Road trip

Anyone who's traveled during the winter holidays knows the routine — crowded highways and airports, bad weather looming ahead and trying to stay in shape while eating tons of high-calorie food and sitting for hours in front of chatting relatives or the TV.

My week off began with a day-long drive around the Cabinet Range on Nov. 18, with breakfast at a home-style cafe in downtown Libby and stops at Kootenai Falls and the Ross Creek Cedars.

A couple of old-timers at the cafe regaled us with stories of Northwest Montana — one fellow plowed Glacier Park's Sun Road for decades before retiring. At the falls, we watched from the "Swinging Bridge" as two kayakers played around in the whitewater. The six-mile long paved road to the cedars was closed by ice, snow and a three-foot high mud slide from the same storm that wiped out sections of the Sun Road earlier this month.

After viewing the Noxon Dam, we drove on to Hot Springs, where I ran into friends from Missoula at the Symes Hotel. They were accompanying a Celtic band out of Hamilton.

The next day, after skinning up Big Mountain for a newspaper photo, I took in the Glacier Symphony and 90-voice chorale in Kalispell. I was familiar with two of the pieces. The other was written by a "living" composer from Vancouver, B.C.

On Monday, I drove out to Seattle, which was experiencing record rainfall that eventually turned to snow. A 1953 monthly rainfall record quickly fell, and a 1933 record was soon in sight. Dinner and lunch were burgers and fries, the start of a week-long binge.

The next three days were spent in Bellingham, where my parents live. The rain continued to fall, but the weathermen were soon talking about colder weather turning all that moisture into snow. By the time I left on Friday, heading for Spokane, the prediction was an inch or two an hour at Snoqualmie Pass.

Stopping for gas at the foot of the Cascades, I saw dozens of cars outfitted for skiing, snowboarding or snowmobiling headed for the mountains. Everyone was beaming. The past few years have been bleak for winter recreation because of drought.

Below the pass, in the designated chain-up area, where entrepreneurs charged $25 for assistance, I passed several hundred large trucks and buses lined up along the side of the highway. It's hard to believe that much commerce passes over Snoqualmie, but there it was — a "convoy" of epic proportions.

Tragedy lurked on the other side of the pass. Heavy snow had toppled a large tree onto I-90 directly in front of a large pickup. The two men in front were killed, but the passengers in back survived. One survivor was the son of a victim.

We stayed downtown in Spokane that night, touring the shops, enjoying the displays and gorging on fine Italian cuisine at an elegant "kitchen." Spokane has been truly gentrified, with older buildings getting a face-lift to restore their former grandeur.

The downtown mall was quite amazing — most malls are built on the horizontal, but this one is vertical, culminating in four floors of cinemas at the top. The view down into the lobby could prove dizzying for some.

We decided to check out the Davenport Hotel, but no sooner had we stepped in the front door then we ran into another friend from Missoula stepping out of the elevator. In no time at all, we were in a side room at the busy hotel bar with a dozen more friends and relatives of friends noisily trading gossip, past follies, politics and adventures. A friend who's an historian showed us around the hotel, which reminded me of a mini-version of the Hermitage, with grand ballrooms and elaborate bas relief and wainscoting.

We closed the night at a downtown jazz club with decaf coffee and very-chocolate desserts. Across the street, the Fox movie theater building was undergoing reconstruction. On the side of the building, we watched Flash Gordon take on Ming the Merciless in the classic Buster Crabbe movie "Flash Gordon Goes To Mars." A donation jar in the stairway said money was being collected to purchase a new $400 bulb for the projector.

By the time we left a memorial service for a deceased relative on Saturday, the roads back to the Flathead were snow- and ice-covered. The morning paper reported great powder days at Schweitzer, Mount Spokane and Lookout Pass ski areas.

Driving in the dark across the mountains proved daunting, but the roads along the Clark Fork River proved much worse. We had the highways to ourselves much of the way — other than a pair of mule deer spooked by our headlights and horns not far from Perma.

Things could be worse — it seems like a foot of snow piled up across the Flathead on Monday. That's great news for skiers but a major headache for commuters and stores eager to get the Christmas shopping spree started.