In 1994, a friend and I (Hi Jen!) spent a couple of days in the Two Medicine area of Glacier National Park on our way to a conference in Seattle. I don’t think I’d ever seen anything more beautiful, and I’ve been to a lot of places. It was one of my favorite trips ever.
While hiking up the Scenic Point trail, I took this picture of Rising Wolf mountain. I shot it with a 35mm Minolta X-357 on Fuji slide film. I likely processed the film myself once I returned home:
I loved this picture. At the time, I felt it was the best image I’d ever taken in my life. A friend whose opinion I respected (Hi Dan!) called it an “Ansel Adams in color”–the highest praise anyone could give me. Of course, that was when the slide was new and clean, and it was projected. The image has lost quite a bit with time, and in the process of scanning.
That 1994 trip to Glacier was my last big adventure before I fell incredibly ill. By 1999, I was unable to work, and it looked like I would never do so again. There were days I was unable to walk, and when I could move, it was a slow shuffle. I was only 31 at the time, and I was devastated. Maybe I would never again walk in the mountains as I had on that trip to Glacier. So in spite of financial distress, I took this slide to a very good local photography store to have an 8×10 print made. I wanted this picture in my room to remind me of the majesty outside the door I had trouble walking through.
The lab put a big scratch through my slide. Someone got sloppy and dragged a slide clip across it. If you look carefully under the brightest spot of sky, you’ll see the horizontal lines of the scratch.
The store repaired the image in Photoshop and gave me a new slide for free, but that slide was shot with Kodak film, and it simply wasn’t the same. I was inconsolable, and the loss felt enormous, given what was going on in my life. I would never take that shot again. Even if by some miracle I could ever return to Glacier and do the hike again, the light would never fall on that mountain in quite the same way, and if it did, odds were it wouldn’t at the exact moment I was there. Once you lose a picture, it’s gone. You will never get the same shot twice.
I can never truly replace this slide, but a miracle occurred in regard to my health. I just spent the last week in Glacier National Park, and I hiked half way up the Scenic Point trail in Two Medicine. Here’s the closest shot I got to the one in 1994:
This time, the day was hot and the sky sunny. Although a piece of me wished against all hope that I’d have storm clouds with a ray of light shining down onto the mountain, I appreciate the symbolism of the difference between the two pictures. I have weathered the storm that came into my life, and things are so much better now than they were back then. After climbing as far up the trail as my body would take me, I sat on a rock to rest up for the hike back down. “I won,” I said out loud. “I won.”
I don’t normally talk about my health here, since this the purpose of this site is to display my art and photography, and to tell the stories of my work. But I want people to know how I found healing, in case the information helps someone else. If you have Fibromyalgia or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, look into the guaifenesin protocol. Note: Even though the site focuses on Fibromyalgia, guaifenesin also helps CFS.
Guafenesin improved my health by 70%. Another 20% improvement came when I figured out I have food allergies (dairy, potatoes, and corn flour). The final 10%–the 10% I needed to hike again–came when I started taking buffered salt tablets to treat my Neurally Mediated Hypotension. While guafenesin improved those symptoms (back in 1999, I used to pass out on a not-infrequent basis), it did not improve them enough to allow me to exercise much. After a few minutes of moderate effort, my vision would go dark and I’d have to stop. Getting on buffered salt tabs a year ago allowed me to work up to 20 minutes of moderate effort. Once I could do that, I gradually increased my walking time to where I could walk slowly while doing my photography for 3 or 4 hours.
Nature photography is excellent physical therapy. You don’t need to move very quickly, and there is lots of sitting while waiting for birds to get into a good position. Plus, the excitement of getting the pictures keeps me out there–I don’t become bored. So in this way, I’ve reconditioned myself enough in the past year that a couple of longer hikes in Glacier became possible. I still struggle, of course. I walk half as fast as most people I meet, and I can only go half as far. I was starting to have problems with almost passing out when I was going up Scenic Point, and I simply could not go any further than half way up. But dang, half way up was awesome, given that it once looked like I’d never set foot in Glacier again. I feel incredibly fortunate in life. This past week was nothing short of a miracle for me, and I am incredibly thankful that I could do it.
If you’re one of the people I met along the way, thank you for stopping in to visit. It was fun to meet so many friendly and interesting folks on this adventure! I’ll be continuing to put pictures up about once a week (usually on weekends), and sharing the stories of what I saw while I was in the park. This is the only post I intend to do on my health, and if you’ve read through it, thanks for indulging me. I feel it’s important to mention my journey of recovery in this post, on the chance that someone else out there will find healing too and hike their own mountain again.
