Glacier National Park - First Two Days

Carol makes friends with a mountain goat

Watch your step Kirk!

Cooling his heels!

A marmot on the trail

Carol and the bighorn sheep

You want to walk on my trail?

Beautiful view of the mountains and the valley

Carol and a field of flowers

Snowdrift in July

A series of flowers

The Highline Trail above and the Going to the Sun Road below

Another view of the trail and the road

McDonald Creek flows into McDonald Lake

Avalanche Creek

Avalanche Lake after the cloud cover lifted

Avalanche Lake under cloud cover

Another view of Avalanche Creek

Isn't this Avalanche creek gorgeous?

McDonald Falls


We left on Monday the 13th from Deer Lodge in rain, we drove in rain to our campsite at West Glacier, MT, we sat up our trailer in the rain, and we slept through the night in rain. You get the picture . . . it has been rainy here. Fortunately, we had little trouble finding our campsite and getting set up . . . . the site is great!!! We are nestled in the forest so much so that when we look out our main dining room window we see nothing but trees and groundcover . . . no sign of our neighbors at all.

We woke up Tuesday to very cloudy threatening skies but by 11am, we decided to venture out, regardless. We may sound biased, which we are, but Glacier National Park is absolutely beautiful whether the weather is bad or good. Yellowstone, Grand Teton, Rocky Mtn National Park all are beautiful but Glacier Park does everything two or three notches higher.

Tuesday, we drove into the park and stopped at a few of the lookout and scenic view points along the road taking pictures and marveling in the beauty. We finally settled on a hike up to Avalanche Falls and then further up to Avalanche Lake. Carol "sort of " coerced Kirk into the final hike to the lake which she said was 2 miles one way with a 170 foot elevation change. It quite obviously was much more uphill than that, more like 500 feet plus. I gave Carol some grief but, in the end, the hike was well worth the effort. We have pictures that show the landscape, some with low cloud cover, some with "almost" clear skies.

On Wednesday, with much better weather prospects, we decided to drive up to Logan Pass via the "Going to the Sun" highway which is . . . to put it mildly . . . interesting!!!!!! Imagine a two lane road ( A "Very Narrow" 2-lane windy road) with several hundred to several thousand foot vertical drops all alongside the road all the way (about 12 miles) up to the top!!! It certainly keeps one attention . . . both the driver and the passenger!!!

At the top we had decided to take the "Highline Trail" which takes you alongside the mountain ridges above the "Going to the Sun" road that we just traveled. You get breathtaking views walking along some areas where you have garden hose railings to hang onto along some of the more narrow parts of the trail (of course, the drop-off is straight down, several hundred feet). We saw mountain goats, marmots, elk, squirrels, big horn sheep . . . . most very intimately from within only feet away to just a few hundred feet. The views, the waterfalls, the flowers, . . . , everything was just great. The pictures we have posted should speak for themselves. For anyone that ever travels to Glacier Park, a walk along the Highline Trail has to be a "must do"!!