Saturday Morning, May 30th, The Empire Builder Observation Car
I got up this morning (Saturday) and headed for the observation car. The schedule said we should be in Glacier National Park. We were and it was spetacular. The scenery was similar to the Cascades, just more of it! It was rough country, and stunning. Rivers cutting through the hills, dense pine forests, folded and creased land forming huge hills, and the hint of snow. There was a layer of overcast, so visibility was somewhat limited, but it was still stunning.
We are going through Hungry Horse, MT right now (as my phone weather just told me, and they are going through a flood watch right now.). I can believe it, as I’m seeing muddy water overflowing its banks outside the windows. With the thunderstorms that moved through Eastern Washington a few nights ago, I can believe it. The waters are running really high.
The observation car wasn’t that busy this morning, and I was set up at a table watching the scenry. I got talking with a couple at the next table who had started in Portland. They hadn’t been able to take the train because of a derailment, and had been bused to Spokane and boarded the train there at 3 in the morning. That explained the lack of crashing and banging of cars hooking up in Spokane. And probably explained the delay for our train as they would have needed to provide all the passenger cars for Portland-Spokane leg as well. Now the announcement that we actually had a café car last night makes sense.
We spent a lot of time going through Glacier. That park is absolutely huge. One place we passed was a hillside with a couple of lighter green scars. I thought at first it was a river bed cutting through the land, or a ski run, but on closer look, it was straight, ended in a point, and the greenery was all new. Also there was no sign of human touch or equipment. I realized it was a healing avalanche scar. Out in the wild, so to speak. Untouched or affected by human hands. I was able to get a picture, but a bit to late to capture both clearly, but you can still see it one of them..
The scenery was wild, very little human habitation, and vast. The sheer scale of it was amazing. I’m used to the Cascade Mountains where you go up, crest the pass and go down. This just seemed to go on and on! And when it was done, we were in plains. There was rugged scenery, then a few rolling green hills, then plains – all within about ½ hour.
Whitefish, MT had a beautiful station!
It’s 11 am and we are just exiting out of the hills, and we stopped at Glacier Park station. The lodge is stunning! We’re now getting into the plains. I can’t believe how quickly the scenery has changed from pine trees and mountains to green foothills to plains. It seems like there was no transition! I’m really enjoying writing and watching the world go by. And Glacier is worth watching. The scenery is absolutely stunning. Montana is just huge. This is the way to travel – relaxed and laid back. As long as you don’t have a connection to make.
Then we were in the plains of Montana. For hours. Again, this country is vast. The land changed some, but it was fractional. Rolling green hills, rolling brown hills, bigger hills, then flat. And so little habitation. We could see barns occasionally, some cows, horses, but so few houses and people. Again, the vastness was amazing.
Lee and I spent the afternoon in our room. We chatted, napped, read, and watched the world go by, amazing at its vastness and the minute changes as we headed east. The clouds were amazing to watch as well. They shifted and we went through a rain squall, then watched it clear up again.
We finally reached North Dakota at about 8pm. The geography didn’t change a lot, but we began seeing more oil drills, and as it became dusk, natural gas pipes ‘flaring’ or burning off excess byproducts from the drilling. Some were large, and way off on the horizon, and some were small. I’d seen this before at the refineries in the Pacific NW, but to see it in the middle of the pains as the sun went down with nobody around was kind of surreal.
I slept really hard, dreamed about horses. At some point, I woke up in the middle of the night to see a full moon shining across the plains and reflecting off some small lakes. It was beautiful and peaceful.
