Fiction and Natural Disasters: ‘The Seeker’ in 1964

St. Mary’s Hotel Washout – Interior Department Survey

In the second week of June of 1964, the worst natural disaster in Montana’s recorded history turned once picturesque creeks into raging, mile-wide rivers. For the first time since Gibson Dam was built on the Sun River, water came pouring over its top. The huge reservoir, swollen by heavy snow melt and pounding rains, spilled its overflow down the face of the 200-foot-high barrier into the Sun. Dams, and railroads washed out, homes and ranches were swept away, and thirty people died. The area affected by the flooding amounted to “nearly thirty thousand square miles, or roughly 20 percent of the state.” – Montana The Magazine of Western History  

When I began writing the love story that evolved into my recently released fantasy novel The Seeker, I could have used any era for my high country Glacier National Park, Montana, and my Gulf coast, Tate’s Hell Swamp, Florida scenes.

I chose to set the novel in 1964 because I wanted to capture the spirit of the times and to write about the times and places I knew. I was a summer hotel employee in 1964 when Montana’s worst flood tore apart the lives of a fair number of people and the infrastructure of a high percentage of the state.

Even today, a Internet search on “1964 Montana Flood” will turn up many pages of links.

Highway 89 on the East Side – Interior Department Survey

A heavy snow pack combined with heavy rains was an overwhelming mix for creek and stream beds, reservoirs and dams. While Glacier appeared to fare better than areas outside the park, there was heavy property damage at Lake McDonald Lodge on the west side, St. Mary’s Lodge on Sun Road, and the highway leading into Many Glacier Hotel on the east side.

I worked at Many Glacier which was flooded, without water and power, and cut off from the outside world due to a road washout. My reactions and emotions at the time were complex, from “I can’t believe this is happening” to “how did I end up rescuing furniture in flooded lake level rooms?” to “I wonder how long it’s going to take to get all the mud out of the hotel.”

For me, the spirit of the times I wanted to capture in the Glacier Park portion of my story has to include this flood from a hotel employee’s perspective.

I don’t know what the hotel’s management knew about the extent of the flood while it was happening. As employees tasked with minimizing damage and then with clean up, we had no idea the entire park was impacted, much less a large portion of the state. Information was slow in coming in an era before 24-hour news channels, Internet resources and cell phones. Without diverting the novel into a story about the flood, I wanted to show—via my characters—what we felt at the time.

Excerpt from The Seeker

Moccasin Creek Debris – Many of the park’s creeks, trails, meadows and roads looked like this.

Before first light on the morning it began, Sam Kinton woke them early.

“The lake is into the hotel. Get your lazy asses out of dreamland, gentlemen.”

“Shit, there goes the season,” grumbled Al.

Al couldn’t find his “goddamn old tennis shoes.”

Sam was in the hallway again, hammering on doors. “This ain’t the prom you’re dressing for, don’t you know.”

They followed him down through the rain to the main door beneath the port cochere. Jed and James, the professional staff, were in the lobby already, haggard automatons, barely recognizable in old clothes, bathed in the unreal glow of flames from the stone fireplace. The power was out, the phones were out, the road was out, the water was out, except for the lake, which was a living creature in the hallway at the bottom of the stairwell.

David was in this hall with others of the skeleton crew who came to the hotel several weeks ago to shake out the winter cobwebs before opening day of the 1964 season. They rescued braided rugs, heavy when wet, and beds, dressers, mattresses, chests of drawers, pictures off the walls, the piano from the stage in the St. Moritz room. Jed wouldn’t allow anyone to work downstairs for more than a few minutes at a time because the water was cold. He ordered them upstairs to be wrapped up tight in blankets and force-fed coffee from the makeshift lobby kitchen. They were constructing history already, reports were coming in, well-intentioned and half true, that hotels, towns, roads, bridges, livestock, dams, railroad tracks, families whose faces they will see later in the newspapers, are out, down, broken, undercut, missing, rent, ruined, swept away.

