Above the Forest ...

Speaking of Porcupine Ridge ... it's an amazing place.  It's the most remote and least-visited of Glacier's surviving lookout buildings, almost impossible to visit in a day trip, at the end of an overgrown route that starts with a deep river ford and that hasn't been maintained in years.  But it also has the most spectacular setting of all of Glacier's lookouts, with a close-up view of Mount Cleveland and the peaks of the northern Lewis Range, and broader vistas up Waterton Lake, towards Fifty Mountain, and and back to legendary Jefferson Pass.  Built in 1939, the lookout has been pretty much abandoned Ince the early 1970s. My job with the park took me up there in the fall of 1987 ... a couple of friends and I spent the night at the Pass Creek Patrol Cabin before struggling up the nearly-vanished trail on a cold October day.  According to the Goat Haunt ranger, we were the only people to make it to the lookout that year.  It was ridiculously memorable. I haven't