Oh What a Hike!

Wednesday, July 9, 2014

Up with the light and breakfast is oatmeal and bananas with coffee – so much cheaper than yesterday’s restaurant meal!  But then, we don’t have wifi – so there you are!

First stop is the St. Mary’s Visitors’ Center to buy tickets for tonight’s Native American song and dance presentation, then on to Many Glaciers to see which hikes might yield us some critters!  There are supposed to be moose by Fisher Cap Lake or Red Rock Lake.

We are paying attention or we might have missed the tiny sign for the Fisher Cap path!  Just a short way down (in both senses) we encounter a lady coming up who says there is no one at home today.  We don’t need another lake, so it’s back to the main trail.  If we go all the way to the falls, it is supposed to be 1.8 miles one way.  That’s outside the parameters we had discussed;  but the path is really smooth and wide and seems to have little elevation change, so onward we go. 

We probably haven’t walked another five or ten minutes when Marilyn stops and points.  There is a doe and her fawn just across a tiny creek! They pose for a few minutes then the fawn disappears into the woods and the doe leads us away from her baby.  There is a family with two boys about five or six years old and they both have cameras.  They are hanging back, thinking they will be in our way, I suppose, so we urge them forward for their shots.

Mom went splashing across the stream in the opposite direction from that in which Bambi went.

The path is really lovely and it seems the wildflowers everywhere are more profuse by the day.  There is beargrass everywhere and I think I’ve finally gotten that iconic view of a mountain with the “large Q-tips” in the foreground that Lisa said was mandatory!

There are just enough hikers (or strollers, like us!) on the path to keep (some of) us from worrying about bears.  We usually step up off the path to let people pass us but there is one time that I actually pass another couple.  Tra-la tra-lay!

They're everywhere!  He might even be chirping in this photo.

 There is just one beautiful view after another – purple flowers, white flowers, red flowers, blue flowers, mountainsides with waterfalls.  We come to Red Rock Lake and continue on the path to the falls.  It is well worth the hike and neither of us has fallen and our hips don’t hurt and even Marilyn’s knee is in good shape.  Glad she is wearing her brace!

We can see Red Rock Falls across the lake half a mile before we reach it.  And it is gorgeous both from afar and up close!

 

Speaking of up close!

 In search of yet another angle, Marilyn moves a bit down the path, past the falls.  As I follow her she turns and shhhushes me, in typical librarian fashion. She has almost walked straight into a young buck in his velvet finery!  I can just see him through the shrubbery and he is pretty uncertain about what he can see of us.  He nibbles for a minute and then picks up his head to gauge our threat level.  He stays several minutes before turning to meander back the way he came!

Path to the waterfall with the ubiquitous beargrass!

Splish-splashin' away!

Heading back, we come again to an icy stream;  but this time Marilyn stops to dunk her hat in the freezing water.  She says it feels great but it just makes me shiver to think about!

Further on we encounter a couple and the man says to me, “Nice Tilly hat!”.  His wife says, “He just loves his Tilly hat” and sure enough his hat looks just like mine!

As we get to the end of the trail there is another couple looking at the mileage sign.  She says that her GPS says that they went 2.4 miles to the falls, making the round trip about 4.8!  Since every map and list has had different distances for each of the hikes, we are inclined to take her GPS’s word!  No wonder we are ready to sit and do nothing for a while!

The trailhead is at the end of the Swift Current Lodge parking lot and, although we have brought our PBJs and chips, a cold drink would be GRAND!  Marilyn starts by ordering two lemonades and a water!  I have a Huckleberry lager, served in a Moose Drool glass.  The drinks are well appreciated but it took forever to get them, even though it is around three o’clock and there aren’t many people in the dining room.  I go to the front desk to ask for the wifi password and it turns out that you can only use the wifi in the lodge in which you are staying!  Strange, since they are all run by Xanterra.  And the lady made me wait while she played on her computer before asking if she could help me. 

We’re thinking a salad would be good while we’re here and order the six-dollar Rocket Salad with arugula, cherry tomatoes (one) and Parmesian (about a teaspoonful) with balsamic vinagret dressing (really oil and vinegar in separate bottles).  We finish them in about six bites – a dollar a bite.  Marilyn asks our waitress if she can speak to her manager and Mimi comes to the table.  Marilyn explains our unhappiness and she offers to comp the salad;  but when the bill comes it appears to be the original charge.  There will be a note to Xanterra!  And we are sure glad that we’re staying at Rising Sun!

Since we are still hungry we go back to the car and eat all the lunch we brought with us!

The Native American program starts at seven and we were told to arrive by six-thirty, so there is a little time to rest and blog (in Word since there is no wifi in the cabin and what passes for an internet connection in the lodge is truly frustrating)  and, of course, we have to download the photos from today so far.  It’s just so hard not to look at what you’ve done!

