Now that Rob and I have received both doses of Pfizer more than a month ago, we’ve planned a trip to northwest Montana. We haven’t been on a plane since our trip to Cartagena, Colombia in 2018 and are really looking forward to it.
The area is where Glacier National Park is located. Just to the southeast of the park is Flathead Lake, source of an urban legend about a lake monster nicknamed Flessie, after Nessie, the Loch Ness monster. It’s a Kutenai traditional legend and the story goes like this, from Wikipedia:
The first native tribe in the area lived on an island in the middle of the lake. One winter while crossing the frozen lake to move camp, two girls saw antlers approximately two feet in length protruding through the frozen ice. Thinking the antlers belonged to some animal, the girls decided to chop them off and take them.
They used sharp-edged rocks to cut through the ice when the antlers suddenly started shaking, the ice around them split open, and the head of a monster appeared through the ice shaking its giant antlers. The girls used their special powers to transform into a ball and a buckskin target to escape the monster, but half of the tribe drowned in the lake, which is said to be the reason why there are so few Kutenai people. The narrative holds that the Kutenai never strayed far from the lakeshore after that, and white settlers later reported occasionally seeing the monster.
The first sighting was in 1889 and since then, more than a hundred sightings have been reported. The creature described as being 30 to 40 feet long, serpent=like as it undulates through the water, and has steel black eyes. The last sighting occurred in 2017.
This spot is definitely one I’d love to see.
That’s a scary story. I would have done the opposite of “never straying far from the Lake shore after that.” It makes you wonder if the matrix brings such things to pass if there’s enough interest.
We’ll have a better sense when we go there!