Day 8-9: Glacier National Park

(Ed: Written Monday, June 1, after leaving Glacier)

Compared to Yellowstone, Glacier National Park was a more rugged, untamed sibling. It felt less like a tourist attraction than Yellowstone, and more like a little slice of preserved wilderness. Nestled up by the Canada-US border, the park is bisected by the Continental Divide. Its east and west halves are linked by a single road: Going-to-the-Sun Highway, which passes through the mountains at Logan Pass. Unfortunately for us, the pass was closed when we were there, necessitating a 60 mile detour over treacherous mountain roads. In retrospect, we arrived far too early in the year, which made our visit much more difficult than it needed to be.

The drive up from Yellowstone started auspiciously. We stopped for breakfast and wi-fi access at a charming coffee shop in Bozeman (where we posted some earlier entries in this blog), while Andrew got an oil change for the car, and lunched at a Pizza hut with a friendly waitress in Missoula. The troubles started as we went north. We slowed to a crawl because of aggressive highway patrols. Then Ricardo lost his glasses in the car (which we fortunately later found), and I found my computer cable strangely melted (which is the source of the strange interlude in the earlier entry).

Thanks to our early departure, we got the entrance at West Glacier by the late afternoon. Unfortunately, our intended campsite, St. Mary, was on the eastern edge of the park, and Going-to-the-Sun Highway, the only road through the park, was closed for repairs. So we made a long detour around the park. It was twilight when we arrived. The campsite lacked water, but we simply made canned chicken soup (which didn’t need water) because we were all getting slightly ill, and ate cookies. We pitched our tent, and lit a fire (having saved some from Yellowstone).

Just as we were feeling satisfied, and were ready to call it a night, the wind picked up. At first, I was more worried that the campfire would jump out of its pit and start a blaze. As we turned around, we saw a bigger problem: our tent was airborne, swept up by the heady gusts. After a desperate struggle, we wrestled the tent down, and packed it into the car. We put out our fire, and beat a hasty retreat to a nearby lodge. Unsympathetic to our plight, they offered us their only room: a tiny basement cell with only two cots, and asked nearly $100. We ended up spending (a very cramped) night in the car parked in the lot at the visitor’s center.

We got up this morning, intent on salvaging as much out of our trip to Glacier National Park as possible. The ranger suggested a few trails and showed us a 15-minute video about Glacier. We had breakfast at a little roadside café, and were reinvigorated. Intent on seeing glaciers, we drove up to Many Glacier valley.

The trail we picked turned out to be a wonderful hike. We wound through a temperate forest, then rounded Swiftcurrent Lake and Lake Josephine, both turquoise blue from the minerals brought down by glacial meltwater. I had never seen such a beautiful lake in my life; the color looked warm and inviting (though the water was less so). From there, the trail proceeded sharply upwards, clinging to the side of a mountain. We crossed countless little mountain streams, which fell as waterfalls, pooling at our feet across the trail. The trail rose steeply; though Ricardo moved ahead quickly, I had to ask the group to stop repeatedly to catch my breath. At last, Grindell Glacier came into view. Though covered by a layer of snow, the glacier was a breathtaking sight, covering the mountain in a blanket of white. Far below, Grindell Lake, made of it’s meltwater, shone like a cerulean pool, nestled in the mountains. Alas, our progress was blocked by a large snowdrift; one misstep on it would have caused us to slide to our deaths, so we prudently turned back.

In the afternoon, we drove back around to the west side of the park, to see the Trail of Cedars. The west side of the park received much more rainfall, and was home to gigantic cedars, which were hundreds of years old and up to a meter in diameter, in stark contrast to the more rugged trees on the east side of the park. We even spotted a rabbit emerging from the bush, while we had not seen anything on our morning hike (though we did hear the call of a mountain goat).

We decided not to risk a second night in Glacier, so we left in the early evening, intending to find a motel on the way to Seattle. Amazingly, we made it all the way to Spokane, Washington, where we settled into a motel for the night. Gratefully, we took our first showers in four days, and drifted off into blissful slumber on a soft mattress.

Pictures from Glacier & Seattle at http://picasaweb.google.ca/lok.kin.yeung/Days810GlacierSeattle#