3.3 A Kodak Moment at Wild Goose Island

A pre-dawn portrait of Wild Goose Island indicated by the warm glow of morning twilight on the distant  peaks.  The faint vertical bands in the blue sky are the contributions from the Milky Way.  A satellite flare cuts across the short 30-minute startrails and clouds are beginning to build in the west while this exposure was made. 

There are many iconic views of beautiful scenery in our country.  Some are identified by “scenic viewpoint” highway signs where the engineers designing and building the routes through the American landscape couldn’t help but be impressed and decided to make it easy for drivers to pull out to stop and enjoy the view too. 

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3 Glacier Park

3.1  Follow the light, stay for the night

I thought I would have plenty of time. But I had forgotten about Highway 2. On the map it looked like any of the other roads, but U.S. 2 in Montana was different. Since it was the only way to reach Glacier Park, it had to maneuver through the surrounding mix of grasslands, river valleys and mountainous terrain. Sudden curves were sprinkled along the route to accomplish this, many of them blind to oncoming traffic. White crosses marked points where the risks had exceeded a driver’s judgment, making for a spooky drive at night, when my headlights would suddenly expose clusters of crosses at the road’s gully.

This time I was driving during daylight however, and the winding route kept my speed to a lower number than my accustomed average. I had composed another picture in my mind’s viewfinder, and I needed to get to the heart of Glacier Park before dark.

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