We finally made it to Glacier National Park. We spent one beautiful day there, mostly on Going to the Sun Road, which takes you up into a glacier. This is a spectacular drive that everyone should put on their bucket list. However, if you are overtly nervous about skinny mountain roads with a cliffs on one side and icy waterfalls on your other side, then perhaps you’d better not go. Here are just some of the views on our way up to the summit of the glacier,
This is truly a wondrous place. If you ever plan to come here just check to see if the road is open. It just opened around June 23rd this year, so we were fortunate that our timing allowed us to travel here. The road is about 50 miles long and can take a while to traverse.
When we reached the summit we took a hike in the snow to Hidden Lake. We had our crampon cleats but we had no idea how difficult this was to be,
But as you can see we ran across not only breathtaking views, but some of the wildlife. A marmot, and some mountain goats. The mountain goats were particularly fascinating as to how they can climb on the extremely narrow ridges of the mountains. At the end of the trail was a frozen over Hidden Lake down in the valley. This trek was only about 3 miles round trip, but it sill took us over 3 hours to complete. And Nancy had really wished she had brought her hiking poles.
This night we ended driving out the East Entrance of the park to the town of St. Mary. There we found the security personnel of a local lodge in the middle of chasing away some wild animal. The way they were jumping about we thought it might be a bear, and best to wait in the truck to ask permission to park in their lot. After taking some of their guests away we managed to ask for that permission and were given instructions to park behind some of the Quonset huts down the road. Oh yeah, it was only a skunk! It was super windy and cold that night, either way sleeping in our ‘Casa Giro’ (name for our popup camper), is always a joy!
Stick with us as we start our journey back home!
Travel Adventures - Gary and Nancy 