I have had experience both ways, once as a personally conducted tourist and once as a human being. With our own car we covered the sight-seeing far more easily and quickly than by bus, with the advantage of being able to linger as long as we pleased over the fascinating mudholes blub-blubbing restfully by a tardily performing geyser, or in some out-of-the-way forest where the tripper never drags his dusty feet. Cars herd together in enticing groves, and their owners exchange destinations and food and confidences about their offspring with an unsuspiciousness lacking at the big hotels. Toby and I proved the efficacy of the old adage about the early bird catching the worm, one morning when we camped near the Great Falls. Our wide-awake neighbors from the wide-awake West got up and caught the worms, then caught the fish, while their slug-abed Eastern neighbors lay in their tents till the sun was high. When we emerged, they presented us with their surplus of four large trout, crisply fried in cornmeal and still piping hot. The early bird has my sincere endorsement every time, so long as I do not have to be one.
Still I think some improvements could be made in Yellowstone. I never go there without getting completely exhausted chasing geysers,—rushing from one which should have spouted but didn’t, in time to reach the other end of the Park just too late to see another go off, only to miss a magnificent eruption somewhere else. Or else I arrive, to learn that some geyser which managed to keep its mouth shut for a decade went off with a bang just yesterday, and another rare one is scheduled for the week after I leave.
They really need a good young efficiency engineer to rearrange the schedule of geysers according to location, so that one could progress easily and naturally from one to the other. One first class geyser should perform every day. Then the bears ought to be organized. You are always meeting someone who just saw the cutest little black cub down the road, but when you hurry back he has departed. So with the grizzlies; they never come out to feed on the tempting hotel garbage the evenings you are in the neighborhood. Only Old Faithful keeps up her performances every two hours, as if she realized that without her sense of responsibility and system the Park would go all to pieces. But you can’t work a willing geyser to death, which is what is happening to Old Faithful. They ought to arrange to have some geyser with an easy schedule,—say the one which goes off every twenty years,—stop loafing on the job, and give Old Faithful a much deserved vacation.
GRAND CANYON, YELLOWSTONE PARK.
Having “done” Yellowstone far more comfortably with the car in three days than we could have in six without it, we left on the fourth day for Glacier. The road improved vastly as we entered Montana. Both the Red and Yellowstone Trails were well made and kept in excellent condition. We skimmed over a beautiful country. Bold and free hills, soft brown in color and the texture of velours spread below us. The road curved just enough for combined beauty and safety, and was well marked most of the way. We mistakenly chose the shorter route to Glacier Park entrance, instead of taking the more roundabout but far more beautiful drive through Kalispell. It is a mistake most motorists make sooner or later, in the fever to save time. But to compensate we had a glimpse of Browning, half Canadian, its streets full of Indians, half-breeds and cowboys dressed almost as gayly as the redmen and their squaws. Some garage helper there made the usual mistake of saying “left” and pointing right, with the result that our prairie road suddenly vanished and we were left in the midst of a ploughed track which had not yet fulfilled its intention of becoming a road. For the next twelve miles to the Park we went through wild gyrations, now leaping stumps, now dropping a clear two feet or more, or tilting above a deep furrow or a tangle of roots. Once more we marveled at the enduring powers of the staunch old lady.
Glacier Park is not primarily a motorist’s park, as is Yellowstone. An excellent highway runs outside the Park along the range of bold peaks that guard the Blackfeet reservation, and an interior road connects the entrance with St. Mary’s Lake and Many Glaciers, the radiating point for most of the trail rides. To run a machine past these barriers of solid peaks would be nearly impossible, yet there are still extensions of the mileage of motoring roads which can and probably will be made. Tourists with their own cars can do as we did, cover what roads are already accessible, then leave their car at Many Glaciers. There they can take the many trail trips, either afoot or on horseback, over the glorious passes from which the whole world may be seen; climb ridges and cross mountain brooks, ice cold from melting glaciers; or look down from Gunsight or Grinnell or Mt. Henry into passes where chain after chain of exquisite lakes lie half a mile below.
Nowhere else have I seen such a wilderness of various kinds of beauty, dizzy ravines and dainty nooks, peaks and precipices with a hundred feet of snow and unmelted ice packed about them, and the other side of the mountain glowing with dog-tooth violets, or blue with acres of forget-me-nots. Fuzzy white-topped Indian plumes border the snow. Icebergs float on lakes just beyond them. Mountain goats make white specks far up a wall of granite, and deer cross one’s path in the lowlands, which are a tangle of vines and flowers in the midst of pine forests. Over a narrow ridge dividing two valleys, each linking lakes till they fade into the blue of hill and sky, we ride to an idyllic pasture surrounded by mountain peaks, for nowhere in the Park, again unlike Yellowstone, can you go without being in the shadow of some benign giant. There is, as the parched Arizonans say, “a world of water,”—little trickles of streams far up toward the sky, melting from æon-old glaciers which freeze again above them; roaring swashbuckling rivers and cascades, such as you see near Going-to-the-Sun, and the double falls of Two Medicine; placid sun-flecked little pools, reflecting only the woods, broad lakes black as night, mirroring every ripple and stir above them, lakes so cold you freeze before you can wade out far enough to swim, yet full of trout; and belting the whole park, a chain of long lakes and quiet rivers.
GLACIER PARK, MONTANA.