Day 19: Stranded in paradise, day 2

  
Today was a true lazy day, just how I like it. We woke up late, read in our tents until our bladders couldn’t take it anymore, cooked eggs in a basket, drank chocolate milk (it’s amazing/dangerous how close we are to cold drinks here!), and took our time cleaning up. Magical.

We spent the morning organizing things that had gotten out of order and reading. We ate quesadillas and PB&J for lunch, then headed to the Many Glacier Lodge for an Americano and a dirty chai. We drank those things while looking at the view above, reading, writing this blog post, and eating Chex Mix Muddy Buddies. Today might be the first day we are consuming more calories than we burn on this trip. Like I said, my ideal kind of day.

We also took a tour of the Many Glacier Hotel, a gorgeous Swiss-style hotel with a spectacular view of two glacial valleys over Swiftcurrent Lake. The hotel turns 100 on the fourth of July, and apparently various federal authorities have willed its destruction throughout the years. Firefighters managed to save the hotel from a massive fire in the 30’s and upon hearing that the hotel was safe, a senior member of the Department of the Interior asked, “Why?” Apparently folks in the federal government hoped it would burn in the fire because running the hotel was using up precious federal land management resources during the depression. We also learned that the hotel was seven inches out of plumb in the mid-90s, essentially falling into the lake. The federal government didn’t want to pay to fix this, but through grants and donations, Glacier raised enough money to pick the whole massive hotel up with an iron bar that stretched the length of the hotel and hydraulic jacks, and push the hotel up away from the lake without sustaining any interior structural damage. Pretty amazing!

   
      After the tour, we found a hallway with several partially completed jigsaw puzzles and spent some time contributing to one of them. We headed back to camp, cooked dinner, and were in bed reading by 8:30p. Nice.