Damn this laptop is slow

Seriously, this thing is slow. It can barely handle downloading and viewing my digital camera pictures, let alone posting them to the internets. Hell, it freezes up if I type too fast. I suppose that it should be expected, considering that the little guy is almost 8 years old by now. It gets me internets, and for that I should be thankful. Just don't go expecting any fancy multimedia whatevers on this site while I'm updating on the road. Just long, rambling posts. That's what Bears In Cars is all about.

I'm in Helena today, the capital of the great state of Montana. Today is a town day, as I regroup from Glacier National Park and prepare for Yellowstone and Grand Teton. Laundry, shower, haircut, shave, checking the AL East standings -- and of course, a little journal-writin. Check out time is in 2 hours and 9 minutes. Let's see how much I can get in before the deadline.

When I left off, I was two states over in Yakima, WA. I've put some serious miles down since. From Yakima, I drove north along the eastern ramparts of the Cascade Mountains, making my way to the little town of Leavenworth, Washington. Now, for some reason, the entire town has been constructed in the style of a "Bavarian Village." It's like a sort of "quaint" European-Alps-Chalet style with lots of elaborate woodwork and frescoes of stuff on building walls -- like what people in western Washington state would think a village in Bavaria would look like.

Here's the thing:

1. The town doesn't appear to have a significant Bavarian population, and even if it did I'm not sure if they'd want to make their entire town look like a place where the gingerbread man would live.

2. The town is called "Leavenworth." If you're going for the full-on German-Alpen sort of thing, you'd think that they'd at least give the town a German -sounding name, like Dussel-Strassel-Alpen-Burgen-Steiner-Schnitzel. Now THAT's German! Instead, they have one road labeled "Strasse" instead of "Street." Big woop.

3. The Safeway has some sort of facade to keep up the "Bavarian Village" theme. So does the McDonald's. It's...well, words can't capture the resulting crime against architecture. This is what happens when town councils have too much time on their hands, people.

Leavenworth was also crowded as hell. It took me more than 2 minutes to find a parking space for lunch, which means that it wasn't worth it. I headed east, had a picnic lunch, and crossed the Columbia River. And then I was in....

Eastern Washington. It's a big freaking plateau that should be desert, except that one of the more ambitious mass-irrigation projects in the country (thanks, Bureau of Recalamation!) has turned it into a giant wheat field. It is big. And flat. And hot. We're talking 90+. I visited Dry Falls, a lovely bit of geology in the Grand Coulee (I won't bore you with the details. If you're interested, go look it up). And then it was time for some fun.

Background: I'm an engineer. I get nerdy about it. I like to see dams. Big ones. I've seen a number of them on my road trip: Glen Canyon (2 years ago), Trinity, Shasta, The Dalles, and Bonnevile. At every single one of them, I managed to show up just a few minutes after the last tour of the dam had left for the day (if they offered a tour. Most of them did. Also, I keep typing "damn" by mistake. I should look into this). I started to suspect that the Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps of Engineers had conspired together in an unheard-of collaboration for the sole goal of screwing me out of getting a dam tour. "Let's tell him that that last tour left 10 minutes ago every time," they'd snicker. "It'll be great."

So I resolved that I was going to see the dam tour of Shasta. I planned shit out. I camped along nearby Banks Lake and showed up at the dam visitor center the minute they opened in the morning. I would stay all day if I had to.

Luckily, I didn't. That would have been a long day. Grand Coulee Dam is pretty spectacular -- it's the biggest dam in the continent, and the most powerful -- but I can only look at a great mass of concrete and admire how big it is for so long. I got in on the first tour of the day. Finally, I would see the inside of the dam -- the powerplant.

Let's get this out of the way now: Grand Coulee Dam is the kind of dam that gives engineers boners. Everything about it is bigger, or heavier, or more powerful, or more groundbreaking, than any other dam in the country. An individual generator is powered by a water flow greater than most rivers, produces enough electricity to power Seattle, and has moving parts that weigh over 5 million pounds. And there are six of them. In one of three powerplants.

Dude. It. Was. Awesome.

The entire building vibrates from the force of water flowing through the turbines. The powerplant has a crane rated to 2,000 TONS, a custom job larger than anything else in the world, and they still have to break the turbines into parts so they aren't too heavy for the crane. The entire building, a full quarter-mile long, buzzes with the overwhelming sense of primal, all-encompassing, POWER.

