Day 10: Tuesday, August 22nd
We had made plans to meet Tim and Laura at 2pm on the steps of the Swiftcurrent camp store, so we got another early start. We decided to just pack up and head out and eat some breakfast at the chalet, instead of camp, so we got to the chalet just after 8am. Unfortunately, there was no one at the desk (I wanted to buy a candy bar), but we sat on the chalet steps and ate some granola bars before visiting their restrooms and then heading on. We got to the pass pretty quickly and stopped for the obligatory photo when the view opens up down the valley.
I think with our 'deadline' of getting in by 2pm, we hiked much faster today. Of course, it was also almost all down hill. We finally started seeing some hikers just before we hit the valley floor. At the stream crossing, we met a woman who had hiked up with her husband. He was going to continue on for a while, but she asked if she could hike with us. We felt a little cocky given the improved speed we had that morning and told her she was welcome to if she could keep up. Turns out, we just slowed her down. But she was a good sport and we chatted for most of the way back until she decided to dust us a half mile or so from camp.
We did have one adventure this day, as we hiked around a bend in the trial to find a mother and moose cow and calf in the stream just ahead of us. The mother decided she was ready to move on and came right up in front of us to cross the trail (in the picture below, you can just see her back going behind the rocks). Unfortunately, the calf was not as brave and the mother got quite a ways down the trail. There were some other hikers coming up the other way and the calf got separated. We followed cautiously behind, but ended up retreating again when the calf came running back up the trail after getting spooked. This time we were a little more conservative and eventually the calf was able to catch up. There was quite a crowd by the time they got to the lake, so we took the opportunity to keep moving and get ahead of them.
The rest of the hike was uneventful and we made it to Swifty right at 1pm. We didn't see Tim or Laura, so we grabbed a bench and Dad headed in to find some ice cream. I started scanning the parking lot to see if I could find my car. Almost immediately, I spotted what looked like my car with what looked like Tim putting something in the trunk. I walked the 100 or so feet across the lot and it was indeed them. Turns out they had beat us in by a few minutes. So we all sat on the deck and started filling each other in our trips. After a few minutes, we decided to finish our stories over lunch so we went in to the restaurant. We had not yet showered, so I'm sure we offended quite a few people, but the food was pretty good. Although I could have probably eaten cardboard by this point and it would have been a relief from dehydrated meals.
Tim's trip report is already up, so that was the bulk of our conversation. After lunch we grabbed showers, checked out the camp store (hadn't made it into stores before our trip) and then headed out. We didn't get too far before we decided to grab some drinks, we made a stop at Park Cafe and had some huckleberry pie and ice cream, grabbed some gatorade, and got moving again. We were staying in Kalispell again that night as we were flying out at 6am the next morning, but we decided to take the Sun road as we hadn't gotten past Logan Pass in our two previous trips from the west side of the park. It's been since 2013 since I was last here, so I hadn't yet seen what it looked like post fire. It's a lot different! We had a lot of smoke, especially on the eastern end of St. Marys - so the iconic view of Wild Goose Island was washed out and you couldn't even see the mountains behind it. We hit no traffic until we got to Logan Pass. The parking lot was still about half full. Just as we reached it, a giant dually truck with Texas plates cut us off and tore down the mountain. It was wide enough that they barely fit in the inside lane, but no worries! They just took up both lanes around the corners! After nearly driving a car or two off of the road, they finally slowed down. We caught them at some construction, after which they started crawling down the road taking pictures. Eventually they pulled over and we zipped by to head out.
We stopped by Whitefish to say hi to Pete again (Hi Pete! Thanks again for all of your help!) and to drop off some carry on bags for Tim and Laura at the Firebrand hotel. After that, we hunted down a car wash (as my rental agreement said I wasn't supposed to drive on unpaved roads and we had several round trips to Kintla worth of dust on the car). We found one in Kalispell and I paid for the basic wash and then started following the instructions to pull in. For some reason, I didn't think of rolling up my window as I pulled in, so we were surprised by a blast of water right in the face and all over the inside of the car. So after frantically rolling it up, we dried off the inside of the car while the outside was sprayed off.
