The last best place is not replaceable

A few evenings ago, we were sitting in Vic's Place, on 1st Street, talking with Kurt Johnson, who, with his wife Candy, owns Vic's, the classiest joint in Havre. The "we" is my wife, Marged, the famous Havre poet, who inspires me in all things.

Normasn Bernstein

Vic's is named after Vic Spinler, of Hingham, who has kept the Park Hotel running for more than 50 years. He's 84 years old and can still tell you about every little quirk and oddity in the building, that was built in 1910, just across from the park in front of the Great Northern train station. Back during the Prohibition years, revenuers would perch with their binoculars on top of the roof of the Park Hotel, looking for smugglers bringing in whiskey from Canada, coming into town from the north on 7th Avenue, across the railroad tracks.

Kurt Johnson is a gentle big bear of a man, who is an expert on all things beer, of which Marged and I know very little, but Kurt was determined to turn us into beer drinkers, even though our usual habit of the past 45 years is to split a bottle of dark Mexican beer, maybe two or three times a year. Kurt, whose smile and hustle is infectious, was making some headway, giving us small samples of half a dozen microbrewery offerings plus other exotic stuff, some of which actually tasted quite good. The small samples do add up, however.

Anyway, that was just how things got started before Kurt asked if we'd heard about the opening of the Going to the Sun Road, up at Glacier National Park. Kym Hall, the park superintendent, had originally announced the opening would probably be delayed until July because of funding cuts, due to the congressional sequester. Their budget had been cut by a whopping $682,000. But, it seems additional money was now being donated by a nonprofit organization called the Glacier National Park Conservancy, whose members are committed to supporting our national parks, and the snow removal could proceed as scheduled, with no additional employee layoffs.

The 50-mile road is the only east-west through-access to the beauty and wildness of Glacier National Park. The road was built in 1932, and crosses the Continental Divide at Logan Pass. Keeping it open after the winter snows is quite a challenge and very costly. There can be as much as 80 feet of snow on the road at Logan Pass. The road takes about 10 weeks to plow, with equipment that is designed to move 4,000 tons of snow an hour, which sometimes clears only 500-feet a day of the 50-mile road.

The Going to the Sun Road is normally open from the first part of June until mid-October, and in June is when the snow melting down the steep mountainsides creates a symphony of waterfalls and is a sight to behold. The last time Marged and I drove the road was in 2011, when it opened on July 13, the

latest opening ever, and it was still a wonderland of sight and sound.

The conversation with Kurt opened a bunch of memories for us, not just of Glacier, but of the unique sights of Montana wilderness that bring us so much pleasure.

We have hiked the Great Bear Wilderness going up to pristine Lake Stanton, just below Grant Ridge, where it seems not a dozen people a year make the trek.

We have spent an entire day, still and quiet in the trees, just waiting for the elk of the Missouri Breaks to move into their feeding grounds, where the bulls' bugling declares who is in charge of which cows, where testosterone runs high, and a full charge of a bull elk, brandishing 40 or so pounds of antlers, is just a few feet away, if another bull gets too close.

We have hauled many a backpack of food up to the top of Mount Otis, a gentle hour's walk to the top of Beaver Creek — a not-so-gentle three-hour's climb if you go up from the east side — with a 360 degree view of Havre's backyard, in all its beauty, and spent the day just looking, and watching (two different activities), and enjoying our never-ending picnic, sometimes in the blazing hot sun of summer, sometimes on the cool, still snow-covered ground of early spring.

We have marveled at the constant change of sky color and ground scenery, that plays like a motion picture, on the short ride from Havre to Great Falls, especially at sunrise and sunset, as the big sky really does become bigger, and projects a dozen different hues of blue, every few minutes.

We have hiked into the very ancient Bear Paw Mountains, south of Chinook, where wild horses used to run by the hundreds, and where Robert Eigell got the inspiration for his wonderful book about this area, uniquely titled "Cows, Cowboys, Canners and Corned Beef and Cabbage." This was a land that

belonged to the Cree or Stoney Indians, and the buffalo.

We have been up and down the Milk River, bird country, that was first named in 1805 by Lewis and Clark, the first white men to see this southern tributary of Canada's Whitemud River, that was once called Frenchman Creek, that flows over the white clay riverbed, whose sediment gives it its whitishcolor and its name.

What a wonderful country this is, this Last Best Place, called Montana. We need to be careful with it.

It is not replaceable.

(Norman Bernstein is a roving correspondent for the Havre Daily News.)