Glacier National Park 2021: God’s Autumnal Extravaganza! Day Six

Day 6: Saturday, 10/2/2021

On this Saturday morning, the sixth and final day of our journey to the sun, Doug, Steve and I slept in, as we knew before the day was over, we would be back in our own beds in Billings, Montana. Breakfast would not be in Kalispell. Doug and I had been telling our good friend Steve about the fine food at the Echo Lake Café in Bigfork, a small city of about 4,700 Montanan citizens forty-and-a-half miles almost due south of West Glacier, the western gateway to the Going-to-the-Sun Highway. Our journey to this great little gem in the wilderness, however, would only take about half an hour since we were staying in the southern part of Kalispell and that was just seventeen miles from the local eatery that stays full during the summer travel season. In fact, our server said that “locals stay away during the summer due to the long wait times.” I have always said the way to tell if a restaurant is any good will be by how long the waiting line is.

After breakfast we intended to drive through the Swan Valley, one of 44 scenic drives in Montana, on our way south. In S.A. Snyder’s Scenic Driving MONTANA, the route is Scenic Drive #3 Seeley Lake and the Swan Valley: Clearwater Junction to Bigfork. In 2020, Doug and I traversed this beautiful fall-foliage corridor in search of larch at their peak color. We were not disappointed. This year, however, our journey one month earlier did not bear fruit like the previous one, as it is an area comprised of more larch than aspen. And since larch does  not transform as early as their distant cousins, the drive was a nice, but not exceptional venture.

We arrived at the Echo Lake Café around 8:15 AM and had to wait a little over fifteen minutes to be served. That was nothing, however, compared to the average wait time during the summer, which can be as long as an hour. In fact, when I was here with my good friends Karen and Wayne during July, our wait was about three-quarters of an hour for lunch.  

Since Doug kept such detailed notes of our time at the Echo Lake Café, I am not going to add anything to his words. They are:

Bob ordered the Chicken-fried Steak Breakfast Special ($14.75), which consisted of the following items: Homemade chicken-fried steak topped with homemade gravy, served ordinarily with two eggs (but Bob requested an additional serving of home-fried potatoes), [home-fried potatoes] and your choice of toast, English muffin, or “our [daily] home-baked item,” which today was cinnamon coffee cake. Bob opted for the cinnamon coffee cake.

Wyatt ordered the ½ Cakes and Eggs Combo ($9.00), which consisted of the following items: One pancake, one fried egg over easy, and one strip of bacon.

I ordered the Homemade Granola Breakfast Special ($9.00), which consisted of the following items: Toasted almonds and pecans, real maple syrup, honey, coconut oil, cinnamon, organic oats, shredded coconut, raisins, and craisins, with an additional topping of blueberries added and a side of milk upon request. I also ordered a side (3 strips) of bacon ($4.00) and two scrambled eggs ($3.75). Note: McKenzie was our server, and Ahauna dispensed beverages.

Personal Reviews of our respective Breakfasts

My review of the Homemade Granola Breakfast Special, served with side orders of 3 strips of bacon and two scrambled eggs: Granola was excellent and, for me, provided a real trip down memory lane. Granola became popular in mainstream America back in the 1970s, and it was one of my staples for breakfast on two long cross-country trips in 1976 and 1978. Scrambled eggs were very good but ever so slightly rubbery. Bacon was cooked to perfection, neither to the point of being overly crisp or undercooked. Wyatt concurred with that assessment of his bacon. In Bob’s opinion, its texture was indicative of high-quality bacon with a good lean-to-fat ratio. Based on my description, Bob characterized the cooked status of bacon as crisp-tender, i.e., “crisp and tender instead of dry and crumbly.”

Wyatt’s review of the ½ Cakes and Eggs Combo: His fried egg was perfect, with no charring of edges, some-thing that he absolutely hates. The yolk was runny to the extent that sunny-side up fried eggs should be. He regarded its texture as ideal, with no rubberiness whatsoever. The buttermilk pancake was fluffy, served on a platter, and was at least 8 inches in diameter. Wyatt found the pancake to be very filling. Indeed, he was glad that he didn’t request a second pancake. He wanted to order the blueberry cobbler for dessert but simply didn’t have room. He rated both cuisine and service as 5-star. Doug did not really know the difference between Eggs, over-easy and sunny-side up. Wyatt’s egg was over-easy, meaning the egg was fried and turned (over-easy) so as not to break the yolk. This was the way our dad always had his eggs.

Bob’s review of the Chicken-fried Steak Breakfast Special: The chicken-fried steak was very good. Gravy also was good, with a creamy texture, exactly what you would expect as an accompaniment to chicken-fried steak. Bob regarded the overall flavor of this entrée as “just right,” as opposed to being overpowering. He described its taste more specifically as slightly sweet but, again, not to an overwhelming degree. Furthermore, the steak was cooked to the perfect consistency. Fried potatoes were cut into cubes with skins retained. Potato cubes were larger than those typically found in commercially sold Southern-style hashbrowns. Bob stated that the potatoes were a little on the dark side, somewhat reminiscent of Mama Janie’s “burned-just-right” fried potatoes. Some of the largest chunks were, predictably, not as thoroughly cooked. Nevertheless, Bob characterized potatoes as seasoned perfectly, with no need to add salt or pepper. He rated the cinnamon coffee cake as very good and assigned it a “B+” letter grade, noting that there was plenty of cinnamon streusel on top and a thin layer of streusel halfway through the cake.

