Oliver’s Blog

Spring Serenity

SPRING SERENITY
By LARRY KLINE – Independent Record – 03/26/09
POLEBRIDGE – I awoke to a thump-thump-thump sound of fresh spring snow blowing off the trees and landing on the metal roof.
It was morning in North Fork Country.
Situated next to Glacier National Park’s western boundary about 20 miles south of the Canadian border, Polebridge offers visitors a relaxed
attitude and sweeping views of the Livingston Range to the east and the Whitefish Range to the west.
And the North Fork Hostel, with its cheap beds and off-the-beaten-path ambiance, serves as an excellent base camp to explore the park’s
west side and the Flathead River’s North Fork.
Named for a lodge pole pine bridge that crossed the river at the ranger station (until it burned in the 1988 Red Bench Fire), Polebridge in
spring is a getaway for wanderers, students, couples, singles and anyone seeking solitude along the snowy banks of the semi-frozen tributary.
Come July, this little town with a year-round population of 14 swells with tourists who want views of Bowman and Kintla lakes, and perhaps a
tasty treat from the historic Polebridge Mercantile, which sports some phenomenal baked goods, and a refreshing drink from the Northern
Lights Saloon.
Cross the new bridge now, though, and you’ll find a largely empty park open for exploration. With the cheap lodging available, this springtime
trip can be an affordable getaway and a chance to see Glacier in a way most never will.
I skied along the North Fork one afternoon earlier this month with my partner-in-adventure beside me, and spent about four hours in the
fresh snow.
It was a day for snow squalls, and we watched the storms drift in and out of the mountains. The river’s ice changed from gray to pale blue
in the shifting sunlight. We followed snowed-in ski tracks, and no one followed us. A curious raptor briefly circled above.
The river and the sky and the snow were ours alone.
Exhausted, we returned that night to pan-fry steaks in the hostel’s large, communal kitchen. There’s no electricity or natural gas in Polebridge,
so we cooked on a propane stove, under the glow of propane lights. A massive old woodstove, its black iron accented with chrome, occupies
one end of the kitchen.
We chatted with Oliver, the hostel’s owner, before heading to bed. He’s run the hostel for six years, and bought the place last winter.
No one seems to know the history of the building, which actually consists of two large old cabins that were moved together in the 1940s.
The hostel’s founder bought the place in 1978, and the inn has since served travelers with character and charm.
Beds are $20 per night. A shower is available, along with the kitchen and living room, for communal use. Couples and families have the option of
private rooms upstairs, and travelers also have a few cabins out back to choose from. More cabins are available north of the hostel in summer months.
Oliver is a friendly and knowledgeable host, and staying at the hostel is pretty simple living (the outhouses are festooned with all sorts of interesting décor). Bring food n a refrigerator is available n and be sure to conserve propane and water during the stay. Guests are expected to clean up after themselves, and Oliver claims to charge double rates to those who don’t do their dishes.
Come prepared, of course n there aren’t many services available in Polebridge. There’s no fuel and only one restaurant-bar establishment with variable hours. The Mercantile has everything a small-town store would have (canned foods, some other groceries and specialty items, along with the baked goods) but it’s best to bring enough food to last.
We chose to rent the Goat Chalet n its former residents were four-legged, according to rumors — and I would recommend the little cabin behind
the hostel to anyone who goes. The cozy structure (probably about 12-by-14 feet) holds a queen-sized bed, a small table and a wood stove
for heat. And it has a great morning-coffee porch, complete with rocking chairs.
The first night, we chatted with a soil analyst while a quartet of University of Montana students played spades. A few other guests read quietly
in the living room.
Rain fell the second night instead of snow, and we awoke to find the thigh-deep drifts crusty with ice. We strapped on the snowshoes and
headed up the Bowman Lake road. Scorched trunks, 20 years dead, reached toward the sky, with new growth already standing tall beneath.
The peaks of the Livingston Range n Glacier’s western front n slowly revealed themselves through the breaking clouds, the blazing sun catching
first one snowfield and then another. Jagged rocks grew out of the mists and then faded once more.
Oliver’s photo blog shows pictures of wolves in the area in January, so we were on the lookout for tracks. We got lucky and found a nice set
of three tracks leading out of the woods. They had followed the road for about 30 yards before turning off into the trees once more.
The tracks had likely been made the night before. I wondered if the wolves were still nearby, and if they could smell us.
I put a finger in the crisp print and traced the marks, trying to imagine the paw and its owner.
North Fork Hostel
How to get there: Drive to Columbia Falls (from Helena, the Seeley-Swan Highway is the most direct route, making for a roughly 500-mile
round-trip). Take Nucleus Avenue north from U.S. Highway 2, and then veer right onto Railroad Street. This curves to the left and turns
into the Montana Highway 486, which is the North Fork Road. Follow the signs to the town and the hostel. Other lodging is available
, including cabins that can be rented from the U.S. Forest Service and the Polebridge Mercantile.
Caution: The first 10 miles are paved before the road turns to gravel with intermittent pavement. We drove it March 14, and it was mostly
solid snow and ice. Four- or all-wheel-drive vehicles are recommended, and tire chains are suggested.
Click here for a complete list of accommodations and prices, and it’s best to call ahead (406-888-5241) for reservations.
by Oliver Meister

