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Joe and Ann Decker are close friends of the Dunkley's. They're retired; he from the Park Service and she as a schoolteacher. He worked as a ranger in Canyonlands and Arches before coming up to Glacier. They have us all over for lunch, Chicago-style hot dogs, buffalo burgers, strawberry pie... Joe suggests that the Mt. Brown Lookout trail would be a good one to do.

That evening, Mary and I plus her parents went to see BeauSoleil at a small concert hall in Whitefish. The lead guy, Michael Doucet, gave neat little intros to each song. They play Cajun music. Although nearly all of the songs were in French, the music was great. He told a few jokes. One starts out with "We have a mountain in Louisiana too." (I'm thinking, "What? No way!"). It ends with "It's 339 feet tall; used to be 342 but people kept walking on it!"

I start out early to do the Mt. Brown Lookout hike. Glacierhikers.com lists it as Brutal, one step above Strenuous. I'm a little apprehensive, not for that reason, but because it's my first solo hike in Glacier, and encountering a bear is always a possibility. If I had to use the bear spray (a little can of very strong pepper spray, meant to discourage a charging bear), could I do it without freaking out?

Heading up the highway, I put the Foo Fighters on random, and, ironically, some of the lyrics that come up on the drive are "I'm alone and an easy target" and "what I need now is a little resolve...."

I park at Lake McDonald Lodge and take a few photos of the interior, then start over to the trailhead. Coincidentally, there's a group of five college-age girls starting out at the same time. We chat a bit on the trail; they're heading up to Sperry Chalet and back for something like a 20-mile day hike, so our paths diverge.

My six-panel panorama of the lake in the morning (when it was indeed very Tranquil) did not turn out: not only was it partly overexposed, but I'd carelessly left a gap between two frames. autopano-sift can do amazing things: but only if you give it enough data to work with!

The hike, amazingly, did not leave me very sore, so I ran five miles in the midday, before feeling tight. I didn't quite make my goal of a 30-mile week, but WTF, with 26 it was double my average.

Mary's oldest brother James, his wife Aly and their family came over; we had a massive supper of home-cooked sausage/chicken gumbo and jambalaya. Their son Alexander just had his 1st birthday the week prior, where there was much cake and presents. He's just getting to the "da-da" speech stage and taking his first steps. Crawling around the living room, he discovered a shoe box on a low shelf. Curious, he opened it up; it was filled with receipts. He started taking out receipts, one by one, and setting them aside. I sat beside him and would grab a receipt, tell him "thank you" and collect them in a pile. This went on until the box was almost empty! We were joking that he'd be a banker or an accountant when he grows up....

My other nephew is Scott, who's a sophomore in high school; he's really into golf and skiiing. But I don't really do either, so on this day we set out to hike the Highline Trail in Glacier National Park. It was cloudy and cool mid-morning starting out from Logan Pass. A mountain goat casually strolled right by us on the trail. Clouds were rolling up and over Haystack Butte, and soon we were enveloped in the mist. Visibility dropped and it got colder, but we kept hiking, knowing that Granite Park Chalet wasn't too far ahead. At about the midpoint, rain turned to sleet, and I was soaked, and cold.

The stupidest thing I had done in packing for the trip was to purposefully skip taking waterproof pants, despite the fact that it would have been only a few more ounces. So there I was, hiking in soggy blue jeans, having to keep hiking to stay warm. At one point, rounding a corner, an intense wind nearly knocked us down. Scott shouted to be heard, "Should we keep going?" "Yeah!" I responded. We reached the chalet before too long. Many other hikers were taking refuge in the small dining hall. After a 30-minute break for lunch, we were back on the trail. The rain let up, and we blazed down to the Loop, ahead of our expected arrival time.

So it was mostly a slog; I'll have to do this trail again some other time when the (supposedly spectacular) views are not fogged over....

A chilly morning; despite the thermals, the borrowed bag did not keep me as warm as I hoped. But I did sleep soundly. By the time the sun hit the tent I was up and out. It warmed up quickly and I switched to shorts and a T-shirt. John was all set up for breakfast and cooked a whole pack of bacon, four eggs scrambled and hot cocoa!

