After our stop at the gold mine in Idaho, we were just a few hours away from our next campground a few miles from the entrance to Glacier National Park. We arrived late that night at Glacier Pines Campground, in Kalispell, and situated ourselves after dark. We were happy to get up early the next morning since we had new adventures waiting for us. We loaded into Boober and drove to the park, with Going To The Sun Road on our agenda for the day. It started out cloudy so our view heading up to Logan Pass was limited. The climb up the road is impressive, building this road is definitely an engineering marvel.
We arrived at Logan Pass, the highest point on the Going To The Sun Road, at an elevation of 6646 feet. We didn’t expect to be able to see much since the clouds were so thick. We walked up to the visitors center and looked around, but when we came out we got an unexpected surprise. The clouds parted and we were amazed by the vista that lie before us. The girls were not impressed by the glaciers at all since we had spent all summer on a mountain with a glacier in Oregon. I had honestly expected them to be much larger than they actually were. The best part was by far the views of the mountains and the pristine landscape in front of us.
After spending a while at Logan Pass, we continued on down toward the East entrance to the park. The drive down the curvy road was beautiful, the clouds were nice and fluffy rolling over the mountain peaks and over the lakes.
We grabbed lunch consisting of Bison Burgers at a little restaurant in Babb, Montana on our way to the Many Glacier area. We stopped and hiked to a waterfall, I didn’t tell the girls about the Bear Country sign until we got back to Boober. They had a great time on the hike, it was steep but they all said they were glad they made it to such a beautiful waterfall. We had to say goodbye to the waterfall after resting for just a few minutes because we had to go all the way back across the Going to the Sun Road to get back to the bus. The next to the last image in this group is the view out over the valley from the waterfall. After hiking back to the van, we drove to the end of the road and found the Swiftcurrent Motor Inn. The view of the mountain above the inn were great, and we even saw a momma big horn sheep with her baby on the hillside as we were driving back toward Babb. I took a picture, but they were too far away to see clearly.
The drive back across Logan Pass gave us a different view of the glaciers. Since the sun was setting, the pictures are a little grainy, but you can see the glaciers a little better. There are more glaciers in the park, we just didn’t have enough time to hike to the best viewing spots. Our time in glacier only lasted one day, but we enjoyed it very much. It only gave us added drive to see other amazing places on our journey, even if for just a short time. Heading to glacier added a couple hundred miles to our journey, but it was well worth the extra slow driving in the bus. Some day I hope to be able to bring the girls back to see these vistas again, and spend a few weeks taking it all in.
After a whirlwind tour of the park, we decided to take a day to relax a little before we headed toward Bozeman. We were glad we went to Lone Pine State Park and hiked some of the trails. The views over the town of Kalispell were very nice, it was a relaxing break before driving again.
We packed up the next morning and headed toward Bozeman early, the Walmart parking lot was our destination. I looked forward to running into a high school classmate and checking out his bike shop in Bozeman.
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