Recharging the Creative Batteries

I just got back from 10 days in Glacier National Park, Montana.  It’s a great place for hiking or just kicking back for a few days to enjoy the scenery.  And if you want to see the glaciers, you need to hurry, because they are melting at a rate that will make them just a memory by 2020.

Of course, if you have not heard, it’s been extremely dry across most of the West Coast, including Glacier.  And accordingly, wild fires have been a problem.  And when there is a temperature inversion, all that smoke can get trapped in the valleys, as it did one day for us.  Here is a shot from around 3:30 PM from the Many Glacier Lodge.

Seeing wildlife is another of the reasons to go to Glacier, and we saw quite a bit – deer, moose, antelope, mountain sheep, etc.  But somehow, we missed the bears.  We knew they were around, as you have the park’s standard reminder.

And then, the rangers occasionally post a more urgent notice.

And finally, when the mixture of bears and hikers reaches a critical mass, you get trail closures.  Interestingly, we had been at the location described on this sign, or very close to it, about the same time it was posted.  But luckily (or unluckily, depending on your perspective), we saw no bears on the trail.

As for me taking this trip to recharge my creative batteries – well no, that was not really the case.  It was just a bit of vacation.  And actually, I tended to take the idle moments on this trip – on the train, on our balcony in the evenings, even in a city park in Cut Bank, Montana – to write on book 2.  But when you are writing a blog about writing, and you took 10 days off for some R&R, you have the give a blog post title that fits the theme.  Right?