Trudging through to the bitter end

If you had dinner guests who were charming and interesting until right after dinner, when they began responding to all attempts at conversation with blank stares, chances are you'd conveniently misplace their phone numbers.

If you're at a movie that you're convinced is the most magnificent film ever made, and then about two-thirds of the way through the director takes an inexplicable interest on the pattern of cracks on a concrete sidewalk, you probably wouldn't buy the DVD for repeat viewings.

Yet so many of us in Northwest Montana persist in pursuing the one activity almost guaranteed to have a bad ending - my own favorite back-to-nature pastime, hiking.

To me, hiking is the reason for summer. It's close to the perfect activity, especially here. You get exercise with the bonus of astounding views, you get in touch with your inner explorer, and you get to leave behind the strings of chain stores and lines of cars that populate every city in America and enter a landscape that can't be duplicated.

But I can think of few hikes where I wished, upon the first glimpse of the sun glaring off of the vehicles waiting patiently for their owners in the parking area, that I could turn around and add just a few more miles.

The Upper Holland Loop, so named in Erik Molvar's "Hiking Montana's Bob Marshall Wilderness" guide, is the prototype of the hike you just want to be done with, already.

After climbing 3,630 feet on nine miles of trail that take you by lovely lakes, up flower-covered hillsides and past a fascinating peak that bears a resemblance to the rubble of a bombed building, you start the painfully steep descent.

This time you only get four miles to cover the 3,630 feet of altitude change, on a trail featuring multiple switchbacks and the loss of both the arresting views of the Mission mountains and the spring your legs had at the hike's outset.

Then as you enter the deep, dark section of woods toward the end, the death march off the mountain runs into an unwelcome four-way convergence of trails, confusing to the exhausted mind and body.

The first time I did the loop with two friends, we were so beat that the intersection didn't register - we just kept on going on the path of least resistance, oblivious that we were headed nowhere.

After about a mile, we awakened from our stupor, and it became evident that we had gone astray. A few extra miles of joyless slogging was our penance for inattentiveness.

And though any hike in Northwest Montana requires that you be on the alert for bears, I've noticed the possibility of their presence generally turns into an afterthought as the day wears on.

The forced loud chatter, the occasional claps, the shouts to warn bears of your presence have all become tiresome. By that point, you'd be more than happy to curl up on the ground in the bear-defense fetal position anyway.

And who can forget, in those final miles, the glories of the intensity of late-afternoon heat, the woods that provide a wind-free shelter to the local mosquito and black-fly populations, warm drinking water and sore feet.

Although hiking is largely about escaping the motorized, paved-over technology-ridden culture we live in, nothing is quite so welcome at the end of a long journey by foot as the sound of a motor or a glimpse of asphalt.

But soon after you re-enter the "civilized" world, you remember the solitude, your lunch by the lake, the coolness of the high mountains - and forget the misery of those last leg-weary hours. And you can't wait to do the whole masochistic exercise all over again.

Reporter Heidi Gaiser may be reached at 758-4431 or by e-mail at hgaiser@dailyinterlake.com.