someplace to park and eat our celebratory peanut butter sandwiches.

We showed ourselves out the dining hall’s back doors and parked on the cliff that (presumably) overlooked the valley and the trail we’d just come up. The smoke was a little too thick to be sure, but the idea of the view still felt wonderful.

Lunch complete, we decided to have a little wander. Starting with the walk-up food menu seemed like a good choice, even though they weren’t quite open yet. What kind of food can you order from a food stand seven miles away from the nearest running water??

“Pie!” I exclaimed. “What flavor will you have today?” I asked an employee who was walking by the window just at that moment. A little backcountry pie seemed like the best idea in the world, after that lemonade.

“Oh, I haven’t baked one yet today,” the man said, and I realized that this was a guy whose job is just to bake pies and cookies in the most literal middle-of-nowhere you’ve ever been.

I kinda want that job.

(Dustin says it’s too late to have that job this summer, but maybe next summer……)

The bathroom proved to be a deluxe pit toilet. “Deluxe” in this case means four stalls WITH toilet paper and two sinks with a little running water to wash your hands and brush your teeth. There would be quite the lineup for the sinks later that night. It didn’t smell great, but I have to tell you – it was better than digging a hole under a bush.

As we ambled around the buildings, the woman who’d checked us in (who turned out to be the manager) waved us down.

“Your room is ready!” she said. She led the way to the dormitory building, which is the lovely, shapely building whose outline we could see from a couple miles away.

Our room featured a double bed and two single beds, a table, and a lot of hooks on the walls.

“Hang everything you brought,” the manager instructed us. “Dirty clothes, everything. Definitely shoes. Make sure any food you have is in sealed bags, too. If you leave anything on the floor or on the beds, critters will get it.” Not might get it. Those fat spotted squirrels are wily. (Actually, I’m looking at you, marmots.) (And, honestly? I wouldn’t put it past the Habituated Goats.)

The manager offered us our key, told us to keep our flashlights handy for after dark, reminded us not to be late for dinner at 5:30, and wished us a good day.

2021 was the first year the chalet had been open since the fires in 2017 badly damaged or destroyed many of its buildings, and sitting down on the profoundly stiff mattresses, you could tell.

“Still probably better than a sleeping pad?” I offered.

But there would be no napping now. The hour was past eleven, and I had a glacier to go collect. Just 4.5 miles and 2,000 feet up to go!

The chalet sits just on the tree line, so for the rest of the day our hiking would be on tree-bald slopes that were magnificent now for their geologic striations and glacial waterfalls. And oh! were there waterfalls.

Switchbacks led the way up the argillite slopes.

The views weren’t great, but even what we could see made the distance we’d come feel very rewarding.

The rocks at this elevation were just as gorgeous as the rainbow pebbles in the lower elevation streams had been. The bald, rock peaks were stunning. Let’s get a little closer to this one, shall we?

Tectonic forces have done marvelous and mind-boggling things to the layers of rock that compose these mountains. Can you imagine the force required to fold and wrinkle rocks like that??

And then we came to Comeau Pass: a cliff face with a narrow crevice that served as our path farther up. Two Habituated Goats presided over it like furry, weird Argonath.

We waited around for awhile to see if the Habituated Goats would consider leaving, but they didn’t seem interested in that or in us, so eventually we made our way up the crevice without bothering anyone.

Having passed the Challenge of the Crevice, we found ourselves on a broad, wind-swept shelf which is the western saddle of Gunsight Mountain. Bands of red, green, white, and yellow sedimentary rock stretched as far as the eye could see, their contours hinting strongly of the shape and extent the glacier must have once enjoyed.

As at Grinnell Glacier, the edge of Sperry Glacier was nowhere to be seen from the point at which this sign was posted. The sign might never have said “warning, this is the edge of a dangerous glacier, please don’t walk on it,” but I bet it did.

There was, however, plenty of evidence of both past and present glaciers in the form of weathered rock formations, piles of glacial till, and lots and lots of waterfalls.

There it is. ❤

As I made my way to the visible edge of the glacier, I was keenly aware that what I was walking on was not necessarily just a tumble of rock. Glacial ice picks up debris (called glacial till which forms piles of rock called moraines) as it melts and pushes forward, causing its leading edges to sometimes appear deceptively dry and solid. That’s why my collection photo doesn’t look a lot like I’m standing on the glacier, but I definitely am. You won’t catch me wandering father out onto glacial ice without an experienced guide. (Though I’d really like to have one of those, some day.)

To wit:

That’s an ice bridge, covered with (fricking gorgeous) rock. Melting water flows underneath. As summer wears on and meltwater increases, ice bridges can get thinner and thinner and may eventually collapse. Know your glacier safety, kids!

And also know some glacier appreciation. Would you just LOOK at that mega-ice-sheet wrapping itself around that prominence?

Back in the day, the glacier wrapped all the way around the rock outcropping (which is an arm off the peak of Gunsight Mountain), filling the next saddle of rock as well as the one it currently occupies. To review:

Sperry Glacier is not as well measured as Grinnell Glacier, but estimates from survey maps drawn in the early 1900s give the glacier’s surface area then at around 800 acres. In 1966, when it was first properly measured by the USGS, it had already retreated to its current location and measured in at 287 acres. Today (well, 2005 for sure and maybe 2015 – the internet’s reporting on this is a little shady) the glacier measures about 215 acres.

Thank you for your patience during this geology and global warming lesson. Save the glaciers!! Now back to your regularly scheduled glacier-collecting photos.

