Montana: Stunning Beauty, Glaciers, Fires, Hikes....but NO bears...YET.

Montana is as wonderful as I remembered. And Glacier National Park, which we always remember as the most beautiful place we have ever been, is just as astonishing in person as it is in our memory.

I was vaguely sorry to leave Missoula and the Flathead Valley. The valley, and Flathead Lake, are just beautiful as I remembered. And this time, after visiting Missoula and Big Fork, we spent a couple of days in Whitefish, which is about as cute as a town could get, and seems like an amazing and wonderful place to live. While we were there we went up to the top of the mountain, riding on the chairlifts that are used for skiing during the winter, and it was spectacular, but without the views we anticipated, because the entire area is hazy with smoke from wildfires in Montana, Washington, Oregon, and even as far away as Northern California. Riding up the chairlifts with us were quite a number of pretty crazy people (mostly quite young), who were sending themselves and their dirt bikes to the top, in order to send themselves careening down the mountain at crazy breakneck speeds. It was fun to watch, but sobering, too. I'm not so sorry to not be so young and indifferent to mortality.

Yes, those are our bikes, but you can't do much riding here. And no careening down mountains.

When we got to Glacier we started right away learning a lot of stuff, like we have at each National Park or historic site we have been to so far. It's too bad that it has taken so long for us to understand that  Park Rangers, guides and docents really can give us a bigger and richer experience than we get just going around on our own, and we have determined to go on more Ranger-lead hikes and listen to more of their talks. Sometimes they are kind of geeky (today the Ranger leading our hike went on in a rather religious way about rocks...and we had to stop a few times on our hikes to hear more about her favorite kinds of rocks), but they are usually adorable in their enthusiasm, and we have already learned a lot more than we would have without their encyclopedic knowledge and dedication.

On of the things we have learned is that the Continental Divide, which goes through the middle of this park, marks two completely different ecosystems. The western side, where we are camping this
time, is the end of the Pacific Northwest,  and gets its weather system and ecosystem from the Pacific. This is why the smoke from the fires farther west, especially from Washington, are making
the air so hazy here. The eastern side of the park is really the beginning of the Plains, and although the smoke is still bad there, the climate is pretty different, the animals are different, and the landscape is quite different.  Most of the hiking we have done here in the two other times we have been here
was on the eastern side, and we are disappointed not to really be able to go there again. So disappointed in fact that we have decided to blow off the last couple of nights at this campground, and go the long way around (you can't drive a trailer over the pass), so that we can enter the park from the other side.

The water is amazingly COLD

Can you see the haziness? There are BIG mountains there at the back, but they look vague

Perhaps I should explain about this park. It is 50 miles to travel from the west side of the park to the east. That sounds like nothing, right? But the Going to the Sun Road, which is THE most spectacular drive I have ever seen, is so winding and difficult that in the best of circumstances,  it takes about two and a half hours to go from one end to the other. So since you start on one side (camping doesn't really happen in the middle, that is the highest pass), you may have four or five hours committed to your day even before you get to the place you want to hike. Most hikes are at least three or four (or more, if I'm coming along) hours long. So you see the problem.

I'm not complaining. We have been on amazing hikes. One day we went to the top of Logan Pass, and hiked up to a hidden lake. It was so beautiful.

Hidden Lake, above Logan Pass

We tried to do this hike with our kids a long time ago, but the snow was too deep. Here is another
amazing thing. The pass opens around the 3rd of July. This year there was still 8 feet of snow there on July 3. Yesterday, on August 8, most of the snow was gone. The wildflowers were everywhere. The short period of time in which these flowers have to push their way up, flower and then drop seeds, is amazing. If I worked up at this pass at the Visitor Center, I'd go out every single day between the 1st of July and the 1st of September just to watch the changes. What an amazing transformation!

Can you see the wildflowers? Maybe you have to expand the picture

There is still some snow

Speaking of transformations, it is hard not to feel both glad and terribly sad about this place. When it opened in around 1910, there were something like 125 or 150 glaciers here. Now there are 25. They predict that all the glaciers here will be gone by 2030. That is only 16 years. Better get packing if you want to see them before they are gone. It will still be amazing and terrifying and beautiful here. But it will be different in significant ways.


One of the most startling things we have seen was on another hike to a lake. About halfway up the hike, there is an area with a tremendous number of fallen trees. Many of them are broken off about half way up the trunk. And they are falling UPHILL, which of course doesn't make sense at all. The Ranger told us that they believe that the trees were blown down, not by an avalanche (which occurred across the valley), but by the WIND created by the avalanche as it fell down the mountain across the valley.  Some of them broke off above the snow cover in one big moment in 2003. WOW.

Trees falling uphill

After we accomplished our hike, we got here:

I know this looks amazing, but it is hazy from smoke.

This is Avalanche Lake.

Last night we took a boat ride on the lake nearest to us. It was a very beautiful night, and not as smoky as some of the time here has been. It was one of the nicest experiences we have had since we began this trip last January.

Our wooden  boat, making this trip since 1938

This is how the mountains looked from our boat ride.

This is how we looked on our boat ride

Here is an amazing story we heard on the boat ride: in the 1930's there was a young couple staying at the lodge here at this lake who announced to everyone that they were going to climb to the top of one of these mountains. Everyone said, don't be ridiculous. Then they claimed they had, in fact, reached the top. No one believed them. They claimed to have left a glass jar, with their names and the date inside, wedged under a rock at the very top. They were just a crazy couple named Cannon, until the 1980's, when some Boy Scout troop found the jar. Now the mountain is called Mt Cannon!

When we were on a hike today,  and came upon a really almost unbelievable waterfall,

McDonald "Creek"

A River Runs Through it...and Bob steps in it

I suddenly thought of the sunset at Mallory Square in Key West.....and thought both: WOW, what a trip we are on...and WOW, what a BIG country.

Am I doing enough Glacier National Park boosting? This is one of the, if not THE,  most stunning
places it is possible to visit in this country. It is not on the way to anywhere. You can't pass through it as part of something else. You have to come here deliberately.  But it is so worth it. It is unlike anything else. And the time to visit it is SOON. DO  it, before you can't do it.