Polebridge hostel owner sells his keys to the world

By MICHAEL JAMISON of the Missoulian
POLEBRIDGE – His first impulse was to run, to turn tail and never look back at that ramshackle stack of logs the real estate agent kept calling a cabin.
“But I was looking for something a little more exciting than Ohio, and the more I thought about it, the more exciting it seemed,” John Frederick said.
Frederick wanted to live “somewhere on the rustic side,” and his future ex-wife wanted to run a hostel, like the European hostels in which she’d spent four years while traveling the continent.
And there it was, the decrepit cabin on 2 1/2 acres, backed by public land and a wild and scenic river – many, many miles from the nearest power line – where grizzly bears, despite their endangered status, outnumbered the human neighbors by a considerable margin.
Needless to say, he bought it.
Lock, stock and barrel for $39,000.
It was the ’70s, after all, and this ponytailed back-to-the-lander was “just living. That’s all. Just living.”
A full 30 years later, Frederick finally is selling his wildly popular North Fork Hostel, located on the outskirts of downtown Polebridge. The town, if it can be called that, is a northwoods outpost home to a saloon, a mercantile and one very colorful honorary mayor.
That’d be Frederick. And he’s retiring.
The getting here is no easy thing, what with the only route in being a jagged and rock-pocked road that eats tires the way a cheese grater eats the skin off your knuckles.
An hour north of Columbia Falls, almost to Canada and hard up to Glacier National Park’s western boundary, the North Fork Flathead River Valley remains much the same as the day Frederick first laid eyes on it. His hostel, though, is no longer derelict; it has been spruced up, fixed up, primed and painted and peopled with visitors from all over the world.
“Hostel travelers are different,” Frederick said. “They tend to be rather friendlier than your average tourist.”
They don’t want to hide away in a resort with all the comforts, he said. They want to “meet other people, talk to other people and get involved. They want to be a part of the place.”
He’ll remember David Mech, the wolf biologist who stayed for months on end, in the little cabin out back. When he left, Frederick was cleaning the place out and for whatever reason laid himself down on the bed. It was one of those old mattresses, the kind with all the little buttons sewn on top.
“Oh no,” Frederick said. “It was a horrible bed. Horrible. I felt so bad. That’s when I started the habit of laying in every bed at least once a year.”
Once a year’s enough. It’s a hostel, after all. No need to get too excited about bed buttons.
And he’ll remember Steve Lake, too, the English guy whose home back home was made from wood salvaged out of a ship dating to the 1500s. “Now that’s pretty cool,” Frederick said.
He’ll remember the Israeli fellow who was so excited about spotting a squirrel in the woods.
“That reminded me what a special place we have here,” Frederick said. “We’re all out looking for the big guys, the bears and the lions, and he’s thrilled to see a squirrel. Your perspective sure changes in a place like a hostel.”
That’s because here, so far from anywhere, the world comes to you.
They come from all around the big round globe, from big cities and from tiny towns, too. The hostel walls are papered in the world’s currency, many of the small bills now extinct, victims of inflation.
The Russians never came much, though, and neither did the South Americans or the Mexicans. “And it’s too uncultivated for the Japanese,” Frederick said.
But everyone else came in droves, especially the Germans.
“They love this place,” he said of the Germans. “They love the wilderness.”
Just ask Oliver Meister. He came, way back in 1992, from southern Germany to stay for a night – but he stayed for a summer, returned for years, and now is buying the place.
“I found it by pure accident,” the immigrant said. “I had been traveling around the world for about 10 years, and was camping up in Glacier Park.”
