Satan’s Army on the Continental Divide

Sometimes things happen at just the right moment. But if things didn’t fall in that exact order, if the timing wasn’t exact, if the pitfalls never happened, then my wife would not have come face to face with Satan’s army. You may be thinking, why would she want to meet Satan’s army? We’ll get there.

So maybe the story started when we had lunch at Sun Point, and the horseflies loved them some Goodman, so I started packing up quickly. I didn’t like cramming my orange slices, can of tuna, and half bar of chocolate/almonds/huckleberry, but those horseflies were all over me! They would follow me from the picnic table to the car like a half-starved person at a buffet just going back and forth as many times as it takes to completely fill the belly hole.

Or maybe the story started with us turning around at St. Mary Falls because the area is recovering from forest fires, and the sun looked too powerful to combat that day. There is a third fall up the trail, and we didn’t get to see it, but the falls we did see were magnificent. I’m talking about gushing torrents of white froth that dissolves into crystalline waters. St. Mary Falls (not St. Mary’s Falls) was a wonderful experience and a fun 2-3 mile hike, but we had to cut it short.

Beautiful, ravaged land with a crystal blue kintsugi scar…

Maybe it started before we woke up that day. None of this would’ve happened if Logan’s Pass wasn’t opened up. We were there the very first day, so I saw the people hiking up the mountain and through the snow to the Hidden Lake overlook. I’ve hiked that trail before, and I remember standing there looking at the people walking up the snow and thinking “that’s a recipe for disaster.” I then noticed the return hikers sitting beside me nursing their ankles. One was in a soft cast, and while I doubt that had anything to do with the trail, it decided for me that we didn’t need to hike that trail. So did the warning sign next to the trailhead: Snow and Ice on Trail! Be Careful. Possibility to Slip and Fall! (The image at the top of the post is of Clements Mountain next to the Hidden Lake overlook. If you look closely, you can see people walking through the snow and ice straight up the mountainside.)

But the second time we were driving up the Going to the Sun Road, we were leaving the park after our adventures at St. Mary Falls. I had in my mind to check out the Highline Trail, which runs along the Continental Divide. I’ve thought about hiking it before, and as we approached the Logan’s Pass Visitor’s Center, I wondered maybe we could hike a small portion of it. I paused the car as we approached the trailhead, which is directly across the road from the visitor’s center.

Small rope lines are common along the trails to help guide hikers, but this rope straddled the path. A handwritten sign announced that the trail was closed. My heart sank just a tiny bit. As I pressed the accelerator, my wife exclaimed with excitement. Her head jerked to the side.

“Go back!”

I checked the rearview mirror and slowly rolled the car back.

There on the ridgeline not far from the car stood three Bighorn Sheep, and these sheep were HUGE.

My wife had two realizations in that moment. First, that they were almost as big as a small horse. All three of them would have looked down on us in our tiny rental car. Then one of them looked directly at Mrs. Bad Ass, and she exclaimed a second time, but more disturbed than excited. She saw why goats are used in icons of Lucifer. That long face, those abnormal, alien-like eyes. She quickly dubbed them Satan’s Army. The lieutenants knocked horns. It was the coolest!!

Of course, I was saying, “Get the cameras!” We’d seen Grizzly Bears, a Black Bear, a Bald Eagle, and even a Moose interrupting a bridal party. (You really do see a lot more animals on the eastern side of Glacier.) But we hadn’t seen Bighorns since a Colorado trip in 2010, and the southern sheep were much smaller than their northern cousins. These sheep trotted down the side of the pass in front of our car and ran up the other side. If we hadn’t been there in that exact spot, in that exact moment, we’d never have seen them.

I’ve often wondered how much life is like this, these specific moments that occur because of long series of events that occur before them. I’ve said before that tragedies are almost always a series of very wrong, highly unusual events that then lead to a tragedy. The story doesn’t usually go, the hiker in the woods was killed by the bear. It’s the hiker who decided to go out in the woods alone, who was hiking in an area they did not know, who was offered precautionary measures but refused them, who happened to be in the area of a bear that was either significantly malnourished or a little wrong in the head (perhaps a known aggressive bear). It’s not just one thing. Any one of those things goes different, and the hiker returns home from an uneventful trek.

The same can be said for these really memorable moments in life. “Stars have to align,” is the expression, but perhaps it’s more appropriate to say stories require plot twists, some less fortunate than others, so that the payoff can happen. We’ve had several plot twists so far on our vacation, none of them a real problem, but they’ve all lead to these really cool moments. I hope you have some plot twists this week, and while the payoff may not happen this week or even this month, I hope you do get the payoff. It’ll be worth it!

Hey, thank you for reading and I hope you’re enjoying my posts. I write the Zombie Dog books, which you can find here both digitally and paperback. I also have a Patreon account here. Supporters get perks like reading my short stories for free.