Neighborhood west of the park…a scene repeated in multiple towns

As June 8th flowed into June 9th and June 9th flowed into June 10th, a discovery was made, and that is that mortal men have no meaningful words left for describing the scope of this event. They already spent their words on small things. In a story headlined NATURE TURNS OUTLAW, a Missoulian reporter wrote, “Natural disaster brings a terror like the terror of a mob: destructive, terrifying, unpredictable, inexorable, and heartless.”

It came down to lists. Adjectives, acres flooded, bridges out, dams compromised, dollars in damages, head of cattle drowned, homes lost, miles of track torn away, miles of road destroyed, people killed or missing or homeless, power and phone lines down, rivers rising and falling, towns under water, visits by government officials.

The Hungry Horse News printed lists of names. The paper “would appreciate any further information.” David read the names again and again: he knew so many of them.

Sam kept a list of towns. Nobody knew where he got his information, though it was probably KOFI and KGEZ radio in Kalispell, and random reports. He posted the lists behind the lobby information desk and made entries with a black laundry marker every hour.

“It reads like a list of war dead, don’t you know,” he told David.

Many of us purchased copies of this collection of news pictures.

St. Mary, East Glacier, West Glacier, Pendroy, Simms, Sun River, Fort Shaw, Fairfield, Big Fork, Whitefish, Lowery, Great Falls, Augusta, Choteau, Loma, Browning, Dupuyer, Babb, Ft. Benton, Kalispell, Essex, Nyack, Columbia Falls, Polebridge, Missoula, Deer Lodge, Plains, Butte, Conrad, Lincoln, Shelby.

An alphabet soup of agencies and organizations was mobilized. ASC, BIA, BLM, BPR, BUREC, DHEW, FEC, FHA, NFS, NPS, MPC, OEP, PP&L, SBA, USDA, in addition to the army, air force, and Red Cross.

Anecdotes served when the lists grew old.

Prior to the flood, the BIA was studying drought conditions on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation. After the flood, the Indians didn’t lose their wry sense of humor. They told the BIA rep that his medicine was too strong.

A man found an overturned boat in his back yard; a woman found a bridge. Owners please claim.

Grateful that his son who was vacationing in the mountains was unharmed, a Louisiana man sent a check to help pay for the flood damage.

The guys working on a dike along the Clark Fork down in Missoula were shooting rattlesnakes by the dozen.

A GNRR lineman slipped off a pole into the rising waters of the Flathead over in Bad Rock Canyon and was rescued through the combined efforts of a fellow lineman, a boat crew, and an air force helicopter.

A truck on Central Avenue attempted to outrun the flooding Sun River and was abandoned when the water climbed up to the bottom of the windshield.

Trees shot through a bridge on the west side of the divide like giant arrows.

Near Plains, an Associated Press photographer took a picture of a sopping wet bunny floating down the river on a plank of wood.

The lake level rooms in the hotel were an explosion of mud. Cleanup and repair crews worked past meals, worked past sleep, and honed the stories they will tell the employees who were been put up at other hotels until the roads were open.

-

Many Glacier Hotel managed, with a lot of employee effort and road crew effort, to open on time with a convention. Other hotels opened more slowly, with some facilities that were ultimately condemned and torn down. Hiking and other activities were impacted throughout the park for the summer season. The news from outside the park was worse.

Fiction, I think, gives writers another way of expressing what a disaster is like as characters are forced to cope with the situation. I hope readers of The Seeker will, at the very least, get a sense of the 1964 flood within the park.