It was cold, he remembered, and rainy, and he asked a ranger where he could get in out of the weather for a day or so. “I found the hostel and I never left,” he said.
For the past five years, this inveterate traveler has not traveled, a fact that seems to genuinely surprise him as it crosses his mind.
“I didn’t have to travel,” Meister said. “The world comes to me.”
This international oasis deep in Montana’s backwoods is his home now, and as of the first of the year it will be his livelihood, too.
“Oliver’s a better businessman than I ever was,” Frederick said. “Someone gives me a sob story and I let them stay for free. He’s smarter than that.”
“There’s always a way,” Meister said of shelter at the hostel. “There’s always chores that need to be done. If someone’s short on cash, we can put them to work.”
In fact, before becoming manager of the hostel these many years, Meister himself traded labor for a place to hang his hat. And the beds, he said, are better now. No buttons.
The four basic rooms handle a baker’s dozen, the two small cabins a half-dozen more. Meister has plans for a private room upstairs, to handle the more “upscale” of the hostel’s thousands of guests that arrive each summer.
There’s the father-son groups that return year after year, the families and loners who show up each and every July like Capistrano’s swallows. There’s the old friends and the new friends and “all the loveable crazies,” as Frederick calls them.
Among the crazies, of course, is the lady who showed up on her bicycle, here so far from anywhere, with a huge old sleeping bag strapped to the rear fender and not much more.
“She was nutty as a fruitcake,” Frederick said. “She really would’ve been better under somebody’s supervision.”
But he swapped her a smaller sleeping bag, got her on her feet, pointed her back down the road to where the real world waited.
“A lot of people who come through are a little lost,” he said. “They’re looking for something. They stay a while, think about it, talk with people, and when they leave, they have a direction.”
It helps, of course, that there’s only one direction out, one road, and that heads south.
“Hostel folk are unique,” Frederick said. “They tend to be younger and maybe not so wealthy. Some are so idealistic they don’t even fit in the real world. Some are so practical you want to hit them on the head. They’re people with ideas, people who want to do things.”
After 30 years, though, all Frederick wants to do is get back to “just living.”
“Thirty years is a long time,” he said. “It saps your energy, and I just don’t deal with people so well anymore.”
Except the ones Meister sends his way. When an interesting traveler comes through, particularly an interesting lady, someone from somewhere with a story that Frederick should hear, Meister goes and gets the boss.
“They are so interesting,” Meister said of his guests. “They are the neatest people in the world.”
And they come, and keep coming, at $15 a night, because “here, it’s not the usual hubbub of the world. It’s not the rat race.”
It is, however, a business, and now that Meister’s bought the farm, so to speak, Frederick has a bit of advice for his friend.
“It was fun,” he said of his 30-year run. “I didn’t make any money at all, not a dime, but it was fun.”
Which the “hostel meister” knows, of course. You might say his first instinct, too, was to run.
“I didn’t really want to buy it,” Meister said, “but John wanted to sell. Basically, I bought it just to keep living here, to maintain my lifestyle.”
And the lifestyle of all those interesting and international globetrotters who arrive on the doorstep every summer.
“I love it,” Meister said. “I love the people who come through. They’re like family. It’s a friendly place, where people can be themselves.
“This is what I’m going to do for the rest of my life. I have everything I need from this world right here in Polebridge.”
by Oliver Meister

grizzly wide past

I don’t know who to credit with this, but it was on my old website and should be archived here!

