Kayaking on Lake Josephine in Glacier National Park
Paddling Lake Josephine again was a major target for the Montana Voyage 2007, objective completed on the last week of the trip. We first paddled it in 1996, carrying the boats up the trail and over the moraine separating upper Josephine from Swiftcurrent Lake. This time, we paddled up the channel that connects the two, with only a slight amount of boat scrapings left on the rocks. Josephine is fed by Grinnell Glacier, and that water is cold! The 1996 voyage involved surfing down a fierce set of wind-driven waves, at the limits of my skill-set at the time. Fear of hypothermia motivated a wetsuit purchase and a kayaking rescue course the following summer. The 2007 voyage wasn’t anywhere so dramatic, just the two of us on a placid lake, with calling loons and kingfishers darting among the trees.
I took the D70 along as a back-up, hiking and infrared body. It stows easily in a dry bag, and I’ve had no trouble making photos with it from my boat’s cockpit, so long as we correct the sometimes wonky horizon lines. My boat has good secondary stability, which means it feels a bit tippy, but is hard to completely invert. I needed some secondary stability when the back-up body was pressed into service full-time. The D2X experienced a shocking failure at a most inopportune time (envision a buck mule deer in velvet approaching me at 20 feet). It’s already on the way to a Nikon service bay (camera, not the deer), and I am not thinking about the signs that autumn is coming early this year.
Having been disconnected from the Internet for so long, and returning with +40GB of unsorted images (electricity was a rarity, and those precious electrons were devoted to burning DVDs; the laptop requires one hour per DVD!), this trip report is going to look more like a dim sum trolley cart than an organized multi-course sit-down meal. We are back, sated with scenery and wildlife, a little over-smoked for our tastes, but very happy. And pleased with my progress on the book project. But Montana is a big place under all that sky – lots of stories to tell about their stretch of highway 89. I’ll be headed that way again before long.
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