After dinner, we headed back to the hotel where we packed all of our gear up in our large duffel bags before getting to sleep.
Epilogue:
We had an uneventful trip home, but arrived back in Houston to hear that the tropical disturbance had become a named storm, Harvey. Dad decided to stay in Houston that night and head back home the next morning (4 hour drive). We considered heading out too, but at this point the storm patch was no where near certain and it was still likely it would hit as a tropical storm. So we decided to stay in Houston. Thursday, I went back in to work to try to catch up on two weeks of emails. During the day, the storm blew up to a Category 1 hurricane. I told all of my guys they were welcome to head out of town and work remotely. Only one guy decided to head out, but it was only because he was going to a wedding that weekend so he was going to beat the traffic. Everyone else came back in the next morning and we watched as it exploded to Category 4 status. At lunch, we called it a day and everyone headed home to prepare. I (along with 4 other men in the neighborhood) spent some of the afternoon helping another neighbor dig a drainage ditch from their backyard to the street.
Friday night, the first of the rain bands started to reach Houston. I put out a 5-gallon home depot bucket to use as a rain gauge. We woke up Saturday having gotten 4-5" over night. But in an odd turn of events, we ended up between bands and had a beautiful morning. All of the neighbors were out in their yards and the kids played in the puddles. We even went out to dinner that night before rain started back up around 7pm. It was really coming down and we had about 6" of rain in two hours, so before we went to sleep, I walked outside to take a look.. This was the first time I got nervous as water was starting to fill up our street. Luckily, we had again landed in between bands for a few hours. Other neighbors were out as well and we walked down to check the gutters. We found out the local bayou had already topped its banks and was flooding houses just a few blocks away. We weren't too worried about our home, but due to the layout of the neighborhood, we were now flooded in. So we took some time getting everything up off the floor before heading to bed.
We ended up with 19" of rain from 7pm to 7am. The bayou was still over its banks and rising - it got as high as our sidewalk (6" below our doorstep). Again, we were fortunate to slip between rain bands for a few hours to let some of the water recede. The boys had a great time playing in the street (and then getting really good baths).
I waded a few blocks away to see if I could help some of the flooded families out. There were people everywhere with canoes, jetskis, and even pulling air mattresses helping neighbors get things out of their homes. My wife made a bunch of sack lunches and I took them and water down to where people were being evacuated and passed them out. About this time, the coast guard helicopters came into the neighborhood and proceeded to air rescue a number of people from their roofs. It was very surreal watching this happen only a few blocks down the street and then seeing it on the national news.
This is the corner of our street, our house is just out of view to the left.
Some of the neighbors helping get people out of their flooded homes.
Four blocks from our home. The flooded bayou is just past the school crossing sign.
The gap in the rain bands saved us from it getting much much worse. We went almost 12 hours without much more than light rain which let the bayou clear out a lot of the water. The major flooding started moving North and East of us, but it didn't get any worse. We were able to get out of our neighborhood after another 2 days. All in, we recorded 41.5" of rain in just under 5 days. The vast majority of that was the second and third day.
Houston has been working hard to recover and now, a month after, people are starting to adjust. There was an unbelievable response of people helping people - and not friends, just strangers helping anyone that needed it. It was great to see, given all of the acidic political rhetoric out there these days. I was planning a day off at our office for all of our employees for some team building in the coming weeks, but my team asked if we could cancel the 'fun day' and instead help a stranger clean out their home. So we took a day off of work, found someone in Barker Cypress that had had 2 feet of water in their home and gutted it down to the studs.
Anyways, there's still a long road to normal. But we survived and I was proud to be a Houstonian. I was in Naples, FL last week for work on the heels of Irma and got to see it all over again. Hopefully they'll be able to recover quickly too.
That's it! 2017 is in the books. Now looking forward to another trip!