 

GRIZZLY WIDE PASS — No one knows for sure when humans first discovered this impossible place.

 

Perhaps it happened on a warm summer evening like this one, an awe-struck group of backcountry travellers watching the mountain goats brave an amphitheatre of sheer rock atop southeastern B.C.’s Flathead Valley.

 

Then one billy goat breaks from the herd and adopts a methodical track along a barely perceptible switchback rising to the top of a hanging valley. Watching from a distance, you can almost sense the laboured breathing as he follows the receding alpenglow ever upwards to the clouds.

 

He approaches a final exposed rim below 2,982-metre Long Knife Peak and pauses while the winds tear at the last of his shaggy winter hair. And with a final grunt, he shoulders into the rock face and melts completely from sight.

 

The man who has led us here, Harvey Locke, first heard of this place from Andy Russell, the legendary guide-outfitter whose territory encompassed this remote region of the Rocky Mountains.

 

“It’s the width of a grizzly,” says the former Calgary lawyer who’s become one of North America’s foremost conservationists. “If Andy Russell hadn’t told me, I wouldn’t have believed it was here.”

 

NARROW CRACK IN THE ROCK

 

The next morning, not to be outdone, our group of nine hikers follows the same rocky zig-zag path up the hanging valley, passing rock walls painted with yellow and orange lichen.

 

Russell described his own ascent thus in the best-seller Grizzly Country: “The ledge was littered with goat sign, and in one spot we found the week-old track of grizzly. At the top of the rim we squeezed through a narrow crack in the rock and came out on another broad ledge overlooking a vast sweep of country beyond.”

 

 

Russell would be impressed with my hiking company this day: Pat Morrow, the mountaineering superstar from Invermere in B.C.’s East Kootenays who, in 1986, became the first person to hike the tallest peak on seven continents.

 

Morrow’s major expedition days are behind him. At 56, he suffers from a bulged disk in his back and requires help to haul the bulk of his gear, including a video camera, on our four-day hike through the contentious Flathead.

 

Still, he seems to levitate up the mountain, arms behind his back as though strolling through VanDusen gardens.

 

As we approach Grizzly Wide Pass, Morrow is first to proceed through and be staggered by the beauty.

 

“Whoa,” exclaims the explorer who has seen much and is not easily impressed. “This is world-class.”

 

A SWEEPING VIEW

 

Pulling myself up onto the final rock slab and inching closer to an expected abyss, I am rewarded by sweeping views of Montana’s Glacier National Park. Mount Cleveland, tallest in the park at 3,190 metres, is visible in the distance, and a strange glacially scoured rock feature known as a nunatak in the foreground.

 

The closest thing to an international boundary marker is a remnant patch of snow laced with fresh wolverine tracks directly below me. Not much farther away, two mule deer bucks take shade beneath a rock overhang. And the warning cries of hoary marmots pierce the thin mountain air as a golden eagle patrols overhead.

 

One member of our hiking group, Joe Riis, sets up a remote camera on the rocks overlooking the pass to capture goats, grizzlies, or anything else that might pass through. “I guess I’m getting known for this remote stuff,” says the Wyoming photographer, who freelances to National Geographic and is next off to capture B.C.’s spirit bears for the BBC.

 

Grizzly Wide Pass (Locke allows he might have created the name rather than obtained it directly from Russell) is so spectacular that nature artist and Order of Canada recipient Clarence Tillenius came here in July 1961.

 

To this day, his painting is part of a grizzly diorama on display at the Canadian Museum of Nature.