–Malcolm

A few updates – interview, a new review, Book Bits, and Glacier Park

• I enjoyed my interview over at Deanna Jewel’s blog Tidbits. It will be posted there until February 8. Stop by, say “hello,” and sign up for a chance at a free copy of my e-book ghost story “Cora’s  Crossing.” We talked about food, Scotch, writing advice, contemporary fantasy, and location settings.
• Meanwhile, I’m trying to wrap up everything I need to do for my fantasy adventure trilogy that’s coming out this year. The Seeker is the first novel in the series, planned for a March 2013 release. For more information on the trilogy, surf over the my website page for an overall synopsis and a book trailer for The Seeker.  My website also has a new inspirations and links page with info for writers and lovers of fantasy.
• For those of you who try to keep up with the latest book reviews and author news, I’m publishing ” Book Bits” several times a week on my Sun Singer’s Travel’s blog. Essentially, this is a page of links. The most recent “Book Bits” post was uploaded today.
• I enjoyed reading The Woman of Porto Pim by the late Italian author Antonio Tabucchi. An English edition translated by Tim Parks is schedule for release in June from Archipelago Books. I posted my review of this collection of stories this morning on Literary Aficionado. If you’re on GoodReads, you’ll also find a copy of my review there.
• With a bit of luck, I might just make it out to Glacier National Park late in the summer season. I’m looking forward to it and hope we don’t get any early snowfalls that kluge up the trip. We’ll see if I can get some pictures of many of the locations I use in my fantasy novels. I’m also curious to see how Many Glacier Hotel looks after the recent updates and refurbishments. Once again, the Federal government is providing insufficient funds for the park’s most basic needs. Here’s a recent story about that:  National Park Service memo details $2.5M in proposed budget cuts at Glacier, Yellowstone.
• I can’t resist sharing this quote from Terri Windling’s blog: “Current cant equates fantasy with escapism, and current fashion would have it that fantasy is both easy to read and to write. It isn’t. When it is done honestly, by a skillful writer, fantasy takes us far enough beyond our daily perceptions to open us to the essential realities beneath it. This is the true goal of all art.”- Ellen Kushner
• And, for a bit of Jock Stewart satire: High Video Game Score Guarantees Lucrative Government Employment

Malcolm

Many Glacier Hotel, 1964

Bridge at West Glacier - Photo by Mel Ruder, who later won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the flood. See also his book "Pictures, a Park & a Pulitzer"

“When torrential rains poured on top of a heavy mountain snowpack on June 8-9, 1964, it caused, by some measures, one of the most powerful flash floods in the United States during the 20th century.” — Daily Inter Lake

When I returned to Many Glacier Hotel in late May of 1964 for another summer of work as a bellman, porter and houseman, I looked forward to meeting returning friends from the 1963 season, adding to my growing list of hikes taken and mountains climbed, and simply enjoying three and a half months in the land known as The Shining Mountains.

Those of us who arrived before the seaon began were there to clean, unpack, set-up and get the hotel ready for the new season after it had been dormant during the fall, winter and spring months.

Flooded Valley

Mother Nature had other ideas: the Montana Flood of 1964. While Glacier Park was cut off from the rest of the world, Many Glacier Hotel was cut off from the rest of the park: the only road into Swiftcurrent Valley was washed out. As we raced to save the furniture in the lake level rooms and then began cleaning up the mess when the water receded back into Swiftcurrent Lake, we didn’t know at the outset just how widespread the flood was.

According to the Daily Inter Lake, “More than 20 miles of U.S. 2 were damaged or destroyed, along with six miles of Great Northern track. A section of Blankenship Bridge collapsed Monday night and the bridge at West Glacier buckled. The eastern half of the Old Red Bridge in Columbia Falls also washed away, together with three homes; another 50 homes south and east of town were flooded.” Damages were estimated at $63 million ($438 million in today’s dollars) as “At least 28 people died and more than 2,200 homes and buildings were damaged or destroyed in seven counties and a dozen communities in Montana.”

