Cooper Hardee
After taking a Landmark Volunteers trip the year previous to this one, I was already familiar with what I might expect from this experience. I knew that the kids I would be working with would be easy-going and amiable, the group leader would be nice and the landscape would be beautiful. But nothing could prepare me for what I discovered on my 2007 trip to Glacier National Park in Montana. I’ve never been outside of the continental United States, and I’ve been everywhere inside of it, but Montana is one of the most gorgeous places I have ever had the pleasure to visit. The mountain ranges are spectacular, the people you work with are some of the best you will ever meet, and you gain more memories than you ever thought possible to cram into a 2 week experience.

While I’m on the subject of memories, I guess I’ll share one of the more amusing ones with you all (which is saying something, since all of them are hysterical). This memory is from the 2nd Saturday that we were there (we all arrived on a Saturday), so this was our first day off. All 13 of us and our group leader all piled into our gigantic white wan (which we affectionately dubbed “The Mystery Machine”), and headed off to get pizza. We were advised to get pizza by a fellow Glacier Park worker who we worked with for both weeks, in a town outside the park in a miniscule town called Polebridge. Considering that we had to get there on extremely bumpy dirt roads in a van, we had to go a little slower than normal. It took us 60 minutes to drive about 15 miles to Polebridge. Once we arrived in the town (which had only 10 houses, a general store, and the pizza parlor, all within a 1 minute walking distance), we parked by the pizza parlor, which was overflowing with locals, and was very nice on the inside. We ordered our pizza (the options were simply red or green pizza, red being meat and green being vegetables) and devoured it, enjoying it thoroughly.

After we had all made our calls home on the local phone booth, we decided it was time to head back. To our surprise however, we discovered that we had locked the keys in the car. Keep in mind that we are in the middle of rural Montana, making it nearly impossible for a locksmith to be able to get to us within 24 hours. Our group leader and team members all took our turns trying to open it with a coat hanger. Our leader ran to the nearest phone booth to call every locksmith in Montana, which was good, because some of us were about to use large rocks to open the door. After about an hour of frantic calling, we found a locksmith that would come out to rescue us from this terrible fate. However, it would take 4 hours for him to get to us.

In the middle of a town that looked like it came out of a mid 1900s western movie, we needed to find something to do. The locals provided us with that option. There was a volleyball net with a ball set up by the pizza parlor, and a few of them were hitting it around. Since we had so much time to kill, we all decided to join them. Slowly, more of us and the locals started to join the game, and eventually it turned into a 12 vs. 12 game, and all of us were getting really into it. We started butting heads, dancing, playfully, arguing on plays, and meshing perfectly with rural Montanans. It went on like this for 4 more hours. Three amazing and hysterical games later, the locksmith finally arrived to open up the car so we could drive back. There was one part of this night that truly sticks out in my mind above all else, about that moment when the locksmith finally came: we didn’t even want to leave that volleyball court.

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