 

Over the years, Russell gave up the gun for the camera and became a champion for the iconic omnivore and its imperilled habitat. He even suggested this quadrant of B.C. become a national park, taking its place alongside Glacier National Park and Waterton Lakes National Park, visible to the immediate east in Alberta.

 

Russell, who died in 2005 at age 89, was neither the first nor the last to issue a conservation clarion call for B.C.’s Flathead Valley. Locke notes that the legendary John George (Kootenai) Brown, first superintendent of Waterton park, touted the idea of an expanded park to serve as a wildlife “breeding ground” in 1911.

 

A century of failed lobbying and planning processes later, a coalition of conservation groups from the U.S. and Canada (with funding from U.S. foundations, largely based in Seattle) continues to campaign for national park status for much of B.C.’s Flathead Valley and an end to contentious natural resource projects.

 

They describe the convergence of the Flathead, Waterton, and Glacier as the Crown of the Continent, its various streams making their way to the Pacific Ocean, Hudson Bay, and Gulf of Mexico.

 

1,000 VASCULAR PLANTS

 

The Precambrian rocks here are the oldest in the Canadian Rockies at more than one billion years old; sedimentary layers contain fossils of stromatolites, single-celled algae that represents the earliest life forms on Earth.

 

The Flathead region is also home to more than 1,000 vascular (stemmed) plants, a dazzling summer array that reflects prairie, Pacific, and even boreal influences.

 

Harvey points along the route to Labrador tea, a plant near the south end of its range, and sky pilot at its northern limit. “In the Flathead, the rules don’t apply,” he asserts.

 

B.C.’s Flathead River is known to Americans as the north fork of the Flathead River, which is designated a National Wild and Scenic River, its undammed waters eventually flowing to the Columbia River.

 

A report by the U.S. Wildlife Conservation Society in 2001 described the Flathead as perhaps the “single most important basin for carnivores in the Rocky Mountains.” Because wolves, grizzlies, wolverines, marten, and lynx move across the international border, this is a “landscape that must be managed as one integral, ecological unit.”

 

The U.S. Department of the Interior reported in 2008 the Flathead “hosts one of the most diverse and unique native aquatic ecosystems throughout North America,” including B.C. spawning habitat of the threatened bull trout.

 

Not surprisingly, proposals over the years for open-pit coal mining and coal-bed methane exploration in B.C.’s Flathead Valley have generated concerns on both sides of the border, including from American senators in Montana, about the impact on world-class wildlife ecosystems and on water quality downstream.

 

The Outdoor Recreation Council of B.C. named the Flathead the province’s most endangered river in 2009, while American Rivers rated the U.S. side of the Flathead the fifth most endangered.

 

That kind of publicity can have a chilling effect on industry.

 

TEMPORARY VICTORIES

 

BP (British Petroleum) announced in February 2008 it is not proceeding with plans for coal-bed methane exploration in the Flathead. And the provincial-federal environmental process for Cline Mining Corporation’s proposed coal mine in the Flathead headwaters is stalled.

 

Still, conservationists consider these only temporary victories in light of provincial land-use plans that still permit resource extraction.

 

Their campaign is pushing for 45,000 hectares, including the Flathead River east to the continental divide at Waterton Lakes National Park, to be folded into Waterton.

 

Another 300,000 hectares west of the Flathead River and north to Banff National Park would be declared a provincial wildlife management area. Such a designation would allow connectivity to other protected areas to the north and would allow logging, hunting, and all-terrain vehicles respectful of wildlife values.

 

Mining, coal-bed methane, or oil-and-gas extraction would be allowed, but not in the Flathead.

 

Conservationists claim to have the public on their side, citing a 2008 poll that found seven out of 10 Kootenay residents supported a national park in the Flathead.

 

But some powerful opposition remains.

 

Kootenay East Liberal MLA Bill Bennett resigned as mines minister in February 2007 over an e-mail sent to Maarten Hart, a veterinarian and president of the Fernie Rod and Gun Club who had complained about the government giving hunting allocations to guide-outfitters at the expense of residents.

