Yes! I finally made it to Glacier National Park. For the past couple of years, I have been begging my sister, Teri, to take the family vacation to Glacier National Park in Montana. And we did it! And...it was worth the 12 hour drive.
This trip became the trip of 3s....we were there for 3 full days, hiked 3 hikes for a total of 30 miles and gained 3,000 feet in elevation. Do you see what I mean?
This picture is of the whole gang (me, Jeremy, Teri and Kelly) on our second hike to Grinnell Glacier. You can see the lake below and the beautiful waterfall over Kelly's left shoulder. The glacier is up over the ridge there. That was a pretty grueling hike: many switchbacks, walking through waterfalls, etc. But it was worth it. Not only did we see the glacier but we also saw some mountain sheep. My wanna-be Camelback exploded all over my backside on this hike and thus I became a believer in the value of buying something worth it's cost. But I needed to determi
ne if I liked hydration packs...and I do! (I have since bought a Camelback.)Here we are basking in the sun with Grinnell Glacier in the background. Teri and I tend to do this at the end of a long hike--collapse on the rock!
Before we actually arrived at the glacier, we came upon a little campground area with a sign saying it was Grinnell Glacier. But it was just a snow field. Unacceptable! I wanted to see a glacier with crevasses and blue snow. I wanted to practice my sword fighting in front of a snow cave and over a crevasse just like Christian Bale in "Batman Begins" did! Thankfully, the snow field was not the end of the hike.
We started our h
iking with what we thought would be a "warm up" hike. The hike went from Logan Pass to a chalet and was going to be 15 miles round trip. The map said it was only a 200 foot elevation gain....but it wasn't! The map did not take into account the ups and downs in between the starting and finish points. But on this hike we did see a majority of the animals: mountain goats and a deer. We followed the goats for a while and the deer followed us for a while. When we got to the chalet, someone had a monocular all set up and focused on something on a ridge just beyond the trail we had just hiked. We asked someone what it was and they said it was a grizzly bear and her cub! The grizzly and her cub had been at the chalet earlier that morning and had wandered down the very trail we just hiked down to that ridge. How wild is that?
We were seriously the Glacier National Park nomads because we moved campgrounds every night! Needless to say I got really good at taking down my tent and putting it up by myself. But we wanted to mov
e each night so we could be closer to the trails we wanted to hike. This is a picture of Teri and me on the side of the famous "Going to the Sun" road (one of our many times of driving it).Our last hike was going to Avalanche Lake. It was by far our shortest and easies hike, but we did on the perfect day. Every other day had been cooler and windy, but the day we hiked to Avalanche Lake was warmer. The trail was shady the entire way up. In fact so shady that it made me feel like I was in the Pacific Northwest. Check out the picture!!
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