My trip to Glacier turned out to be much shorter than anticipated. It was windy as I drove through Choteau and Augusta and quite breezy in St. Mary’s when I arrived around 3:30 pm, but nothing prepared me for the gale that was whipping across St. Mary’s Lake and through Rising Sun. I will freely admit to being prone to wind whining once it reaches 15 mph (I really do hate wind), but this was totally over the top. Just walking the 30 feet into my motel room was an ordeal and it only took a few minutes to discover that the reason the carpet was littered with leaves was because of a major gap along the door frame. So after a few minutes of attitude adjustment I put on my best I Am A Real Photographer hat and drove up to Logan Pass. At Siyeh Bend, the wind threatened to blow me off of the road and there were standing waves on St. Mary’s Lake, which made me wish for a video to capture the amazing light and rippling patterns. But then I would probably have had to get out of the car.

The wind continued to grow worse, absolutely howling throughout the night, and after a mostly sleepless night which involved periodically restuffing the towels I had wedged into the door jam, I concluded that a Real Photographer knows when to cut her losses and take a different road. As I stumbled up to the restaurant for coffee, the heavy low clouds which had blown in showed no signs of taking up residence somewhere else anytime soon, convinced me that I definitely needed to be elsewhere. Anywhere as long as the wind wasn’t blowing.

So I persuaded the desk clerk that she needed to cancel my reservations with only a small penalty and then braved the wind and road construction on the Going to the Sun Road across to the west side. Since I was abandoning my plans for the Many Glacier area, I wanted at least to make a pilgrimage to McDonald Creek and pretty rocks. As I rounded the top of Logan Pass, I was completely surprised by the blue sky ahead of me. Suddenly, although very belatedly, it occurred to me that just like living on the east side of Electric Peak, the mountains of Glacier shape geomorphologies that create sharply delineated weather patterns. I proceeded to spend a delightful (and windless) afternoon communing with the McDonald Creek river spirits and I thank the McDonald Creek Muse for the gift of several lovely abstracts, which were exactly what I had hoped for. Sometimes you just get lucky in spite of yourself, and I am appropriately grateful.

And, by the way, just why isn’t McDonald Creek called McDonald River?