Mother Nature at her fiery and sweltering worst did all she could to dent the experience, but this time I bested her.
Swiftcurrent Peak sits right on the Continental Divide just north of Swiftcurrent Pass. You can climb it from the trailhead at the Swiftcurrent Motor Inn in the Many Glacier area, but I decided to hike along the Highline Trail from Logan Pass, then head downhill to The Loop on the Going-to-the-Sun Road. I had my own ride, but you can also make this loop using the park’s new shuttle system to get back to your car.
The Skyland fire at Marias Pass was burning pretty seriously at the time, but surprisingly, the smoke wasn’t too bad. Unfortunately, the Brush Creek fire blew up west of Whitefish and at about 10 a.m, a massive plume of thick smoke came belching out of the Lake McDonald Valley. It was a surreal experience watching this wall of smoke creeping along the sides of the valley straight at me like a fogbank rolling in from the ocean.
One by one, the peaks of Glacier vanished behind this pall of smoke. Heavenly Peak vanished. After a while, I couldn’t even see the Garden Wall directly above me. I was walking in an utter pea soup of smoke. The visibility couldn’t have been more than about 100 yards.
I was a little bummed, but I also realized there wasn’t anything I could do about it, so I continued on to the peak of Swiftcurrent, hoping the summit would be above the smoke.
The hike to the chalet is easy, with only 700 feet of climbing over the saddle of Haystack Butte. The hike to the top of Swiftcurrent Pass from the Chalet is easy, too. It’s only about a 600-foot climb. I’ve heard it’s really difficult from the east side.
Now, to the top of Swiftcurrent Peak is definitely not easy. You climb 1,275 feet in only 1.2 miles, a monster grade of more than 20 percent. That’s slightly steeper than Mount Sentinel. Fortunately, it’s only 1.2 miles of this grind. Unfortunately, I had to do it after already hiking 7.8 miles. It took me 45 minutes to do that last pitch.
What motivated me was the two guys I saw about one-third of the way up the mountain when I started. I tried to see if I could catch them before they got to the top. I did tag up with them right near the summit. (They sure kicked my butt on the way down, however.)
About halfway up the mountain, you go through a weird forest of purple flowers (Lupines? I’m not sure. I don’t do flowers.) and dead whitebark pines. I don’t know if a fire wiped out the whitebarks or disease, but it was odd climbing through the middle of this copse of stunted, skeletonized white trees.
Amazingly, a few minutes after I summited, the wind kicked up and the smoke mostly cleared out. There was still some haze in the park, but considering how bad it had been n and how bad it got a couple of days later n I realized I was pretty lucky. I had stumbled upon a brief window between the smoke events to climb this mountain.
After the smoke cleared, I got an amazing view of the entire park. You tower almost 1,000 feet above Swiftcurrent Glacier and a couple thousand feet above a chain of lakes draining into Swiftcurrent Lake on the east side of the divide. You can literally see dozens of peaks reaching all the way into Canada.
There is one bummer about the trail from the Chalet back to The Loop. Besides being really steep, and hence hard on your toes and knees, it also doesn’t have much shade, so the midafternoon heat of a 94-degree day really baked me. I had thought to bring 144 ounces of water, and I ended up drinking five bottles of water and pouring the remaining bottle over my head, mostly in those last three miles.
One thing I noticed about the return hike was how the forest below the chalet is already beginning to change. This forest burned up in one of the big fires of 2003, and when I first hiked it in 2004, everything was coal black n the trees, the brush, the ground. The trees are, of course, still dead, but the ground is covered in extremely dense hip-high vegetation. The forest is coming back alive. What a difference three years can make.
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