Month: August 2017

The alarm went off at 5:30 – we haven’t been up that early on this trip! After breakfast and packing our lunch, we headed off up the road. It was really nice out – calm, blue sky and fairly clear. Right now, there wasn’t much smoke in the air from the fire that is burning on the other side of Glacier National Park. We’re being rewarded for getting up so early I guess!

There were lots of cars on the road ahead of us but we made a couple of stops to take a few pictures, and the parking lot was 75% full when we got to the Logan Pass Visitor Centre. Most were arriving early to get hiking. There is a 12 mile hike that leaves from the visitor centre that people are heading out to. We chose the 3 mile one to Hidden Lake instead.

The trail has close to a 600 foot elevation climb in the 1.5 miles to the view of the lake. We were glad to be on the trail earlier since the weather is to get warm again today – probably 27 or 28 C. There were lots of people hiking the trail. It had some rocky sections but much of it was boardwalk. We met some people who were building more boardwalk. They were carrying the leftover pieces of wood down the trail. They had made at least 3 trips back down with leftovers and weren’t finished.

At one point, we were fortunate to see some bighorn sheep up on the rocks. We were also surprised at the number of wildflowers still in bloom. The areas along the creeks were very colourful! We saw a few creatures as well – some Columbian Ground Squirrels and even a Hoary Marmot.

 

Hidden Lake was quite large. We enjoyed the view and then headed back to the truck to carry on the Going to the Sun road. As we drove down the other side of the pass, the smoke from the wildfire increased and our views got hazy. We were glad we had some nice views on the way up. Many of the pull offs were full – definitely need to be on the road early if you want to get to any of the other hikes.

 

Tomorrow we’ll start the trek home officially. We plan to take highway 2 all the way across the northern US to the upper peninsula of Michigan. We’ll plan to take about a week to get home.

So we still had a bit of haze driving on Sunday. We’re still getting smoke from all the forest fires – you can smell it in the air at times. Shortly after an uneventful border crossing into the US, we arrived at Glacier National Park. We were delighted to hear that Saint Mary Campground did indeed have campsites available for the night! It turned out that two days ago, the bears started to frequent the camp because the berries were ripe for eating. Once that happened, they closed the campground to everyone except those who have hard-sided campers. That opened a whole lot of spots for people who hadn’t reserved like us. We were able to get a site for two nights and after setting up, headed to the visitor centre to learn about the park and the road we want to drive on tomorrow.

The park staff have warned us that if we are planning on driving to the Logan Pass Visitor Centre to park, we will need to be there by 8 am. We have about an hour’s drive to get there so it will be a very early morning to start! However, we’d like to drive the “Going to the Sun Road”, even though we did drive it once before.