Dateline June 24, 2018, Whitefish and the Bison Range
We left Waterton first thing and made the short run down to the United States border. However good a trip, it is always a fine feeling to be back in the Good Old USA, and the drive along the east side of Glacier National Park was a beautiful welcome home. We had hoped to take the famous Going-to-the-Sun Road across the park, from St. Mary to West Glacier, but in the middle of June the top of it had not yet been plowed clear and was closed, so we dropped down to East Glacier and ran Highway 2 around the bottom to West Glacier instead.
Whitefish. Our destination was Whitefish, and it was a sentimental one. When John was a sophomore in high school, his family rode the Northern Pacific from Seattle up to Whitefish for a Christmas ski trip, and he had always wanted to come back and see Big Mountain again, now grown into the Whitefish Mountain Resort. He still laughs about the ski instructor who marveled that his mother actually skied "at her age." She was all of forty; a young person's sense of what counts as old is a funny thing, and these days forty looks downright spry.
The town is a delight, with no shortage of things to do. We drove up to Big Mountain, and it has changed past recognition; not a building up there seemed to go back to 1962, when John last saw it. It is a serious resort now, busy in the ski season and lively all summer, and the town below was full of restaurants and shops and bustling with visitors.
Naturally we found our way to a golf course, the Whitefish Lake Golf Club, which has two of them; the staff steered us to the South Course, and we played it the next morning.
It was a good test and a beautiful one, with the ski runs rising in the background, and they tell us there are now even more of them on the far side of the mountain. A great morning of golf.
The next morning, poking around the RV park, John found a deer browsing among the sites; there was wildlife everywhere.
The National Bison Range. We packed up and pointed toward Bozeman, but swung south first to take in the National Bison Range. It was set aside in 1908 as a sanctuary for the American bison, and the rangers keep the herd to a healthy size for the land, somewhere around three hundred, rising to three hundred and fifty once the calves arrive; the surplus is moved along or sold, some of it for meat. What they are protecting is a pure-bred herd, which matters more than you would think, since over the years cattle blood has mixed into so many bison that a truly pure animal has become a rare thing, and they trade stock with Yellowstone now and again to keep the bloodline fresh.
We drove a good part of the nineteen thousand acres on muddy clay and rock roads. The range runs wild and open these days, and with the rut coming on there were lone bulls about that would soon be fighting to mate. We never did find the main herd, but we came on a few bison, a great many mule deer, and one lone elk, and it was well worth the detour.
From there we turned east, with a filthy RV to wash and Billings somewhere down the road.
