A cautionary tourist tale | Mary Sheehy Moe

Montana tourism continues to thrive this summer. In July visitor spending in Whitefish alone reached a record $15.65 million. In the hope of sparing some other unsuspecting visitor my pain, I share my last tourist experience there.

I’m not particularly outdoorsy. Love the beauty. Hate the horseflies. The discomfort. The exertion. But when my daughters decided to hike Big Mountain that July, it sounded great. She-time! And the Danny On Trail: At 3.6 miles, it’s just a little longer than my daily walk. And c’mon: Whitefish has gotten so chi-chi I figured the horseflies there pull little golden carriages with miniature Kate Middletons in them.

So I threw caution to the wind. Off we went to hike. And hike. And hike. I figured we were about half-way when Ellen announced we’d completed the first mile.

Only a mile? Ruh-roh. I’d expected to get reintroduced to some muscles that hadn’t stopped by lately, but by the second mile, a pair I’d never even met — hip flexors, Google later informed me — were chatting me up big-time.

The big problem, though, was my sinuses. As we kicked up dust, thwacked pollen, and trod paths thick with paintbrush, those sinuses started filling.

Sidebar: My mother declared certain words, especially those referring to “elimination,” verboten. “Snot” fell into that category. I tell you this to assure you I was not raised to be as uncouth as the upcoming fall from grace suggests. I was once so refined I wouldn’t even utter the word “snot,” much less cover one nostril with an index finger while blowing snot out of the other one. (It’s called “snot-rocketing.” Google it.)

I’d watched my husband clear his sinuses that way in the Great Outdoors on several occasions, and I was impressed with its efficacy. Yes, Kleenex is preferable, certainly more couth, but Kleenex doesn’t grow on trees. And when you gotta blow, you gotta blow.

What does all this have to do with hiking Big Mountain? When I threw caution to the wind that day, it wasn’t just common sense I left behind. It was Kleenex. And that, quite literally, was my downfall.

On a steep hillside thick with shrubbery, we paused for a break. A swig of water. A hiatus to hush those flexors. And a little snot-rocketing.

I’d learned through painful experience that when you snot-rocket, you need to be forceful about it or you’ll slime yourself. To avoid that, you must lean over, press one nostril firmly shut and let fly with the other one. So on that narrow path on that steep hillside on my rubbery legs. I leaned. I pressed. And I let fly with such force that I flew too.

I wasn’t thinking clearly. I knew I’d flipped, which meant I was curled and I needed to uncurl or I was going to roll 250 feet down that hillside, and the faster I rolled, the more it would hurt when I crashed into a tree or boulder or passing bear at the bottom. I was completely fixated on unfurling my body like a scroll and dragging it over brush and gravel and whatnot till friction stopped it — splayed, flayed and fileted.

My daughters say it was actually kind of graceful to observe, a tight flip with a layout finish. More importantly, it worked. I stopped about 20 feet downhill. Molly fetched me, pulled the twigs and stickers out of me and wrapped my bleeding right hand.

We resumed the hike. By the third mile, I was going downhill every way but spatially. The hip flexors, chatty before, were bellowing now. My scrapes were screaming. Horseflies were setting up house on me like I was already dead. We eyeballed the straight-up stretch to the top and faced reality: I couldn’t make it. Ellen made a call and soon a dreamboat from Havre in an ATV (Havre has it!) showed up to take us back to civilization.

There was still the homecoming to dread, though. I started prepping for my husband’s if-only-you-would-act-your-age diatribe. No need. The dear man was the soul of solicitude. As he should have been. If he hadn’t introduced me to snot-rocketing, I wouldn’t have fallen at all. Snot fair. Snot right. But that’s how I tend to roll. Don’t you.