I wrote about the flood in an essay that appeared in the National Park Service’s Glacier Park Centennial book, 100 YEARS – 100 STORIES. That essay is a short, factual account that focuses on the hotel itself. While I changed the names for my account of the flood in Garden of Heaven: an Odyssey, the true details in my novel present a larger account of the flood, as shown in this excerpt:

“They follow him down through the rain into the lobby. Jed and James, the professional staff, are in the lobby already, haggard automatons, barely recognizable in old clothes, bathed in the unreal glow of flames from the stone fireplace. The power is out, the phones are out, the road is out, the water is out, except for the lake which is a living creature in the hallway at the bottom of the stairwell.  David is in this hall with others of the skeleton crew who came to the hotel several weeks ago to shake out the winter cobwebs before opening day of the 1964 season. They rescue braided rugs, heavy when wet, and beds, dressers, mattresses, chests of drawers, pictures off the walls, the piano from the stage in the St. Moritz room.  Jed won’t allow anyone to work downstairs for more than a few minutes at a time because the water is cold.  He orders them upstairs to be wrapped up tight in blankets and force-fed coffee from the makeshift lobby kitchen. They are constructing history already, reports are coming in, well-intentioned and half true, that hotels, towns, roads, bridges, livestock, dams, railroad tracks, families whose faces we will see later in the newspapers, are out, down, broken, undercut, missing, rent, ruined, swept away.

Storm over Mt. Wilbur - M. R. Campbell photo

“As June 8th flows into June 9th and June 9th flows into June 10th, a discovery is made, and that is that mortal men have no meaningful words left for describing the scope of this event. They’ve already spent their words on small things. In a story headlined ‘NATURE TURNS OUTLAW,’ a Missoulian reporter writes that ‘Natural disaster brings a terror like the terror of a mob: Destructive, terrifying, unpredictable, inexorable, and heartless.’

“It came down to lists. Adjectives, acres flooded, bridges out, dams compromised, dollars in damages, head of cattle drowned, homes lost, miles of track torn away, miles of road destroyed, people killed or missing or homeless, power and phone lines down, rivers rising and falling, towns under water, visits by government officials.

“The Hungry Horse News prints lists of names. The paper ‘would appreciate any further information.’ He reads the names again and again: he knows so many of them. Sam keeps a list of towns. Nobody knows where he gets his information, though it’s probably KOFI and KGEZ radio in Kalispell, and random reports. He posts the lists behind the lobby information desk and makes entries with a black laundry marker every hour.

“‘It reads like a list of war dead, don’t you know,’ he tells David. St. Mary, East Glacier, West Glacier, Pendroy, Simms, Sun River, Fort Shaw, Fairfield, Big Fork, Whitefish, Lowery, Great Falls, Augusta, Choteau, Loma, Browning, Dupuyer, Babb, Ft.  Benton, Kalispell, Essex, Nyack, Columbia Falls, Polebridge, Missoula, Deer Lodge, Plains, Butte, Conrad, Lincoln, Shelby.

“An alphabet soup of agencies and organisations is mobilized.  ASC, BIA, BLM, BPR, BUREC, DHEW, FEC, FHA, NFS, NPS, MPC, OEP, PP&L, SBA, USDA, in addition to the Army, Air Force, and Red Cross.

“Anecdotes serve when the lists grow old.

“Prior to the flood, the BIA was studying drought conditions on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation. After the flood, the Indians don’t lose their wry sense of humour. They tell the BIA rep that his medicine was too strong.

“A man finds an overturned boat in his back yard; a woman finds a bridge. Owners please claim.

“Grateful that his son who was vacationing in the mountains is unharmed, a Louisiana man sends a check to help pay for the flood damage.

“The guys working on a dike along the Clark Fork down in Missoula are shooting rattlesnakes by the dozen.

“A GNRR lineman slips off a pole into the rising waters of the Flathead over in Bad Rock Canyon and is rescued through the combined efforts of a fellow lineman, a boat crew, and an Air Force helicopter.

“A truck on Central Avenue attempts to outrun the flooding Sun River and is abandoned as the water climbs up to the bottom of the windshield. Trees shoot through a bridge on the west side of the divide like giant arrows.

“Near Plains, an Associated Press photographer takes a picture of a sopping wet bunny floating down the river on a plank of wood.

“The lake level rooms in the hotel are an explosion of mud. Cleanup and repair crews work past meals, work past sleep, and hone the stories they will tell the employees who have been put up at other hotels until the roads are open.