For information about the Echo Lake Café visit (https://www.echolakecafe.com)

I had to stop at a gas station in Big Fork due to an emergency light coming on. However, it proved to be no major problem. I did, however, notice the oil gage was well down, so I bought some oil, and then we moved out, at about 11:00 AM, homeward-bound. The tripmeter was reading 20.2 at the time we left.

I did not take many photographs on this day. In fact, Steve drove most of the time while I rested in the back seat. Doug kept his notes and if there was anything of note, they alerted me. But I did not take  more than fifty pictures on our return trip.

A few of them, however, were from the Holland Lake Lodge at the edge of Holland Lake about fifty-three miles south of Echo Lake Café. Along the way, we passed some concentrations of aspens and cottonwoods, and though some of them were showing color, there wasn’t anything special. It wasn’t until we were well past the Swan Lake that the aspens began to “more prominently populate forests that border the corridor traversed by the Seely-Swan Highway. We turned left, at mile marker 35, onto Holland Lake Road. From there it was a little less than four miles to reach this out-of-the-way Inn nestled up on the shores of Holland Lake. With Holland Peak, at 9,356 feet, the tallest mountain in the Swan Range looking down, this quiet little spot would make a nice getaway and perfect staging area for viewing the larch in the southern end of the Seeley Lake-Swan Valley corridor known as MT-83.

Doug noted that he saw a sign that Holland Lake was a loon-nesting area. There was a pit toilet at the parking area for the Holland Lake trails, of which there are five different ones.

It is a little less than twenty-eight miles from the junction of Holland Lake Road and Montana State Route 83 to Seeley Lake, a CDP (census-designated place) in Missoula County. The town of approximately 1,300 sits at the southeastern corner of Seeley Lake and is only a few miles from the James Girard Memorial Tamarack Grove, on the other side of the lake.

I’ll let Doug’s words take over now: “As we approach Seeley Lake, both the lake and town itself, we are at an altitude of approximately 4,000 feet. Larches are currently and more clearly exhibiting the earliest signs of color transformation, i.e., the lime-green stage.”

With the tripmeter reading 106.4 miles, we turned off (left) onto Boy Scout Road. As Doug noted: “There are a few “early-bird” larch trees that are actually exhibiting legitimately yellow foliage.” After traveling 2.3 miles we crossed the Clearwater River and started looking for the Jim Girard Memorial Grove, otherwise known as the James Girard Memorial Tamarack Grove. Two-tenths of a mile later, we pulled into the small parking area on the left .The tamarack, or western larch, are, as Doug calls them, “confused conifers.” They look like any other evergreen, with the exception that their needles will turn, or change colors in the fall, and then drop. This small, but stately grove of old trees have been around for a long time. In fact, “Gus” the oldest of these conifers is over 1,000 years old. To put that into perspective, there were well less than one billion people  (estimated 250 million) living on earth. Today, that number is approaching seven billion. In Doug’s notes he contains excerpts from a couple of signs found at the grove. I’ll let his words do the talking:

“Excerpted comments from the “Tips for Living 1000 years” sign:

“How old? About 1,000 years old. 250 million people inhabited earth then, compared to today’s 6.8 billion.”

• “How old? About 1,000 years old. 250 million people inhabited earth then, compared to today’s 6.8 billion.”
• “Diameter? 7 feet, 3 inches. Diameter is the distance across the center of the tree at 4 ½ feet above the ground.” Source: Clearwater Resource Council.”

“Excerpted comments from the “Restoring Fire to Girard Grove” sign:

• “In the fall of 2003, the U. S. Forest Service returned fire to Girard Grove as a life-giving force after a century-long absence. . . The reasons date to a policy of fire suppression across the West, starting in the early 1900s. . . . [Managers] first logged the smaller firs and pines in the winter of 2002 before setting fire to the grove the following fall.”
• “Maintaining a park-like grove will require future fires every couple of decades.” Source: Clearwater Resource Council.”

To close out my dialogue for this day, I will once again, turn to Doug’s notes.”

“Bottom-line impressions of the Seeley-Swan Highway as a fall-foliage destination this time of year: The Seeley-Swan Highway is an exceptional fall-foliage drive . . . when the Western larch are at peak color. The area is significantly less impressive in late September and the earliest portion of October, simply because aspen-cottonwood concentrations are quite low and snowpack on surrounding mountains is minimal, thus creating much less pronounced contrasts in compositional landscape elements.”

Cutting across the Flathead Range, we turned east at Clearwater Junction onto Montana State Highway 200. Then MT-141 took us to US-12, which brought us to Helena, the capital of Montana. After a dinner sitting outside the Burger King, we drove south on US Highway 287 until we reached I-90 at the town of Three Forks. From there it was a straight shot back to Billings.