A Walk in the Treetops.  It sounded cool in the brochure.  But rising early and winding my way up and up Big Mountain, I realized I was getting jittery.  It's not so much heights that get to me as the notion of falling from said heights!  Still, I've always been an adventurous soul, so I was determined to try it. 

My first adventure was finding the dad-blame place. I ended up at guest services who directed me to an obscure ticket booth in a lower parking lot practically invisible from the road.  There I checked in and met the other intrepid treetop walkers, along with our two guides.  We were driven to a small waiting tent in the back of beyond, strapped into elaborate harnessing, and set up with partners.  My partner was Mike, the odd man out in a family party of five.  The family decided to adopt me as one of their own, and we got along famously the whole trip.  Mike and I had to check each other's ropes/clips to make sure they were securely fastened to the overhead wires.  We were going to be seventy feet up, and the guides weren't taking any chances! 

A half-mile hike through a pine forest brought us to the base of the treetop climb.  Yikes!  Only two boards wide, with wire handles on either side, it was  basically a huge suspension bridge strung from one giant larch tree to the next, up to two platforms suspended seventy feet above the ground and swaying gently in the breeze.  I took a couple of determined breaths to calm myself, clipped my green and yellow safety ropes onto the overhead wire, and walked the swaying suspension bridge up to the first tree, where Mike supervised me moving my clips to first a ring and then the next set of overhead wires, and then I did the same for him.  the biggest problem for me was figuring out how to safely brace myself when I reached a transfer point.  Some of them were so far away from the tree itself that I had nowhere to anchor my feet while my hands were occupied.  Scary stuff at fifty feet above ground! 

In the end, even the view from the platform was limited, but I'd come for the experience of walking among the treetops, not for scenic photography, so I didn't mind.  Mike's family kept posing for pictures, taking videos, and Ginger -- a sister-in-law -- dropped her little red digital camera down forty feet to the forest floor.  One of the guides went down to fetch it, and he trailed underneath the walk for the rest of the time, snapping pictures of various family members as they teetered on the edge of the platforms and did rather crazy things (considering the height we were at!) 

After the Treetop Walk, one of our guides gave me a tip about the old Chalet building looming over the parking lot, which was said to be haunted.  He arranged for a security guard to give me a tour, and Nick not only showed me the building and talked about what it was like inside after dark, but he also took me to a second building where staff members had heard phantom footsteps while alone in the building at night.  Creepy stuff.

After my impromptu ghost tour, I rode the lift to the top of the mountain to have lunch and then do some scenic photography of the Swan Mountains.  Then I saddled up my SUV and headed into Glacier Park.  Whew!  What a place.  Amazing mountain view after amazing mountain view.  And the Going to the Sun road was both breathtakingly beautiful and terrifying.  Steep and narrow and winding with sections without guard rails and plunges more than a thousand feet deep.  Oh boy!  I'm glad I didn't know what kind of drive it was before I started. It is not for the faint of heart. 

I crossed the Continental Divide at Logan's Pass, and couldn't see a thing because the clouds had descended and it began to snow!  Snow!  On September first!  That was the worst part of the drive, in fog so thick I could barely see, and no friendly car tail lights in front of me to ease the way.  Alone in the whiteness, I clung to the center line passed (had I known it) even steeper drop-offs and more frighteningly narrow twists in the road.   Then I was out of the clouds and down the other side of the mountain, and heading for my final destination -- the magnificent old Glacier Park Hotel. 

My first thought, seeing the massive historic building, was that this was what Disney tried to be, but couldn't.  You couldn't replicate the amazing building with giant Douglas Fir tree trunks ringing the lobby like the backwoods version of Ionic columns and balconies edged by rough-hewn logs, aged to a dark brown by almost a hundred years of history.  I gaped and gawked, my head spinning with fatigue, and almost fell over when i realized that the old building had no elevators and I had to drag my bags to the third floor!  I made it fine the first time, but after dinner I was so fatigued I actually tried to unlock my neighbor's door instead of my own!  Fortunately, he had a great sense of humor and whipped the door open in my tired face and demanded to know if I'd brought a bottle of wine with me!!  After staring at him a moment in complete shock, my mind got the joke and I laughed as he pointed me to the room next door.  Needless to say, I called it a night and went right to bed!!