A hint of mountaintop promise from behind bright swirls of mist. A trillium blooming in new green, shadowed by cedar. A waterfall that pours straight from a thick bed of moss, spilling over slick black rock to pool among a tangle of forest-floor roots.
These are the snapshots tourists never take, because to find them you have to move slower than the speed of RV. That’s the speed of this season.
“Each spring, the opening of Glacier National Park seems to be a gradual thing. The snow is cleared, but then a late-season storm blows in, undoing some of the work road crews have performed.”
So wrote Bert Gildart, who keeps an online diary of his travels in both picture and essay.
Gildart, like so many others, loves to drive up and over famed Going-to-the-Sun Road, loves powering through the mountains with a windshield full of alpine panorama.
And he, like others, waits through the long spring for road gates to finally swing open, for those late-season storms to blow themselves out.
“But there are some advantages to the gradual opening,” he writes, “particularly if you are a cyclist.”
That is the secret spoken softly here - the hushed hum of tire on pavement, the ratcheting click of changing gears lost beneath the applause of spring runoff. Because every spring, after the snows have been shrugged from the Sun Road’s shoulders but before the gates swing wide, cyclists own this blacktopped track to the wilderness.
Some come equipped with fancy bicycles and spandex. Others have skis or snowshoes strapped to their backs. Not a few clatter along balanced on training wheels. All spread out comfortably from ditch to ditch, knowing the road is theirs, at least for brief while.
“That’s the best part,” 6-year-old Grace said on a recent ride. “No cars.”
That, and the fact that this time-between-times is fleeting, which makes it all the more wonderful. Like fresh-cut flowers that seem brighter because you know they can’t last. Like huckleberry season, or the month of morels, or the wild backcountry ice of late autumn, which can only be skated after the cold but before the first snow.
The Sun Road ride only happens while robins are incubating their eggs, and Canada geese are hatching, and calliope hummingbirds are mating, and bull elk wear velvet crowns, and ruffed grouse are drumming. And then it’s gone.
All around, it seems a time of preparing, of readying, of slowly putting things in order before the full flush of summer.
“Though the road is not quite suitable for vehicular traffic,” Gildart writes of this season, “it is perfect for foot and bicycle traffic.”
He chronicles a single ride - a bear, some deer, harlequin ducks dancing in whitewater, sun shining on snow, the stonework of the Sun Road’s west-side tunnel, “which so perfectly frames Heaven’s Peak.”
Early spring wildflowers are just now surfacing, often through patches of dirty snow. Everywhere is water, icy cold and in a hurry, spilling from high white heights.
Rivers run loud, sound almost like traffic but not quite.
At first, the spring ride begins down at Lake McDonald Lodge, but then that gate opens and the pedal power doesn’t kick in until up around Avalanche Camp.
The road for miles is broad and empty and generously flat, winding along the banks of McDonald Creek, around Red Rock Point, through the pinch between the peaks, with high falls tumbling on either side for miles and miles, before beginning the climb. It’s as if the road, like the season, must approach its height gradually.
You can’t ride all the way to the top, of course, because there are drifts up there taller than the peak on your roof; but it’s like that quote by Lao Tzu, there on Gildart’s travel site - “A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.”
The road itself is the destination, and along the way are bikers, hikers, picnickers. Bear watchers, duck watchers, picture takers. Some are very, very young, and some are definitely not. Most carry pepper spray in their water-bottle cages.
These are the secret things that only happen here, and only now before the park fully wakens.
Next month, Glacier will belong to everyone else - to the people with those cars and RVs, who, for now, are still waiting for something to begin, not knowing that it already has.
But for folks like Gildart, “that means for a few more weeks cyclists pretty much have this most inspiring portion of Glacier all to themselves, and that’s something I don’t mind at all.”
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