Labor of love

Family matriarch enjoys rickshaw ride to Sperry Chalet

When the geology professor asked students to jot down their favorite place on earth, Elsie Taylor wrote Sperry Chalet in Glacier National Park.

But in her mind she thought, "But I'll never see it again."

At 79, Taylor's hips had seen better days. Dislocations, surgeries and complications meant she relied on crutches to walk. She couldn't even straddle a horse.

Taylor's connection to the chalet, and the camaraderie and sweeping views it offers, are no passing fancy. Although she now lives in Seattle, Elsie Taylor was born into an outdoorsy family in Butte. Her father, John B. Taylor, cruised timber with Bob Marshall, eventually becoming superintendent of the Lolo National Forest.

After moving around as a forester's kid, Elsie returned to graduate from the University of Montana and raise her family in Kalispell.

Over the course of several decades living near the park, Taylor figures she made as many as 60 trips to the remote lodge, toting children and treats for a niece, and later a daughter and friends, who staffed the chalet.

The rustic outpost, built in 1913, is accessible from Lake McDonald by way of a 6.7 mile-trail that gains more than 3,000 feet in elevation. Taylor, a former race walker, used to cover the distance in two and a half hours on a good day. Now, the chalet may as well have been on the moon it seemed so unattainable.

But her children envisioned a rocket ship, of sorts.

On a perfect summer day in late August, Taylor's entire extended family conspired to celebrate the summer of her 80th birthday with a trek to Sperry Chalet. Using an off-road wheelchair built for paraplegic hunters, Taylor's children, grandchildren and in-laws hauled her up the steep and rocky trail.

"Mom can neither walk nor ride a horse up here, but this is her favorite place and we wanted to do something special for her birthday," said her son John McGarvey, who traveled from near Raleigh, N.C., for the occasion.

The wheelchair was rigged like a rickshaw for pulling. It pitched and rolled, stalled against rocks, and tipped. Part way up, Taylor said the going was easy, punctuated "with moments of terror." Taylor held on and the team made it to the chalet in four hours, a respectable time for many who simply hike the trail.

"It was a constant jostling," Taylor said. "It would get on one wheel at times, but I was never scared it would flip. I had three sons, a son-in-law, a grandson and two grandsons-in-law keeping me upright."

At 17, Taylor's grandson Ryan McGarvey was the youngest workhorse in the traces. "It was tough," he said, nursing a sore neck and back. "We had one person in pulling and one person pushing."

The family borrowed the rugged wheelchair from MonTECH at the University of Montana. The chair was designed by George Young, an avid outdoorsman who was paralyzed in a rollover accident. He rigged the chair for bow hunting. The McGarvey clan added the rickshaw outfitting.

It's unusual to see wheeled vehicles on the more rugged trails in Glacier National Park, but park rules absolutely allow their use.

"Anybody with mobility impairment can use whatever nonmotorized aid they need to get wherever anybody else is able to," said Jack Gordon, a landscape architect who serves as accessibility coordinator for the park.

Taylor said she doubts rides like hers will start crowding the trails any time soon.

"There aren't going to be lots and lots of people pushing those things up the trail," she said. "It was a terrible shove to get up here."

Ultimately, 21 family members - four generations - assembled at the lodge for the weekend. "Everyone with my DNA is here," Taylor said.

Taylor cried when she reached the chalet, and reveled in how little had changed about the place in the years since she last visited. The mattresses are firmer, there's a new composting outhouse and the woodstove has been removed from the sleeping cabin.

The park itself, Taylor said, is changing in some ways. Her rickshaw couldn't take her to Sperry Glacier, and she said that might be for the best.

"Not only is the trail too rough, but the story is too sad," she said, referring to the effect climate change has had. Sperry Glacier, roughly four miles from the chalet, is melting. What once was an 800-acre block of ice is now 250 acres. "I'm getting old. I want happy stories," Taylor said.

And the new stories appeared to be happy ones. The family spent two nights celebrating Taylor and their long history with the chalet, singing, laughing and just catching up.

The family credits Margaret Henderson with the idea of bringing the family matriarch up the trail. Taylor's youngest child, Henderson lives in Kalispell. She worked at the chalet in 1982 and again with her husband, Michael, in 1987.

"This has been a family place," Henderson said. "My mom probably carried each of her kids up here. My grandfather made his last trip up here on horseback when he was 82. This is just a special, special place."

White is an assistant professor at the University of Montana School of Journalism.