After the best night’s sleep so far, we head out to get breakfast from The Butcher’s Nook, a recommendation from the friendly faces at the motel reception. It’s a restaurant fan by a local community of Amish, serving hearty American classics and freshly baked doughnuts, pastries and bread. We order a mix of the pastries and sit in their large dining hall as we eat them, saving some for later - they are made from scratch every morning and you can really taste the difference (that should get Sainsbury’s lawyers on the phone).
As we begin the drive we were supposed to complete yesterday, we start moving into a noticeably rural area - this coincides with an increasing frequency of Trump banners and flags, a very visual reminder that for large parts of the USA, the 45th president is still a very important and very relevant figure. But that’s something for another post.
We arrive at Columbia Falls, a town that marks the entrance to the Glacier National Park and where we’ll be staying tonight - in the meantime we take a drive into the national park and veer off when we see a sign for Hungry Horse dam. As we make our way through snowy, weaving roads, we glimpse a damn that evokes the opening scenes of Goldeneye - the atmosphere is amazing, with wispy mists floating through the valley, obscuring the massive arc of the dam itself. We park up and walk towards the dam, stopping to look over the huge void it makes into the valley, seemingly the only people around - that is until a door in one of the access tower opens and almost pitches my companion over the edge of the dam.
Once we get to the other side, it seems like there’s a snowed-out road that is used by the locals in the winter as a snow-mobile track which winds deeper upstream into the valley. We decide to walk along a ways, as it’s a beautiful afternoon and we want to stretch our legs after yesterday, but decide to leave the snowshoes in the car - this isn’t too much of an oversight as the way is pretty compacted and it’s easy enough to make progress in just our boots. We end up walking quite a long way into the valley, which is filled by an artificial lake as a result of the dam, and is lined with needle thin, needle-free pine trees that appear to have been charred - perhaps by a wildfire in the summer months. Mist pours over the top of the dam like a waterfall moving backwards and everything is perfectly silhouetted against the muted sky.
After a few hours, and a conversation with a man on a snow-mobile (rather ominously, he said we were ‘very brave’ for walking on the track in boots), we head back to the car as the mists really settle in and drive back to our hotel - we’re planning on staying here for a couple of nights, our first ‘long stay’ of the trip. We drop off our stuff and head back out to find some dinner - this leads to the Gunsight Bar, which serves a decent sandwich but has one of the weirdest pub quizzes I’ve ever witnessed underway when we arrive. The round we’d missed had answers that included Osama Bin Laden, Pol Pot and Nagasaki, just to give you a flavour of the tone - it left us wondering what the hell the theme of the quiz was in the first instance. That said, we enter the picture round and absolutely crush the answers - we’re so confident that we hand in our paper early, assured of our victory. We are therefore pretty angry when the host tells us on his amble to the bar that we only got 9/10, despite getting every question right.
We leave with an indignant flourish at this travesty of quiz-based justice, and head to the supermarket for some supplies then head back to the hotel to get some rest before tomorrow’s first proper venture into Glacier. Should be fun.