Back at it again. Let’s play a little catch up, shall we? 😅 (It’s Friday the 13th as I’m looking back writing this).
Where was I? Oh… Canada.
Oh, Canada 🎶🍁🇨🇦🥌
(extra points if you know what the last emoji is without having to look it up 🙃).
Let’s see… we woke up Saturday morning, and I did a little stretching on the picnic table. We went to the creek by the campground to find a rock for my mom’s friend, and then we ate some breakfast… cold cereal.
My mom set up an appointment to do an endowment session at the Cardston Temple, so I drove her over there. I would have loved to have gone inside, but not having been an active member of the church for the last, gosh, I don’t know how long, I’m not allowed in.
My loss.
But it was really nice to even be there on the grounds. I spent the entire time that my mom was inside, outside on the grass in front of the south side of the temple.
Mostly I just stretched and stared at the temple. I did a good bit of thinking. I’m sure I probably did some praying.
It was an absolutely beautiful day outside, sunshine and very few, if any, clouds, I believe.
Beautiful place. Beautiful temple.
After my mom finished at the temple, we left Cardston, but we left via the southwest side of the town because I wanted to get a good look at the gorgeous mountains that I had glimpsed only from a distance while in Cardston.
As we drove to the southwest part of the town, I started taking a road that was going to loop back around to the road that was going to take us back to the United States, but I missed my turn and ended up heading west, and I just decided to keep heading west toward the mountains because it was absolutely gorgeous.
I paused periodically to hop out of the van and snap some photos. The green hills with the backdrop of the rugged, craggy mountains, was simply beautiful.
I got unintentionally attacked by a cloud of flying ants that were all trying to mate. I guess attacked is too strong of a word. I got bitten by one that landed on that part that’s halfway between your neck and your shoulder. Originally, I thought they were all trying to attack me, and then I realized when they swarmed the windshield of the van, that they were all just sort of… Head over heels for each other.
That’s probably not the best descriptor… But I think I’m going to leave it there. 😅
We ended up driving all the way to the mountains, all the way to the road that goes to a second border crossing, the crossing that’s basically right in the middle of the mountains themselves.
When we turned onto that road, however, we were greeted by a sign that said that that particular border crossing was closed for the season. We’ve seen signs before indicating closures only to find out that the closures were not indeed closures, the campground we stayed at being an example, so we decided to go ahead and take that highway anyway, as the road followed the mountain range, and the views were breathtaking. 😍
I would drive, and then I’d pull over, and we need to snap some pictures, and then I would drive some more, and then we would pull over, and I would snap some more pictures. And we just kept doing that, over and over again because the scenery was so beautiful.
We were both hungry, so eventually, we pulled over at a spot where we could look up a colorful meadow at the gorgeous mountains that rose up at the end of the meadow, as well as those in the near distance. It also happened to be at a spot where a beaver had built a dam, so that was an extra bonus. Mom made some sandwiches, and we snacked on some chips as we ate our sandwiches.
Love those Canadian picnics, eh? 😁
We decided to keep on going. By that point, I knew that the border was for sure closed, because I had chatted with someone who was driving the other direction, and she confirmed that it was indeed closed.
Though it was closed, I was grateful that my mom wanted to continue driving the rest of the way. I’m grateful because of what happened next.
As we were driving along, I think I stopped and snapped pictures a few times here and there, but as I was coming around to bend, I could see through the trees on the side of the road that there was a river fairly close to the road, and my brain immediately together the picture in my mind that I guessed I would be able to see where I standing by or in the river.
If what I guessed was the case, it was going to be a phenomenal picture.
It was.
😍😁🥳😍
After making my way through the weeds and small trees, and walking across a still part of the river that was off to the side of the main river, I saw one of the views that will remain in my list of most favorites of anywhere I’ve been in the world. I have a few in that list, and this definitely joins that list.
Picture yourself standing in the middle of perhaps a 90-ft wide shallow river that you can wade completely across without any problems whatsoever. The bottom is Rocky, not muddy. The banks lead to flat meadow that’s maybe 100 yards long on the far side of the river and maybe 20 yd on the side we were coming from.
From there, the meadow gives way to evergreen-covered hills, which roll on until they give way, in turn, to the spectacular craggy peaks of the Montanan and Canadian Rockies.
Picture the view standing in the middle of this river looking up river with the forest and the hills on both sides, and with the picturesque jagged peaks straight ahead, towering above the hills.
That right there is my happy place. That right there is the view that makes my heart sing.
Breathtaking mountains. The perfect river. Forested hills, and not a man-made edifice to be seen.
Oh how my heart and soul are filled to overflowing when I am privileged to find myself in places like this.
Heaven. That’s my heaven.
Fortunately or unfortunately, I was not alone in my heaven. In fact, I was the visitor. Why do I say that? Well, as we were walking toward the moving part of the river, there was a little section of mud.
Why would mud be of interest, might you ask?