“David and Al are the designated water carriers. An artesian well near the caretaker’s cabin is the only uncontaminated source. Water for toilet tanks and the cleanup crews goes into old garbage cans, water for cooking and drinking goes into new garbage cans, hauled in the red Thames van to multiple sites—hotel, camp store, cabins, dorms—day after day until their unvarying route is a deep channel carved into consciousness and time, until they are more river than men.

“The county health department flies a nurse to the isolated compound in a helicopter. She brings messages from the outside and enough typhoid serum to go around.

“During a lunch break, David drives the Thames downriver to the curve where the road is cut. He takes pictures but they explain little.”

In real life, I was too busy to take photographs inside or outside Many Glacier Hotel. I wish I had some even though, as that fictionalized version of me says in the novel, they would explain little. Even so, after the hotel opened (a bit late), those pictures would be part the story about Many Glacier Hotel in 1964.

–Malcolm

Malcolm R. Campbell is the author of three novels set in Glacier National Park, including the recently released contemporary fantasy “Sarabande” available on Kindle.

His nonfiction about Glacier Park includes “High Water in 1964″ in A View Inside Glacier National Park: 100 Years 100 Stories (NPS-produced paperback) and Bears, Where They Fought: Life in Glacier Park’s Swiftcurrent Valley (99 cents on Kindle).

Another Glacier Park Novel

Mt. Gould - NPS Photo

When my next novel Sarabande is released this fall by Vanilla Heart Publishing, it will become my third novel set partially in Glacier National Park. Sarabande’s Glacier Park locations include Mt. Gould, the Angel Wing, Lake Josephine, Swiftcurrent Lake, Many Glacier Hotel, and Chief Mountain.

When the novel begins, my protagonist Sarabande has just finished spending the night on top of the Angel Wing. I’m sure the park service prohibits this practice, but then she lives in a look-alike universe that is accessed via several portals in the park. Her world is the 1970s. Our world, at the time the novel is set, is the 1980s.

99 cents on Kindle

She has much to learn about our world, from electricity, to the existence of a major hotel sitting where there’s an empty space in her world, to cars and highways, and how to travel across country. The Many Glacier area, as I mention in my e-book Bears; Where they Fought: Life In Glacier Park’s Swiftcurrent Valley, is rich in history, trails and mountains to climb.

The popular valley is not only a draw for tourists, but is my favorite place in my favorite park. I can think of no better place for an adventure novel. We have the extremes of weather, of dangerous high places and the chances of meeting grizzly bears or moose or ospreys or wolverines.

I’m looking forward to the release of Sarabande for many reasons. It’s my long-promised sequel to The Sun Singer.  It’s told from a female protagonist’s point of view—a first for me. And it gives me an excuse to write again about Glacier National Park.  I have been posting about the heroine’s journey itself in my Sarabande’s Journey weblog.  It’s been fun to explore the differences between the solar journey in The Sun Singer, which follows Joseph Campbell’s well-known series of mythic steps in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and the lunar journey which is quite different.

Lunar journeys are usually much darker and much for frightening because they focus on the lore of the night and the unconscious and, as we see in many myths, the domain of the underworld. Nevertheless, Sarabande is an adventure story with its primary scenes in a mountain world that park visitors know so well. The story also unfolds along U.S. Highway 2, the wetlands of northeast Montana’s prairie pothole region, and in Decatur, Illinois where Robert Adams, the Sun Singer lives.

As we get closer to the release date, I’ll begin posting excerpts of the book. It will appear first as an e-book on Amazon’s Kindle and in the other formats available at the smashwords.com site. A bit later, it will also be available as a paperback. If you’re a fan of Glacier National Park, I hope you will enjoy both the story and the location.