We get to the auditorium at exactly the right time to get the perfect seats.  The front row is reserved for the families of the performers and the second row is two seats wider on one end.  That means we can snag those seats and it is just like being in front!  The program begins with a history of the Blackfoot Confederacy, which is composed of four separate peoples, and its relationship with the United States government.  You can imagine how that goes.  We didn’t treat the Blackfeet any better than any other tribe.  The man who is the MC is also one of the dancers and a lawyer and a new member of the Tribal Council.  He, like everyone else we see, is quite accomplished.  The leader of the singers and drummers is a teacher at the school in Browning and so is another of the dancers.  There are two veterans of the armed forces and we are told that by ethnicity, more Native Americans volunteer than any other group.

The dancing portion of the presentation begins with the grand entrance in which each of the dancers enters through a side door and dances across the stage.  

After than each dancer performs individually, showing off such dances and the men’s buckskin dance, the women’s buckskin dance, the jingle dress dance, performed by two young girls, ten and eight. 

Traditional men's buckskin dance, usually performed for visitors

Bald eagle feathers in her headdress and fan

In competitions, the movement of the costume, as well as its design,
are as important as the choreography and its execution.

Can you spot the two "selfies"?

Jingle-dress dancers

We also see the prairie chicken dance performed by a six-year old boy! There is also the shawl dance in which the woman dancer makes the fringe on her shawl part of the choreography. One of the most spectacular dances is the grass dance, in which the dancer imitates the prairie grasses blowing in the wind.  This one is often performed at the beginning of a pow wow to bless the dance circle.

The six-year old performing the prairie-chicken dance learned it from his
father before he joined The Great Spirit.

When Joe explains the costumes, he sometimes tells us about an "O I T".  That's an old Indian trick, like making the jingles on the girls' jingle dress from old snuff-can lids!

So majestic, like their mountains

 Joe Kelly, who’s native name translates to Power Buffalo, and is the MC, performs next to closing because he is now so old that he is too winded to close the show and immediately begin the next, speaking portion of the show!  Or at least that's what his cousin told him when he changed the order!

His braid goes through the spinners which hold the eagle feathers in
his headdress,  He also has a Nike shoelace helping to
hold the whole thing on his head without slipping!

In true theatrical tradition, the closing number is a killer! We’ve come along way from the opening number, which is reminiscent of old western movies, very staid with little choreography.  By contrast, the fancy feather dance is filled with wild spins and twirls, jumps and extremely complicated footwork.  The horsehair attached to his headdress is in constant motion as is every other part of his costume!

After each dance, Joe calls the dancer to the front of the stage and describes in detail his attire.  There is a combination of traditional and contemporary designs in the intricate beadwork;  there is even one girl who has “selfies” in her design!  Jim tells us that among the many things which “your people” brought to the land, including measles and other diseases, we brought mirrors and the Blackfeet fell in love with them!  He shows us how they have been incorporated into several costumes.

Nearly all the dancers have won national dance competitions at pow wows all across the continent and Jim makes a point of reminding us that this is a family activity.  He and one of the other dancers are first cousins and there are second-generation dances appearing with their mothers or fathers.

After the dancing Joe returns to tell us a bit more about the Tribal Rights” which the Blackfeet retain, like hunting and fishing and cutting of timber.  He then invites us all to join the dancers in a simple dance which snakes out the door on one side and back in the other!  By the time we get back in, several of the dancers have set up on the stage to sell their wares, including earrings, a book and a CD of simply gorgeous flute music.  

Guess the wording of that sentence tells you which one I bought!  It doesn’t hurt that Pat Armstrong is sitting there playing that mesmerizing flute and that he is one of the spectacular dancers, too!  Marilyn asks him some questions about the fingering of the instrument and he shows us that it doesn’t really conform to the scale which we use in our music. (The name escapes me and I don’t have internet right now – maybe I’ll come up with it later!)

We are starving!  We thought the program would only be forty-five minutes to an hour but it is nine fifteen by the time we get back to Rising Sun.  We just make it for dinner!  We each order a salad but I get the smaller one with grilled chicken and Marilyn gets the larger with tofu.  I just am barely able to finish mine.  Part of that might be frustration because the network is slow very slow and I never do get to publish my blog!  Maybe it will be better in the morning.

At least we get to see another sunset!

_________

 (I keep remembering things from our time with Lisa, like the fact that she gave us all her card so that we can send her pictures of the big-horned sheep.  That way she can say they are hers! 

And she told us the saga of Bill Kelly.  It seems that there were originally thirty-five red busses and now there are only thirty-three.  One is in storage but the other was Bill Kelly’s bus.  It used to be that the jammers kept their busses with them all the time, not parking them as the end of the day as they do now.  Bill offered to drive a young lady home and afterwards he and a couple of the other jammers were “supporting some of the local business establishments because they were so civic minded!”  Well, Bill missed one of the curves and his bus went over the side.  Bill was killed but the other two survived with debilitating injuries.  They are still alive today!)