Today was devoted to exploring the North Fork area of the park. To get there, one has the choice of either taking the North Fork Outside Road or the North Fork Inside Road. One is outside the Park and the other is inside the boundary of the Park. Both roads are described as being very rough in the guide books, but the inside road gets really bad reviews. As it turned out we didn’t have to choose, as a 7-mile segment of the inside road is closed right now. Actually almost half of the route is paved if you take the road north from Apgar, so it really wasn’t so bad.
Our interest in seeing this area was its remoteness and limited access. We were in hopes that on this holiday weekend it might offer more solitude and less crowding. In general, we haven’t experienced crowded conditions at all on the trip, but it makes a good excuse to run the Escape over some really bad roads.
The “town” of Polebridge is in the North Fork area, about 25 miles north of Apgar. Its two main attractions are the Mercantile and the Northern Lights Saloon. There is also a bed and breakfast and a hostile, as well as a smattering of cabins. Polebridge has telephone service, but no electricity other than what is provided by generators. Most lights are propane. The Mercantile was built in 1914 and the saloon looks to have formerly served as a log cabin. Both of these buildings were spared in the 1988 Red Bench Fire that burned 38,000 acres. Several other cabins in the area were not so fortunate. There have been a lot of fires in the area, but this one is significant in that the Forest Service followed a then-new policy of letting it burn. The land’s recovery from this and many other fires is still very visible.
After grabbing some lunch at the Merc (really tasty pork and mango salsa turnovers) we moved on to Bowman Lake. Up to now the road had been bad, but wide. Soon it got much worse and very narrow. We drove through more area recovering from fire as well has huge stands of trees that have not been burned. The dense forests are of course beautiful.
But when you look close, the recovering areas are beautiful as well. Many of the burned tree trunks are still standing and in between are grassy areas or small conifers growing so densely that at first glance it appears to be grass. And I have never seen so many wildflowers. Loads of Indian Paint Brush, something that I think is a wild rose, a purple spikey one that we thought might be columbine but decided it wasn’t. Okay so I’m no good at plant identification – there were lots of them and they were amazing to see.Our mapping software had declared this to be a 2 -hour round trip. We of course knew that wasn’t going to be true because we like to stop a lot and take photos. It took was a bit longer than I would have guessed – we stretched it to 3 ½ hours one way.
At Bowman lake there is a campground and picnic area. The lake is really beautiful and we found people fishing and canoeing on the lake. There is a trail around the lake and it connects to other trails that go farther into the back country. We got out the tripods and stayed quite a while taking pictures. At one point some deer came very close to us and we both went into Great White Hunter mode – stalking them through the forest and clicking away. Okay actually we stalked them through the picnic area, but it was still pretty exciting! This is a style of photography I have not previously experienced. I have a lot of room for improvement here. My results were more about quantity then quality.
On our trip out of the Bowman Lake area we were amazed at the number of cars we passed coming in to the lake. It made us glad that we’d gotten a fairly early start and were ready to leave before they arrived.
We drove down to McDonald Lake just to see what it is like. The Wonder Dog got a chance to chase small waves that were breaking on the gravel beach. She had a great time.
From McDonald Lake we drove to Apgar Village, where there is Visitor’s Center for a look around. There are a few small shops and food vendors there. Wife asked if I would like some ice cream. What kind of a question is that? Has she ever known me to pass up a chance for ice cream? The only question is the flavor – I had huckleberry.
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