–Malcolm

New Glacier Park E-Book Explores Swiftcurrent Valley

Swiftcurrent Valley two months ago - NPS photo

“The road up to Swift Current in its present condition has been known to make a preacher curse, and I have my opinion of the man who makes the trip over this road (!) without breaking the 3rd commandment or perhaps all ten of them.” — Dupuyer, Montana “Acantha,” March 3, 1900

Bears; Where They Fought: Life in Glacier Park’s Swiftcurrent Valley, a new e-book by Malcolm R. Campbell, steps back in time to the short-lived mining boom town of Altyn that prospectors and developers believed would be Montana’s great center of copper and gold mining.

Today, the remains of Altyn sit at the bottom of Lake Sherburne less than a mile from the present-day location of Many Glacier Hotel. Altyn came and went as did the two grizzly bears whose fight attracted the attention of a Piegan hunting party about 1860 and lent a long-forgotten place name that came out of one of the valley’s many stories.

The new e-book, from Vanilla Heart Publishing, looks at some of the valley’s other milestones between those long-ago fighting bears and, the hotel’s construction and development by the Great Northern Railway and the floods of 1964 and 1975.

After employees saved Many Glacier Hotel from the Heaven’s Peak Fire in 1936 and wired the Great Northern that the structure survived, the railroad sent a telegram back with the word “Why?” Though the railroad was beginning to doubt the viability of its Glacier Park holdings, they owned an operated Many Glacier and other hotels and chalets in the park for almost another 30 years.

The hotel was saved in 1936 and, since then, it’s become a National Register property and another enduring legacy of a valley that stretches far back into the past in the land of shining mountains. I first walked into the Swiftcurrent Valley in 1963. Since then, I’ve gone back many times. Bears: Where They Fought is my way of capturing the spirit of the most beautiful country on the planet.

Bears; Where They Fought is available for 99 cents on Kindle and in multiple e-book formats (including PDF) at Smashwords.

-

“On a quiet day, however, those walking alongside the relatively recent Lake Sherburne reservoir may hear the voice of grandfather rock whispering a secret: within the scope of geologic time, all rivers are new, and the men and women who follow them are as ephemeral as monarch butterflies on a summer afternoon.” — “Bears; Where They Fought”

–Malcolm

Many Glacier Hotel Summer 2011 Restoration

Hotel Dining Room - David Restivo, NPS

Many Glacier Hotel, on the east side of Glacier National Park, Montana, will be running at 50% capacity this summer due to a massive restoration project. Check with the concessionaire, Glacier Park, Inc.,  for restoration updates as well as this summer’s late openings of Swiftcurrent Motor Inn and Rising Sun Motor Inn due to the heavy snow pack.

Hotel facilities impacted during the 2011 summer season include: 50% of the guest rooms, Annex 1, North Bridge, the main Dining Room, the Interlaken and Swiss Lounges, Kitchen, and Employee Dining Area.

Guests will be served meals in a modified dining room space since the kitchen will remain open during the project with regular menus and full services. Red bus tours, boating operations and the horse concession will not be impacted by the restoration.

According to Glacier Park, Inc., “There will be normal construction type noise in the northern half of the building during daytime hours. Early mornings, evenings, and weekends will be quiet. There should be limited noise in the lobby area and for guests staying overnight; there will be no construction noise in the wing where guest rooms are located.”

This phase of the restoration project is expected to be completed prior to the hotel’s opening for the 2012 summer season. Since future restoration work is planned and will be scheduled when funding is available, guests planning trips to Many Glacier Hotel in upcoming summers may wish to monitor the concessionaire’s website for room availability.

–Malcolm, a former summer employee at Many Glacier Hotel and the author of two novels (“The Sun Singer” and “Garden of Heaven: an Odyssey”) partially set in the Swiftcurrent Valley

Glacier by the Grace of God and the Great Northern

“Empire Builder” James J. Hill (1838 – 1916) built the nation’s fifth transcontinental railroad across the top of the country without governmental subsidies. When he threw the weight of the Great Northern Railway behind the failed efforts to create Glacier National Park, Congress listened and the park was born.

Many Glacier Hotel in 1912 GN Brochure

Once the park was born, the railroad was subsidizing the government.