Let’s look at that last photo again:

You might be thinking, “yes, that’s a lot of snow for August, but you are up in the mountains so I’m not sure what the big deal is.” Perspective is a little tough here. See the gap between the ice and the rock point? That’s my destination. Let’s zoom in!

Now I really feel like I’ve collected this glacier. Standing on the rock-covered ice at the edge is fine if that’s the best you can do, but at Sperry, I could get right up to the edge – called a randkluft by geologists and Germans – where heat from the sun-warmed rock causes the glacier to melt away more quickly, leaving a crevasse of intimidating proportions.

Somebody more intrepid and less fond of being alive than I could have easily gone exploring back there and made it back a serious distance.

A very, very cold breeze blew out of this randkluft, and you could hear water flowing through it and underneath the ice at great volume. Fortunately, it’s easy to see here that we’re standing on living rock (actual mountainside) and not a tricksy, maybe-dangerous glacial moraine.

Sorry. That’s the last global warming photo I’m going to make you look at. But LOOK at it! If I were standing in the same spot in the 2008 photo that I’m standing in Dustin’s photo just above, I’d be on the far right side in profile looking to the left side of the photo.

We took our apparently mandatory glacier-side Pirate Booty break and soaked in the glacier’s glow for just a few more minutes. After all, we’d come all this way.

But the hour drew late, and missing dinner was completely out of the question. While Pirate Booty is delicious, we were going to need a bit more than that to replenish 16 miles of burned calories. Time to head back down the hill.

But, oh! The beauty of this place takes my breath away.

Can I have one more brief pause for geology? I don’t mind if you scroll past.

Okay. I’m done. Thanks for your patience. Back to your regularly schedule macro-photos.

Can you spot Dustin in the rocks?

Can you spot Laura in the bushes?

“If you don’t stop picking huckleberries, we’ll be late for dinner!”

“So we’ll have huckleberries for dinner!”

“You burned, like, 6,000 calories today. If you eat huckleberries for dinner tonight, I’m going to have to carry you down tomorrow, and I don’t want to.”

“Okay, okay, I’m coming!”

“Laura!!”

“Seriously, this time! I’m coming.”

(This conversation possibly slightly dramatized for entertainment purposes. Dustin was totally supportive of my huckleberrying. We were, however, at risk of running late for dinner.)

We got back to the chalet with not quite enough time to wash our faces and hands (which we did anyway, because… oof). By the time we turned up in the dining hall, our food was already out on the table waiting for us: a full turkey dinner with a side of ginger pumpkin soup which was SO salty and SO good.

I may have also asked for (and very kindly received!) an entire extra side of gravy. The only thing I didn’t eat was a little piece of focaccia and my salad, which I fed to Dustin. My fitness ap informed me that I burned 3,900 calories this day, and I think this meal went a solid way toward making that back up.

The staff asked everyone dining to introduce themselves. The rest of the (I assume) mule-transported crowd was greatly impressed by our day’s efforts, which was rather gratifying. The staff then went through a rather lengthy list of rules regarding how to be responsible inhabitants of a backwater hotel with no electricity or running water, but with plenty of wild critters that want to eat your salty stuff.

Returning to our room after dinner, Dustin realized he hadn’t had his victory shot of summit scotch, so we got that done a little late out on our deck. The evening was thick with smoke, but still very lovely. There were people, Habituated Goats, and fat spotted squirrels available to watch for entertainment.

Breakfast in the morning was just as hearty as we could have hoped for (and, after the microscopic portions we received for $30 each at Phantom Ranch, a huge relief). We did not hurry ourselves at all. With only a tiny little 7-mile downhill hike to the car, what was the rush?

It amused me to realize, as we hoisted our day packs and started down the trail, that by this time the day before, I’d already hiked seven miles uphill to arrive here and eaten my lunch. Today’s schedule was much more my pace, but yesterday’s adventures had been Top-10-Lifetime.

We took our time on the way down, pulling over to pick huckleberries wherever we found them. I was already dreaming of putting them in waffles. Per Glacier NP regulations, each person may hand-pick up to one quart of berries for personal use only. You’d better believe I had no intention of sharing those waffles.

In the middle of one particularly lush patch, this family of Habituated Goats decided to fight us for the berry-picking rights. They won, by virtue of being bigger and scruffier and more native-wildlife than us.

I’d like to do this again someday, perhaps pursuing our original plan of a three-day hike over Gunsight Pass. We don’t even need to stay at the chalet. It was incredibly cool to stay there once, but there are camp sites available just up the trail if we get to the permitting system fast enough, and if I can still buy pie a la carte, I will be very happy.

This post and the previous Grinnell Glacier post actually require some bibliography-style acknowledgements, for all the sciency bits.

First, Callan Bentley’s post on the American Geophysical Union’s website about The Rocks of Glacier National Park taught me about the colorful of rocks I was seeing, the strange ways they behave, and how they got there to start with.

The USGS’s 1980 report, “Grinnell and Sperry Glaciers, Glacier National Park, Montana: A Record of Vanishing Ice” talks about how glaciers are measured and how big they were at various points in their pre-1980 history. Numbers from more recent years were easier to find with simple Google searches.

And then researchgate.net’s paper Glaciological measurements and mass balances from Sperry Glacier, Montana, USA, years 2005–2015 taught me about bergschrunds and randklufts and showed maps of glacier shrinkage that are terrifying and beautiful.

I think the photos I borrowed are all credited, but if I missed any, please holler and I’ll fix it!