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The Glacier National Park Connection
for
three adventure novels
The Sun Singer
Garden of Heaven
Sarabande
Major portions of my novels are set in the Swiftcurrent Valley of Montana's Glacier National Park. Visitors to Many Glacier Hotel who hike to Grinnell Glacier, Iceberg Lake and the Ptarmigan Tunnel will recognize many of my place settings.
Why Glacier? While working at Many Glacier Hotel while in college, I climbed mountains, hiked for hundreds of miles, and found my favorite place on the planet. What a great place to visit. What a great place for novels about characters venturing off into the unknown.
at Many Glacier Hotel
EXCERPT: The central part of the quiet lobby stretched all the way to the building’s fourth floor roof. Immense tree trunks supported interior balconies that ringed the great room. The trees were polished smooth, no doubt by the hands of hundreds of children who tried to encircle them with their arms. He heard their high-pitched words of wonder, alive in the wood: Can you reach all the way around? No, too big, too big.
Many Glacer with Mt. Wilbur in the background.
on top of Chief Mountain (Nináistko)
EXCERPT: Nináistko was formed 100 million years ago when forces of incomprehensible power and magnitude slammed two slabs of the world together thrusting the older proterozoic rock 50 miles eastward up and over the younger cretaceous rock. Many said the great rocks that formed the backbone of the world were piled one upon the other and sculpted into shining mountains by Nápi, the Old Man who created the world from a ball of mud fetched up from the depths of the dark primordial waters by Muskrat. David stood upon the narrow limestone and dolomite summit ridge of Nápi's handiwork (or of a geologic thrust fault) on a cold September afternoon in 1963, because Katoya told him the mountain was in his path. As expected, Nináistko purred beneath his feet like a large cat.
Fall 2011
at Lake Josephine
EXCERPT: Sarabande heard the launch and saw the cabin fade from view behind them. The children were nosier than usual. In fact, they were shouting. Soon, she saw why. Sikimí was hopping along the beach on his hind legs.
“Holy crap,” shouted Sarabande, “is he shaking off fleas?”
“Not at all, he’s putting on airs for a boat-load of kids who’ll never forget him,” said Siobhan. She clapped her hands in applause. “That jump is called a courbette. Friesians can do it, and now we know night can do it while playing the role of a Friesian.”
Lake Josephine - NPS Photo. For more NPS photographs, click here.
NONFICTION - "Bears; Where They Fought: Life in Glacier Park's Swiftcurrent Valley"
EXCERPT: A hiker following Glacier Route Three west into the valley from the plains along lateral moraines left behind when the valley glaciers melted off 8,000 years ago will hear no residual growls from those fighting bears. No sign marks the spot. The wise aspen, spruce and pine keep their counsel. On a quiet day, however, those walking alongside the relatively recent Lake Sherburne reservoir may hear the voice of grandfather rock whispering a secret: within the scope of geologic time, all rivers are new, and the men and women who follow them are as ephemeral as monarch butterflies on a summer afternoon.
Swiftcurrent Lake with Grinnell Point (Left) and Mt. Wilbur (Right), still snowed in on May 2, 2011 - NPS Photo on Flickr. See the Flickr photostream.
Many Glacier Hotel 1963
nights, and old Swiss-style hotels were a fantasy land in spite of the hard work. We carried luggage, cleared dining room tables, mopped the floors, made the beds, and told guests yarns about the mountains.
Our summer included bridge games, long hikes, fresh fish, romances, twisted ankles, mountain climbing, boating, broken hearts and a lot of pictures more personal than this old black and white that doesn’t quite fit on my scanner.
I studied writing in high school and college and the craft I learned there was well worth the time. While I spent less time in the park, my total of seven months there over the span of several summers shaped my life and work more than any college course. Perhaps I was more impressionable than most or perhaps it is a writer’s natural focus on experience that has made this place loom larger than life.
For a writer, time neither steals away old joys nor heals old wounds, and I came away from the park with my fair share of both. For better or worse, they have sustained me and defined my outlook, while becoming the setting for my magical realism (Garden of Heaven: an Odyssey) novel and two contemporary fantasies (The Sun Singer and Sarabande).
Virginia Woolf once wrote that all of a writer’s secrets loom large in his work. I think that might be true because this setting impacted me just as much as Hogwarts impacted Harry Potter and “The Land” impacted Thomas Covenant. So it is that this faraway place flows out onto the page in my storytelling as a true love of mountains, wildflowers, bears and all the events that did happen or might have happened in the shining mountains.
In June, the management of Many Glacier Hotel in Glacier National Park figures out a way to pose the entire staff in front of a photographer for the summer picture. I no longer remember how many takes it took to make the photographer happy. And, though I thought I would always remember the names, home towns, and colleges of all the students in this picture, the details have long since become hazy.
We came from all around the country during the last week in May and spent the summer in the fantasy land of the Swiftcurrent Valley working as cooks, waiters, desk clerks and bellmen until mid-September. A lot of us came back the following summer, and some the summer after that, as has been the custom with the concessionaire’s summer help since the days when the Great Northern Railway (now, BNSF) owned and managed the facility.
For a Florida boy who had always wanted to see the mountains, Glacier Park’s horn-shaped mountains, stair-step valleys, cool summer
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Copyyright (c) by Malcolm R. Campbell, P. O. Box N, Jefferson, Georgia 30549
Read my collected posts about Glacier National Park, Montana in this FREE PDF e-book. Learn more about the scenery behind the stories.