This is what happens when you give a civil engineer an unlimited budget. It's pretty sweet.

Ok, enough dam-love. Let's move on.

The remainder of Eastern Washington passed with little fanfare. I drove through some mountains, visited a "grotto" (I learned that "grotto" is a fancy name for "little cave." It was ok, I guess), drove through the Pend Oreille valley, and then I was in Idaho.

Things I did in Idaho:

1. Got gas.
2. Peed.
3. Drove down a dirt road for five miles before I concluded that it was the wrong road.
4. Visited Moyie Falls.
5. Peed.
6. Left Idaho.

I spent nearly two full hours in the state. I passed through the panhandle, the narrowest part of the state, and well, there wasn't a whole lot to see up there. Although whenever I hear the state name, all I can think of is "Idaho? No, YOU da ho!"

I don't think I could have handled that for more than a few hours, anyway.

So then I was in Montana. Big Sky Country. A big state. I visited Glacier National Park, a beautiful place, and got some serious hiking in. It was cloudy for the majority of my visit, but I sitll managed to get some serious scenery in. Glacier is dominated by impossibly steep sandstone cliffs towering about greenish-blue glacier-fed lakes. The "Glacier" part is pretty small, though. The park used to have over 150 glaciers, but after a century of global warming, they've melted down to just a few dozen small glaciers. It's expected that the last of the glaciers will be gone by 2030. So it goes.

The best hike in Glacier? Triple Divide Pass. A seven-plus mile trek up the Cut Bank Creek valley and up the ever-steeper glacier-carved valley walls up to the pass, just a few hundred feet below the bare rock of Triple Divide Peak. From there, you can look down across two majestic glacial valleys, with impossibly blue alpine lakes and waterfalls cascading down 1,000-foot tall cliffs, as clouds break over towering sandstone peaks. Triple Divide Peak is named so because it marks the dividing point between three watersheds: the Columbia, the Saskatchewan, and the Missouri. Three ridges radiate out from the summit, setting the fate of any raindrops that fall near the peak. To the west, everything flows out to the Pacific; to the northeast, everything flows to Hudson Bay, and to the southeast, everything flows to the Gulf of Mexico. It's hard to find another place where a difference of a few inches can mean water flowing to destinations thousands of miles apart.

I say that the hike is "Triple Divide PASS" for a reason. The trail runs to the pass just east of the peak, along the ridge that means the difference between flowing to the Arctic Ocean -- and flowing to the Gulf of Mexico. The ridge then rises nearly 600 feet to the peak -- straight up. I had been dead-set in my goal of climbing to the very peak, the dividing point of drainage basins that covers the entire continent -- but I wasn't prepared to risk my life to do so. The ridge was a near-vertical wall of crumbling sandstone blocks, with equally imposing cliffs branching off to the north and south to discourage any traverse to an easier ridge ascent.

So I'll have to put off my dream of standing on the crown of the continent for a little while, at least. But someday...

Glacier Park is also prime Grizzly Bear country. I'm an accomplished bear-fighter when it comes to black bears, but grizzlies are another thing altogether. Grizzlies are BIG, and they are MEAN. And I sure as hell don't want to spook one.

So as I hiked through dense forest and bushes, the sort of places bears love to hide in as they dig for their grubs and berries, I had to make noise to announce my presence to any potential bears. Now, I'm not the sort to hike around with bells on like some damned hiking clown, so I needed an alternate sound source. Like singing. When I hike alone through potential bear habitats, I sing out loud. Badly.

Problem is, there's a lot of bear habitat in Glacier, and I ran through my catalog of songs pretty quickly. It goes by extra-quick when I only know the chorus of most songs, and even then I'm singing "Do-doo-DOO" because I don't know the words. So on my third day of hiking, I was heading up to Triple Divide with no songs left and about five miles of prime bear country ahead of me. So what did I do?

I got nerdy.

Real nerdy.

I started doing math in my head. Out loud. Distance and velocity problems, trying to calculate my average hiking speed and estimated arrival times based on the time and distance to go. Now, five miles, even at my average rate of 3.6 miles per hour (I told you I got real nerdy), is going to take over an hour and a half. That's a lot of math. I was doing long division. With decimals.

And nothing scares bears away like long division.

Even still, it gets pretty boring after a while calculating out hiking velocities. So maybe I'll get myself some damn bells after all. I suppose it beats having my spleen ripped out by a grizzly.

Next Up: YELLOWSTONE!

keepin it real

-Dave-