DAY SIX: Goat Mountain
Sunday found Justin and I back at the pass alone, with Rachel nursing Micah at home for a case of weird light-headedness and nausea. (Post-proposal stress syndrome?) We got a late start but with decent weather were determined to break our streak and summit one peak before leaving the park.
The night before, on the phone, Justin's dad had told us about a nice little mountain near the Lake Saint Mary's area that was just a "walk up" a grassy slope. That sounded like just about what we needed, especially as we weren't sure how the weather would change.
As it turns out, the weather DID change-- again, and again and again-- and the mountain was, well, technically walk up a slope... a loooong walk that required the endurance to climb 4,100 feet in litte over 3 miles. No technical stuff and overall not that "difficult," but more of a grunt than expected. The mountain terrain was interesting; it began as a long meadow and evolved into more typical rock shelves and boulders. Near the top, we slogged up some skree (loose rock) to find ourselves in a mysterious maze of canyons that we had to navigate AROUND to get to the summit.
All the way up, the weather was pleasant with blue sky overhead at the mountaintop. But a look behind and it was easy to see that we were only experiencing a break in the rain because the peaks behind us were sucking all the weather over their summits and chewing it up into thin wisps of cloud. By the time we reached the summit ridge, one particularly nasty cloud front had actually made it OVER Going to the Sun Mountain, dropped DOWN the other side and was blasting wind and sleet straight at us. The whole time it stayed clear and dry over in East Glacier, as we could see from the summit. We layered up and hunkered down in the freezing gusts to eat our sandwiches, then booked it the hell off that ridge. Ten minutes later it was clear and sunny again. Go figure.
There was a great skree run down the side that we (thank God) didn't climb up cut the time down the mountain by an hour. The whole way down the loose skree banks, Justin followed a set of animal tracks that crisscrossed the entire mountain face until they disappeared into scrub and we veered off the trail. That's when we saw the prints up close-- thought they might be mountain lion-- and spent the rest of the descent looking behind us. (Although Justin's narration of Alien vs. Predator probably didn't help my nerves any.) Turns out, those prints probably belong to a grizzly. Coincidentally, when we got to the ranger station to inquire about them, the Hidden Lake trail (where we hiked Cannon Mtn.) was closed because a bear had been on the boardwalk earlier... and was still in the area.
We got back to a warm cabin to find Micah and Rachel had engineered their own mixed version of Strong Bad's "techno" song in Apple's GarageBand-- without ever having heard it. They'd spent part of the day canoeing and pulled themselves out of the lake near the lodge when the wind got too strong to paddle back.
There was no cleaning in our underwear to end this year's festivities... but we did take our obligatory "on the cabin steps" photo the next morning as we got ready to leave. It seemed like such a short trip and such a hurried end after so much planning but, as usual, nothing was lacking. Any day in GNP is a good day.
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