We tried to plan an excursion in response to last summer’s miniature environmental calamity (fires) only to have our expectations scuttled by a different miniature environmental calamity (floods). Yet there’s also a way in which my family’s experience this past week has given us a personal glimpse of a reality that awaits all of us. You never know when a stretch of heavy rain will wash out roads built through wilderness along rushing western rivers. There can be June blizzards in Glacier National Park. And anyway, as my father has always said (with a touch of hard-earned cynicism), “Man plans, fate laughs.” There’s no controlling the weather. We will have no trouble finding alternative things to do. In Montana there is natural beauty everywhere you look. Which is disappointing but obviously not a catastrophe. So the kids won’t get to see Old Faithful, the astonishing wildlife, and the park’s other spectacular sights, at least not on this trip. Entrances at the southern end of the park are scheduled to open Wednesday, with restrictions designed to limit traffic in the hobbled park, but they are roughly a five-hour drive away from where we are staying. The same can’t be said for Yellowstone NP, which, as you may have heard, was slammed with torrential floods early last week that shut down the park entirely, washing away multiple roads and burying others under mudslides and downed trees in the northern half of the park, and shutting down the north entrance for what could be years. But at least we’ve been able to do some very chilly hiking and rafting on the park’s perimeter. Glacier NP received three feet of snow earlier this month, slowing down the always-colossal task of clearing Going-to-the-Sun Road, which was nowhere near open for our visit this week. Unlike last year, this has been an incredibly wet and cold spring in the Montana mountains. Things didn’t quite turn out as we hoped. We’d deal with the cold and dampness in return for diminished risk of fire and then close out our visit with a few days at Yellowstone National Park, a first for our nearly grown kids. So we would visit early, in the second half of June 2022, when the high country of Glacier National Park is often wetter than a month later.

The summer of 2021 in Montana was hot and filled with fires that left the air thick with smoke in many places by early July. When we planned an ambitious family vacation out west nearly a year ago-our first since before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic-it seemed like we were being smart.

A handout photo provided by the National Park Service showing the North Entrance Road in Yellowstone National Park washed out by flooding.

Sluggish morss ad infinitum