Well, it’s not the mud itself that was of interest. It’s the tracks that were in the mud, tracks that led me to continually look all around, eyes peeled for what might be nearby.
In addition to what looked like deer and moose tracks, maybe elk, there appeared to be wolf tracks, the tracks of a large cat of some kind (most likely mountain lion?), and then the piece de resistance, a very very very large track, perhaps as big as my head, each paw pad perfectly indented in the mud.
I’d never seen a bear track before. But there wasn’t even a question as to what it was. As soon as I saw it, I was like whoa boy!
Within maybe a 5 ft by 5 ft square patch of mud, there were three different significant predator tracks along with two prey tracks.
And they weren’t old tracks.
😅
But… This was my happy place, my soul-filling, heart-longing heaven.
But there I was without any means of defense, not even bear spray.
It’s so naturally, I walked into the middle of the river, crouch down, and started snapping pictures.
😅
How could I miss capturing that view and that place that now holds such a longing in my heart?
(sigh)
So, looking every which way every handful of seconds, I snapped picture after picture after picture, finally taking one of the bear track. I should have snapped a picture of the massive collection of tracks all in the same spot, but I didn’t think of it at the time. I was just trying to snap as many pictures as I could of the gorgeous scenery, and then to get the heck out of there because we were completely unprepared to be away from the vehicle in that kind of location.
Oh, my heart. Build me a little cabin on the river. One that blends into the background and can barely be seen. That’s my happy place.
Though, to be transparent, I would love it if it were like New Zealand and thus without the predators. 🙃
New Zealand is one of my other happy places. It’s just so far away.
Very very reluctantly, I got back in the van, and we continued our drive the rest of the way to the closed border crossing, stopping again for pictures here and there.
It was an absolutely magical place. As best I can guess, the river that I was standing in was, of course, on the Canadian side of the border, but the mountains I was looking at upriver, as best I can tell, are those of glacier National Park in Montana.
So beautiful.
Anyway, we snapped more pictures and more pictures and even more pictures, and then we headed back down the road we had come up. It was getting late, the sun was down, but there was still a bit of light left, so we decided to drive over to waterton National Park, the Canadian side of the area with glacier National Park on one side of the border and waterton National Park on the other side.
There wasn’t anyone to take our money at the entrance to the gate, so we drove into the park and drove over to the visitor center to pay there, but the visitor center was closed. So we stayed for maybe 15 minutes or so on the shore of lower waterton Lake, or whatever the lake was. I snapped a bunch of pictures, trying to do my best to work the settings on my phone camera to handle the very low light situation. I got a handful of decent pictures, but it was getting dark quickly, so it was super hard to get good photos.
So we drove away from the park, we drove back to Cardston, where we found a grocery store and stocked up on food for the drive.
We ended up going back through the same border crossing that we had gone through last night, but the American border person was a lot more concerned about us than the Canadian one was last night. The Canadian guy was like, hey great whatever, come on in to our country, enjoy, yada yada yada. The American guy acted super suspicious. We had to open our doors, he started going through our stuff. It was… a different experience
😆
It was going to be Sunday the next day, so we were trying to find a place to go to church. We could have easily stayed in Cardston and gone to church there, since something like 75 or 80% of the people who live there are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of latter-day saints.
But we wanted to make some progress on our trip toward our next destinations. We decided to go to the Lewis and Clark caves in southwest Montana, the bear and Wolf reserve in West Yellowstone, and then we were going to drive down the west side of the Tetons, cross the pass, and then drive back up the east side of the Tetons and head on into Yellowstone National Park.
That was quite a ways, and we weren’t going to be driving all of that all at once, but our normal stopping locations, truck stops, were non-existent, and the rest area that I was hoping we could stay at was blocked off due to road construction, and there weren’t any open campgrounds anywhere either.
Finally, after driving for a very long time, I think it was something like 1:30 a.m. Or 2:00 a.m., we found a rest area where we crashed for the night. I don’t know if anyone cared, but that’s where we ended up. The rest area worker who came in the morning to take out all the trash from the bins in the bathrooms didn’t seem to mind at all that we were there.
Whatever the case, we were grateful to find a place to sleep, so that we could at least get a handful of hours of sleep before church, which started at 10:00 in the morning in a town about 10 minutes down the road from where we ended up sleeping.
I’m sure I’m missing plenty of stuff that I could add. It was quite an eventful day, But that’s enough to give you the gist of the day.
I guess I’m probably not going to catch up too much today because I’ve got a migraine coming on, and it’s already after midnight, and I can’t drink anything because if I do, then the stomach acid that’s in my stomach will decide it wants to come back up my esophagus, and that’ll make for an absolutely miserable night. So, hopefully, I’ll be able to not have the migraine be too bad tonight, and hopefully, I’ll be able to get some liquid in me tomorrow and get some migraine pills, and stave it off.
Anyway, loves and hugs. Polo.
Lift the world.
~ stephen
Lift the World 