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.

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“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

Bears, Where They Fought

from Nature’s Gifts Anthology from Vanilla Heart Publishing

Lake Sherburne from Glacier Road 3 - Photo by Andrew Kalat

When Hudson’s Bay Company agent Hugh Monroe and a Piegan hunting party rode up the Íxikuoyi-yétahtai (Swiftcurrent Creek) into a U-shaped valley that would become part of Glacier National Park a half century later, they saw two male grizzly bears fighting next to two small lakes. They named the place Kyáiyoix ozitáizkahpi (Bears-Where-They-Fought-Lakes) because that’s what happened there and that’s how they would speak of it later when they told their stories.

A hiker following Glacier Route Three west into the valley from the plains along lateral moraines left behind when the valley glaciers melted off 8,000 years ago will hear no residual growls from those fighting bears. No sign marks the spot. The wise aspen, spruce and pine keep their counsel. 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.

From the perspective of Glacier National Park’s Proterozoic rock born in a great sea 1.6 billion years ago, the immortality man acquires here in the Shining Mountains comes through his stories.

Nature’s Gifts Anthology

My essay “Bears, Where They Fought” about the stories surrounding Glacier National Park’s Swiftcurrent Valley from the days of Hugh Monroe to the short-lived mining boom town of Altyn to the 1975 flood is one of many contributions in Vanilla Heart Publishing’s 2010 Earth Day anthology, “Nature’s Gifts.” You can read the remainder of this 4,500 essay I wrote in commemoration of the park’s 2010 centennial in the e-book in multiple formats or on Amazon as a trade paperback.

The anthology offers readers more than twenty pieces, from haiku to villanelles, from essays to short stories. Take a walk in a garden or hike in a national park. Reflect on the moon. Learn something new. Laugh and cry with our writers as they discover the beauty, the joys, and the raw power of nature.

Nature Conservancy Contribution

The Nature Conservancy will receive a donation of 50 percent of the profits for every book sold in both print and e-book editions for one year. Dedicated to protecting our rapidly vanishing natural environment, The Nature Conservancy has protected more than 117 million acres of land in 28 countries.

Essay copyright (c) 2010 by Vanilla Heart Publishing

Glacier Centennial: ‘The Sun Singer’

Vanilla Heart Publishing announced this morning that a portion of the proceeds from the sale of the new second edition of my novel “The Sun Singer” will be donated to Glacier National Park in support of the 2010 centennial program.

The second edition, released February 25th, is primarily set in Glacier National Park’s Swiftcurrent Valley. A portion of the profits from the book’s trade paperback, Kindle and other e-book formats during March, April and May will be donated to the centennial committee.

The National Park Service staff at Glacier National Park have provided me with a great deal of research information over the years, and with the second edition of “The Sun Singer” and the park’s centennial occurring during the same year, this was an opportunity to return many favors.

In the novel, young Robert Adams and his family travel to Many Glacier Hotel, the area where his late, avatar grandfather grew up. As a family, they are there for the scenery and the experience. But Robert is there for something more: a mission to a look-alike crown of the continent in an alternative universe.

When park visitors take the launch to the head end of Lake Josephine, they disembark at a pier next to a small lean-to. Many of them will hike back to the hotel, head toward Morning Eagle Falls and Piegan Pass, or stroll up to Grinnell Glacier.

What these visitors do not see, unless they are as magical as Robert’s Grandfather Elliott, is the hidden cabin sitting there overlaying the lean-to, shimmering close at hand in another universe rather like Brigadoon in the Scottish Highlands. Within the cabin, there’s a door to another world, one closer to Robert’s family than he suspects and more dangerous than he can imagine.

He must decide whether he has the grit and determination to step through that door and to turn his cursed psychic power into a gift in the service of others. In fact, his survival depends upon it.

I worked at Many Glacier Hotel two summers as seasonal help (note photo of me in bellman uniform) and, while there, hiked most of the trails in the area and climbed many of the mountains. As the plot for “The Sun Singer” unfolded in my mind, I couldn’t think of a better location for the primary setting.

Last fall, my article about the 1964 flood at Glacier appeared in the National Park Service centennial book “100 Years 100 Stories.” My essay “Bears, Where They Fought” about some of the stories flowing out of the park’s Swiftcurrent Valley is included in the soon-to-be-released Earth Day anthology from Vanilla Heart “Nature’s Gifts” (which helps support the Nature Conservancy). For me, the second edition of “The Sun Singer” is a dream come true.

I hope you have a chance to visit Glacier National Park this year and take part in the centennial activities. It’s a magical place filled with cold running streams, turquoise lakes, National Register hotels, and mountains carved by ancient ice. Once you are there, you’ll find maps and guidebooks available for your hiking pleasures. While I hope you’ll read “The Sun Singer,” I don’t advise taking it to that lean-to at the head end of Lake Josephine. There’s a swirl of energy there that might interact with the book and carry you away on a longer journey than you intended.

–Malcolm

Recent Glacier posts in this blog include Bears Don’t Eat Beargrass and Glacier’s Historic Red Buses.