Seeley Lake

July 23rd, 2024

I drove south along the Swan River and over the divide to the Clearwater River drainage. I camped at Lake Alva a little north of the tourist town of Seeley Lake, Montana. Most people here were taking advantage of the string of lakes on the Clearwater River to escape the heat wave.

I spent my first day having lunch at the Chicken Coop (good food) and then visiting the market to resupply with groceries. The town is a single strip along the main highway with a good number of places to eat including small drive-up stands and food trucks.

Snow capped peaks could be seen across the lakes, but were a little hazy from smoke of Oregon wildfires. Montana had placed a restriction on campfires due to the long period of hot, dry temperatures. This did not affect me, as I rarely have an evening campfire. It seems like to much trouble for one person and I generally am asleep by dark.

On my second day, I rose early to beat the heat, and went for a hike to Holland Falls. This 3.5 mile round trip hike is through forest along the shore of Holland Lake and up to a small gorge above the end of the lake. There, a very nice misty and cooling fall tumbles from the cleft between mountains and cascades down to the lake.

The hike was very nice with only a short section of exposed trail as it nears the gorge and falls. A set of trekking poles comes in handy to avoid a nasty fall. As I left the cooling air around the cascading creek, I rounded a steep hillside that blocked the noise of the water. Sometimes, what makes a hike wonderful is not just what you see, but what you hear. In the sudden quiet, I heard a sound more common in the north woods of Michigan, Wisconsin, or Minnesota. Several Loons were calling below on the lake and the calls created an echo between the steep north and south shoreline. If you don’t know what a Loon sounds like, search on the internet for a recording. It is a primordial yodeling call that is uniquely natural. It makes you instantly attuned to the world of forest, stream, and lakes that surround you. For me, it brings an awareness that this is where I belong, not behind the desk of a glassed in office 20 floors above a street of honking traffic and rushing people.

The sounds and sights of the forest and mountains along a trail, has the ability to remove stress. No matter how ergonomic your office chair is, and how thick the carpet, the city and your office are stress inducers. I remember a place I worked many years ago in the west Chicago suburb of Downer’s Grove. The stress at the company was palpable, mostly due to tight delivery dates and a few troublesome employees who seemed to love drama at the expense of doing anything useful. I and a friend brought baseball bats in our vehicles each day. Rather than using our hour long lunch break to consume a sandwich, soda, or cross the street for a Portillo’s Polish Sausage, we would drive to the nearby batting cages and crush baseballs. Each time we swung our arms and felt and heard the contact of wood and ball, it seemed a little bit of the stress would escape. We could then return to the office and make it through the afternoon.

The thing I remember the most about that office, however, was related to the location of my desk. It was in a corner of the 2nd (and top) floor of the building and faced out along the row of windows on that side of the building. Below, as in many suburban office locations, there was a retention pond. On that pond a small flock of Canada Geese would be loitering each morning. Between 9 and 10 a.m., with a massive flapping of feet and wings, they would lift off and fly north, probably to nearby fields for food. North was directly at the window where I was sitting. I would sit there and stare as 10 to 20 geese came straight at me, eye to eye, on a collision course. At the last second, with a quick change in pin feather angle, they would sail just over the eave of the roof, mere feet above my head and disappear. That was my mid-morning stress relief.

My gift for putting up with the stress for another 42 years, was money dumped into my checking account twice a month. Now it is the haunting yodel of a wild Loon on a secluded lake, 5000 feet up in the mountains. The latter is a much better gift.