While John fished, I wandered, hoping to get to the top of the rim. I should have taken a direct route behind the camp, but I stupidly chose to go halfway around the lake, then up. The trail petered out, leaving two poor options: bushwhacking through thick, shoulder-high huckleberry, or a water-logged path at the edge of the lake. Getting up to the top of the rim no longer seemed worth it so I returned to camp.

The other guys had done some fishing; we packed up and headed out by around noon. I packed a couple of broken-off stromatalites from the outcroppings that were all around the campsite. These can be some of the oldest fossils on Earth, formed by mats of blue-green algae in shallow seas.

After some consultation, we decided to follow the stream for a more direct route down. It quickly turned dangerous in and around the creek, so we blazed a trail tangent to the chute. I led, pushing through incredibly thick patches of huckleberry, into dense fir forest, down precipitous brush-covered slopes, hanging on to branches with every step. I slipped a few times but was having fun until hitting the edge of a cliff and began to think we might have to back-track. John consulted his map and led us down an even steeper section, then across, eventually leveling out. We crossed another stream, crawled through a dog's hair thicket of alder bushes and soon caught the trail.

The crazy bushwhack had probably saved some time; we had descended at least halfway. The trail seemed steeper than it had coming up. It was hot in the sun, fairly cool in the forest. Within 90 minutes we reached the trailhead.

J had seemed to be doing okay on the way down, but was puking again in the stream (upstream!) at the trailhead. The two dweebs got in the back and rode mutt as we sped off, windows open. John asked them if they wanted to hit the A&W but Jason answered, "Nope. We're broke." That was that, we dropped them off at his trailer in Columbia Heights and wished them well.

Walking into the A&W, all stiff-legged, in dirty stinky clothes.... I inhaled a bacon cheeseburger; don't even remember what it tasted like.

From a few yards back behind me, I heard a painful "Owwww" and then an "Oh, shit!" "You okay, John," I asked? "No" was the reply. Backtracking through the thick brush, I reached him quickly. The wound did not look good. It was about an inch-and-a-half gash, cleaving the skin on his shin, exposing the muscle below. It seemed to have missed any major blood vessels, luckily. We both got out first-aid kits from our packs.

We were about a third of the way up the way to Tranquil Basin, a backcountry area south of Glacier National Park. A tortuously steep path--so overgrown in parts that it was more of a bushwhack--led to two high altitude lakes in the Great Bear Wilderness. One of John's favorite areas for elk hunting, he had been clearing the trail with a machete to make it slightly more accessible. A steep step up and a simultaneous whack downward... and our backpacking trek could have been over before it really began.

But he bandaged it up and wanted to continue! Holstering the machete for good this time, we hiked onward. It wasn't much later when, between bear calls, I heard voices up ahead. We soon caught up to them, and at a stream where they stopped, introduced ourselves. Jason and J were two young dudes from Columbia Heights. Jason had a pistol on his hip and a huge pack with fishing poles, while J carried a backpack forward on his chest and a giant Army duffel bag on his back. Needless to say, they were moving a little slower, and we continued on with a parting "see you up there!"

In an area blasted by an avalanche in a recent winter, we encountered our first snowpack. Just in testing a snow bridge over a creek, I put a foot on it and fell in up to my waist. My turn to look stupid.

Finally reaching the crest, we came upon the first lake. John had said he'd sterilize his wound when we got up to the lakes, but instead he immediately assembled his fishing rod, put on a lure, and was casting. The guy's got priorities, I thought: fishing before first aid. He hooked a little fish (cutthroat trout) within a minute, released it, and repeated soon after.

We continued on to the second lake. It was warm even at this altitude, but in the deep shadows, snowdrifts survived the onset of summer. The trail petered out and soon we were scrambling along the short cliff that formed the southern shore of the larger lake, framed at one end by an impressive rock wall, deeply bifurcated with gullies.

