A day in Glacier National Park...

This entry is for Tuesday 06 July...

***Miles travelled today: 147

***Total miles travelled: 6994

***States travelled through today: Montana

What a day in Glacier National Park!!!

After a hearty breakfast, we set off for an adventure filled day in the park... I hadn’t fully realised in my pre trip planning when looking at the information about Glacier National Park, that due to the mountains and glaciers there is actually only one road that actually runs through the park... there are roads around the edges of the park that allow you to come into the park but then you cannot actually travel too far by car... Glacier National park is clearly a paradise for hikers... damn!!! I forgot my boots!!! Mmm... Yeah!!! There is however one road that takes you from the western side to the eastern side... straight over the mountains... its called ‘Going-to-the-Sun’ Road... it’s about 50 miles long and is said to be one of the most scenic routes in the world... well, it was absolutely fantastic... once I got over my fear of actually driving with a sheer cliff down one side!!! The road is usually only open from mid June to Mid September, as at other times it is generally snow bound... and they are currently doing roadworks as they are redoing the whole road having started last year and it is a project that is said to last the next ten years!!!

At the beginning of our trip today we were extremely fortunate to see black bear as he decided to cross the road just in front of us... 20 seconds either way and we would have missed him...

...the road soon started to climb... it is clearly another feat of engineering... and similar to those roads we travelled in South Dakota there is no other reason for them other than pure scenery... the road had been closed a few weeks ago as they had had snow fall – of nearly 20 feet!!! They had to plough it all off the road... and the road has been opened to traffic for a few weeks... when we got up to the visitors centre at the top of Logan’s Pass, there was still up to six feet of snow in places... we have never seen snow like it!!! The ranger said that last week, there was double the amount of snow up there... and said that the snow is melting at about a foot a day!!! People up there were seriously decked out for snow!!!

At one point we were stopped for nearly 15 minutes due to the roadworks... what an amazing place to be in a traffic queue... I noticed that there were some rocks falling down, that were a bit too close to the car for my liking – and I looked up to where they were originating from, and there was this huge Bighorn Sheep, perched precariously on the top of the cliff, trying to make his way down!!!

There were some lovely waterfalls around and the peaks of the mountains were just amazing... we could see one of the glaciers in the distance, research indicates that the remaining 19 glaciers that are currently in the park will all have disappeared in another 20 years... but clearly the phenomenal landscapes that they have left behind will remain...

We made our way through to Many Glacier for lunch... and on the road back, as we decided to make our way over the ‘Going-to-the-Sun’ road again, but obviously in the opposite direction – we were fortunate enough to see not only black bear, but also a Grizzly bear with two very small cubs... the ranger advised that she lived up in the hills that were to the left of us and that every afternoon she bought her cubs down to the rivers edge looking for food, and she was then trying to get back across the road, but there were too many cars stopped, so after a while the ranger asked people to move on, to allow her the space to make her way home...

I don’t know which was worse, driving or being a passenger... but it was certainly a fantastic drive... we took different photos on the way back... including the ‘Weeping Wall’, which, was a sheer wall of granite, and due to the sheer amount of snow melting, it just pours off the wall and into the road!!!

Anyway we got back to our little cubby hole, after stopping at the Lake MacDonald lodge where we just went and sat and watched the lake...

I had decided that I wanted to go down to the lake later in the evening to take some photographs at sunset... Jay was really tired, so I ventured out on my own, and went into Apgar village, bought some post cards and sat by the side of the lake taking photos as the lighting in the sky kept on changing...