Louis W. Hill (1872 – 1948), who replaced his father as Great Northern CEO in 1907 and board chairman in 1912, made Glacier National Park his personal project. By 1917, the Great Northern Railway had spent twice as much as the Federal Government developing the park. Within another three years, the railroad had outspent the government by a factor of ten to one.

Early roads, trails, power systems, telephone systems, hotels and chalets were built by the railroad so quickly that one suspects that the plans for the region had been on the drawing board for years. As the playground evolved, Louis Hill’s “See America First” publicity campaign brought passengers to the park via Great Northern Trains: Glacier Park Limited, Oriental Express, Western Star, Empire Builder.

Swiftcurrent Lake

Authors Jennifer Bottomly-O’looney and Deirdre Shaw note in the current Glacier Park commemorative issue of Montana The Magazine of Western History that in spite of occasional friction between the railroad and the government, the park service had a sparse budget and welcomed the Great Northern’s investment.

Amrak’s Empire Builder still serves the park today and Great Northern Railway successor line Burlington Northern is the largest contributor to the 2010 Glacier Park Centennial.

Louis Hill visited the park often, taking frequent pack trips out of railroad-built Many Glacier Hotel. But the man who has been called “the Godfather of Glacier Park” was not a John Muir or a George Bird Grinnell. Like his empire builder father, he saw the park as a spectacular place that could also be very profitable.

He once said that “Every passenger that goes to the national parks, wherever he may be, represents practically a net earning.” Author C. W. Guthrie (All Aboard for Glacier) adds that he “had an artistic bent, and that gave him a real feeling for the park.”

Louis W. Hill

In his 1988 book Stars Over Montana, Warren L. Hanna laments the fact that Louis W. Hill is relatively unknown today when compared with the other patriarchs of the park. Hanna says that Louis Hill did more than anyone else at the outset to plan and develop the park and make it known.

“In all of Glacier’s more than 1,500 square mils, there is no peak, pass, lake, valley, or road named for this remarkable pioneer,” said Hanna.

Louis Hill knew a good view when he saw one. He knew exactly where each hotel and chalet should be placed and how to connect them with roads and trails, and he knew best of all how to get the people there to see it all.

More Information

Parallel tracks: Glacier National Park born from Great Northern Railway in the “Missoulian.”

“Producers of a Playground” in Man in Glacier by C. W. Buchholtz.

The lavishly illustrated All Aboard for Glacier: The Great Northern Railway and Glacier National Park by C. W. Guthrie.

Glacier’s Historic Hotels And Chalets: View With A Room by Ray Djuff and Chris Morrison.

“Glacier National Park: People, a Playground, and a Park,” by Jennifer Bottomly-O’looney and Deirdre Shaw in Montana The Magazine of Western History, Summer 2010.

Each purchase of this Glacier adventure benefits the park.

Many Glacier Hotel Hootenanny

Once upon a time, in those days now referred to as “the old days,” employees at Glacier National Park’s Many Glacier Hotel put on skits, talent shows, serenades and a weekly Hootenanny.

Return with us now to Swiftcurrent Valley on July 30 at 8 p.m. for a hootenanny presented as part of the Many Glacier Hotel employees reunion.

The program includes a folk-singing performance by ten groups of musicians drawn from employees of various eras in the Glacier Park Hotels. Musical performances have been presented in Glacier’s Hotels throughout their history.

Hootenanny programs were presented at Many Glacier from the 1960s to the 1980s, and have been revived since 2006. This program will celebrate the musical history of the lodges, engage visitors with fine talent and interpretation, and build community.

Maybe you’ll join in on some of the old songs and learn a few new ones.