 

“It is my understanding that you are an American, so I don’t give a s— what your opinion is on Canada or Canadian residents,” Bennett wrote.

 

“As someone who has spent the past six years working my ass off for my constituents, I am not about to take that kind of bulls— from someone who, for all I know, is up here as an American spy who is actually interested in helping the U.S. create a park in the Flathead.”

 

FORCES NOT JOINED

 

While hunting and conservation groups have joined forces in several areas of the province, including the Northern Rockies near Fort St. John, on conservation issues, not so in the Flathead.

 

The B.C. Wildlife Federation, boasting it represents 35,000 hunters and anglers either through individual or club memberships, argues a national park in the Flathead is “completely unnecessary and will only detract from the use, enjoyment and economic benefits of this region to the British Columbian economy.”

 

The federation adds: “Montana politicians must also respect that the Canadian Flathead is B.C.’s jurisdiction and that within Canada’s acknowledged international obligation to steward waterways upstream from the U.S., we will manage the Canadian Flathead in accordance with responsible British Columbia standards and policies.”

 

Locke explains that politics makes for some important differences in the shared Flathead ecosystem.

 

Animals are protected in Waterton and Glacier, but vulnerable to legal hunting should they cross into B.C.

 

Grizzly Wide Pass is actually located within 10,921-hectare Akamina-Kishinena Provincial Park, a wilderness open to hunting.

 

The Ministry of Environment says that hunters killed the following game animals in the Flathead in 2007: 62 white-tailed deer, 35 elk, 15 mountain goats, 14 moose, eight mule deer, six black bear, one bighorn sheep, and one grizzly.

 

Harvey says it is B.C.’s “dirty little secret” that hunting is widespread in provincial parks despite the fact that only about two per cent of British Columbians are licensed hunters.

 

TIMBER CUTTING ALLOWED

 

Locke, who is conservation vice-president of The Wild Foundation based in Colorado, also notes that the boundaries of Akamina-Kishinena were drawn by the province to allow timber cutting in lower-elevation Akamina Creek.

 

And he argues that B.C. Parks is so short of cash that there is almost no on-the-ground management or enforcement of hunting activities.

 

Our hike up Grizzly Gulch Creek to Starvation Pass and ultimately Grizzly Wide Pass had no signage and parts of the trail were plugged with fallen trees.

 

“The deadfall takes the edge off the trip,” confirmed Alberta backcountry horseman Ross Taylor, whose party of two was the only one encountered during our hiking trip about 100 km south of Fernie.

 

The debate over the future of the Flathead continues to gain steam and international recognition.

 

At a June meeting in Seville, Spain, the 21-member world heritage committee of the United National Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (including Canada) voted unanimously to send a mission to “evaluate and provide recommendations on the requirement for ensuring the protection” of the Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park. The park was established in 1932 and became a 457,614-hectare UNESCO world heritage site in 1995.

 

“Protecting this valley is not a loss for B.C.,” argues Montana-based Will Hammerquist of the National Parks Conservation Association, who attended Seville with Fernie’s Ryland Nelson of Wildsight to lobby for a successful vote. “It’s an area we are fortunate to share. Let’s work towards that.”

 

The official position of Parks Canada is that B.C.’s Flathead remains an “area of interest,” but that a national park feasibility study cannot proceed without support from both the B.C. government and aboriginals.

 

The Ktunaxa first nation, whose B.C. bands are spread between the Invermere and Cranbrook areas, has agreed to the study, but so far the B.C. government is not budging.

 

Or talking, it would seem.

 

Bennett did not respond to The Sun’s request for an interview. Nor did the the ministry of intergovernmental relations, which has the lead on the Flathead issue.

 

Locke remains optimistic. He prefers to think that the B.C. government is being “reflective rather than uncommunicative” and that it is weighing its options for the transboundary Flathead as the conservation groundswell spreads

 

by Oliver Meister