The weather cooled down from the 80-90 degree highs of the 3rd and the 4th. Storms rumbled and lightning flashed while at the Great Northern Brewery in Whitefish, sampling their ales (I can highly recommend the 'Going to the Sun' IPA). It was a close call--for a moment I had expected that we'd follow Mary and her mom to a quilt show--but Bob saved the day by breaking off to the pub.

The pattern of late afternoon storms continued through the middle of the week, postponing a planned backpacking trip. At Apgar in Glacier National Park, the skies turned from partly cloudy to heavy rain to hail in the space of 15 minutes and tourists, myself included, huddled under the eaves of the gift shops.

I was dead set on running 30 or more miles that week, so would go out for a six-mile run on Middle Road every afternoon. This area, paralleling the middle fork of the Flathead river between Columbia Falls and Kalispell, is largely small farms and ranches. There aren't a lot of runners. It's not helped by the fact that there's literally no shoulder on either side of the road. But there isn't a lot of traffic either (though on one occasion, a road-width-spanning harvester came up from behind). I get the feeling that, sooner or later, someone will pull up along side and ask if my truck--and my horse--have broken down. We commonly spot deer while leaving or returning on this road and according to some of the neighbors, a bear was recently spotted. Dogs, not used to human intruders, run out into the street after you. I've developed a pattern that works with all but the most aggressive canines. You slow to a walk, cross the street away from them if you can to show that you're leaving their turf, don't look 'em in the eyes, but keep moving steadily. With repeated passages, they'll become uninterested in you. A similar strategy also work with cops... they smell fear, and any erratic behavior will set off their senses.

I was also helping Mary's parents deal with the dread Microsoft Operating System. I'd convinced them to purchase a Wi-Fi DSL modem/router, a new wireless 'N' model, at not insignificant expense, so we could all use our laptops throughout the house. Their PC, though fairly recent, had slowed to a crawl, taking nearly seven minutes to boot up and be usable. Mary's oldest brother was also having trouble with an infected PC.

Seriously, I do not know how people can stomach Windows. It's always the same: you boot up and get a spray of reminders about this-and-that malware detector expiring in so many days, notifications about the last run or prompts to ignore the prompt this time or be continually prompted, confusing and conflicting messages between Windows and third-party firewalls and virus scanners, and so on, ad infinitum. The latest virus keylogs entries into popular online banking sites and delivers your account info to criminals in waiting. So you can literally be robbed just using Windows and surfing the net. But evidently, that's still not enough to get most people to try Mac or Linux? I really do not understand....

I must confess that I find the 'Big Sky' a little disturbing. There's a place on the Idaho-Montana border that must approximate some of the areas of Eastern Montana. It's like a large, extremely shallow, and nearly featureless bowl. Potato farms have petered out traveling northward; grassland and cattle ranges have taken over the scenery. Mountains appear far to the west, foreshortened by the incredible distance, but with a shape and shade indicating they must rise a mile or more from the plain. To the south and east, small rises block the true horizon, leaving the impression that the openness continues endlessly. And to the north, the slow rise to the 'crown of the continent' begins, a steep but steady grade through largely empty terrain.

The clouds, having gradually fallen for many, many miles, appear to hover only a hundred feet overhead. This pane of scattered clouds, pulled down by gravity, seems like it is pressing in, leaving you without that third dimension.

It feels like being on a different planet, maybe Majipoor or another giant sci-fi world, Earth-like but with double the radius. To me, it seems vaguely unsettling, perhaps a feeling of insignificance made obvious. I am glad to get back in the tiny car and continue on, an hour's drive to be amid topography again.

I guess it's common knowledge in the Flathead valley that the guy who owns the San Francisco 49ers has a palatial estate up here (now on sale for $8.8 million, I'm told) and throws a huge, private party for Independence Day every year (rumor has it that Duran Duran performed). The fireworks show he puts on dwarf those of the surrounding towns. So after the farmer's market in the morning, and a backyard barbecue in the afternoon, we'll head to a suitable spot to catch the spectacle. But first, my nephew Scott and I burn through the remains of his stash from last year: sending rockets off on crazy paths over the Dunkley's garden and setting off smoke bombs that momentarily drive away the mosquitoes.