–Malcolm (Many Glacier Bellman in 1963 and 1964)

Jock Stewart Reviews ‘The Sun Singer’

from the Morning Satirical News:

Babb, Montana, May 21, 2010–I’m standing here on a blustery day in Babb at the intersection of Hgy 89 and Glacier Road Three watching company trucks and employee cars making their way up Swiftcurrent Valley to get Many Glacier Hotel ready for its June 4th opening for the summer season. My ancient CJ5 complained about the trip all the way from Junction City, and both the Jeep and I are wondering if the 4-wheel-drive will work in tomorrow’s expected snowfall.

I’m here–mostly on my own nickel because newspapers don’t have a lot of money anymore–to visit the setting on a mythic adventure novel named The Sun Singer. (Hey, there goes one of those 1930s “jammer buses” up to the hotel with a batch of new employees.)

Let me clarify several important CYA points right now:

1. Except when I’m desperate for cash, I don’t do windows, Karaoke bars or book reviews.
2. I know diddly about Quantum physics, and that means that I don’t buy into the theory that everything that can happen does happen or that there are multiple universes connected to each other by time portals.
3. Magic is just smoke and mirrors and too many glasses of Scotch.

So, let me dismiss out of hand, the rather rash claims by author Malcolm R. Campbell that there’s a real time portal hidden at the base of Mt. Allen at the head end of Lake Josephine that leads to another universe. If such a thing existed, everyone having “issues” with loan sharks, ex-wives and bad whiskey would be here in the park doing whatever voodoo chants or meditations were required to open that door so they could escape.

Frankly, I think the whole time portal in the park occurred to Campbell years ago after he fell off the top of Mt. Allen and hit his head.

Time Portals

If there were a time portal–and I’m not saying there is one–all those running through it might find themselves smack dab in an industrial-strength spot of bother. That’s what happens to young Robert Adams in the book. His family brings him to this beautiful park, and what does he do? He leaves the celestial world of hiking, boating, riding jammer buses and mountain climbing and steps through a doorway into a place filled with evil. Once he gets there, he forgets who he is.

I know a lot of people in the psych ward over at county general who act like they’ve been there and done that, but the big difference is, they’re real people. Robert Adams is a fictional character who has to figure out how a magical wizard’s-type staff works just to get back to the hotel with his physical self all in one piece.

Even though I had a few drinks while reading “The Sun Singer,” I didn’t totally believe in magic when I got to the last page. But I have to say, the novel tells a darned good yarn and when I sobered up, I considered getting a job in the quantum mechanics or avatar business so I could learn more about all the realities that yours truly appears to have been ignorant of up to now.

Be Safe Rather Than One Universe Shy of Reality

Look, if you go to Glacier this summer, take a copy of the novel along and read it at night while spending your daylight hours celebrating the park’s 100th birthday. Just remember, Robert Adams goes looking for a time portal because he promised his mystical grandfather he’d do it and try to fix whatever was broken. What was broken included himself.

So unless your life is too broke to fix, leave that portal alone. Or at least, read the book first and then decide where you stand on such things as magic and time portals and becoming a Sun Singer.

As for myself, I need to find a warmer place to sleep tonight than a 40-year-old Jeep with a canvas top.

Hello, Montana Readers and Bookstores

This summer, tourists will be heading for Glacier National Park to celebrate the 2010 centennial. While the official birthday is May 11, the summer season will have most of the activities.

What a perfect time to highlight a novel set in the park: “The Sun Singer.” Park visitors entering Glacier from Babb can follow the exploits of my protagonist Robert Adams with their feet (hopefully protected with a good pair of boots). Many Glacier Hotel, Swiftcurrent Lake, Lake Josephine, Chief Mountain, the Ptarmigan Tunnel, Lake Elizabeth and Morning Eagle Falls are among the popular Glacier sites mentioned in the novel.

Better yet, each purchase of the novel benefits the Glacier National Park Centennial Committee. My publisher will donate a portion of the profits for each paperback, PDF, iPad and Kindle version of “The Sun Singer” sold.

The mountain adventure novel is available via standard industry terms and discounts from Ingram and directly from Vanilla Heart Publishing.



2010 is the year to celebrate the park sitting atop the backbone of the world and read a transcendent novel of determination and hope.