The show did not disappoint. We watched from a vantage point somewhere on the outskirts of Kalispell, far enough away that the sound of the bursts did not carry, but close to a race track where the synchronous sound of motors in high gear filled aptly in, occasionally grinding down to a dull roar (a yellow flag, no doubt). Not only was it a big show with a big finale, but people and places all over the valley were putting on their own shows concurrently. I love fireworks. I love being in the middle of the action, as in Lordsburg NM where it's like a war zone (seriously, they should warn PTSD sufferers to leave town the first week of July). And it's great to enjoy the large-scale tableau, as we did one year from Griffith Observatory above LA, or often from Tucson, where fireworks aren't even sold (legally, that is ). So this was kind of a happy medium, with large and small bursts all around, but at a safe remove so you don't have to worry about your airspace being violated by wildly off-ballistic missiles shooting in from over your shoulder.

Smaller displays continued here and there in yards and fields as we drove home, and sporadic sounds, including occasional gunfire, into the late night. I'm sure I slept quite peacefully.

Wearily, I rang the bell for the eleventh time. The hotel manager was not responding. It was actually 1am Thursday morning (I had forgotten about the time change; damn Daylight Savings) and the tiny town of Hurricane, UT was as deep in sleep as I wanted to be at that moment.

But it didn't seem like that would be happening anytime soon. I considered the options (call another hotel? continue on to another city?) and didn't like any of them. It had been a late start: working late on Tuesday had led to most of the packing being done on Wednesday, hitting the highway around 2pm. The drive from Tucson had been almost uneventful: just outside of Flagstaff, some idiot almost ran us into the median. You're never too old to check your blind spots! And on the state line, a police roadblock had us stopped for five minutes; a bad wreck was being cleaned up.

Luckily for us, the long day was soon to be over. Another guest at the hotel arrived at the lobby and, recognizing our plight, mumbled something and got all aggro with the bell, banging out a rapid series of chimes. Suddenly, the door behind the desk popped open and the hotel manager, a sullen looking East Indian fellow, appeared! We were quickly checked in.

Unfortunately, in a pattern that was to repeat in three out of the four hotels, the room was not handicap accessible as we had reserved. So I had to go back, ring the bell again, probably just as the guy was getting back to sleep. But, not noticeably more sullen, he got us into a new room, and the day was finally done.

What kind of crazy address is 2250 South 1200 West? Is that a coordinate, an address or both? Frustrated, tired, and hungry, I tried to figure out which part of that was a street name, and how we would get to it. The first hotel in Ogden had not worked out and we were on the way to another. I had not counted on the stupidity of hotel managers who, once again, were not clear on the concept of accessibility. The hotel manager said--and he wouldn't be the first nor the last--"it's on the ground floor, so it is handicap accessible." No idiot, if my wife can't step over the tub to take a shower, or would break her butt without bars around the toilet, it's not fucking accessible. And they had already booked all the rooms that were actually accessible.

So Mary did what I should have done in the first place, call around and talked to the actual people at the front desk to see if they had rooms with walk-in showers, etc. It took a couple of calls to find one, and another call on the road to actually find the hotel itself.

It had been a fun but long day. Leaving sleepy Hurricane early, we had toured Zion National Park and Cedar Breaks. In the afternoon, rain had seemed to follow us northward through Utah, finally ending in Salt Lake City with a bright opening in the clouds above Ogden.

Zion was absolutely spectacular. I vowed to get back there soon to do some of the hikes. It is Amazing, towering red rock and white limestone rock formations. Layers of stratigraphy exposed in curving sections worn nearly smooth. At one point, Indian Paintbrush appeared to be growing straight out of a wall of sandstone by the side of the road. We hadn't even taken the tram to see the main part of Zion Valley.

Cedar Breaks was also definitely worth seeing, with cool weather (around 60F) at over 10,000 feet and alpine meadows full of wildflowers. Bluebells, columbine and a lighter pinkish version of Indian paintbrush appeared in droves. It turns out we were there a day before their annual wildflower festival. Clouds moved fast overhead, creating ever-shifting shadows moving across the pink-and-white rock.