Day 54: Glacier National Park MT

Tuesday, June 9
Glacier National Park MT
Odometer Begin: 115,945
Miles traveled: 134
Time spent traveling: 3.5 hours
Other: First rain on tent in 50 days!
Wx: mostly cloudy, rain, sleet, haiil, low 40s F
States traveled: MT

We packed up our things after a warm breakfast of a ham, black beans and egg scramble. Since the Going to the Sun road is not open yet, we had to drive around the southern border of the park on Highways, 2, 49 and 89. It is a very pretty drive so we didn’t mind much. The east side of Glacier is quieter which suits us and it also way more breathtakingly beautiful. The Mountains are sharp and jagged and just amazing! We got to the Many Glacier campground around 12:30, found our site and set up the tent. Rain was coming so we put the tarp up over the table. We’d decided to hike into Grinnell Glacier and see if we could spot any Big Horn Sheep or Mountain Goats. The hike is definitely one of the highlights of the trip. It follows a valley by several lakes and then climbs up to look over Grinnell Lake. We are not exactly sure where the glacier was among the snow or if it is still there because a sign at the trail head said it was decreasing rapidly in size. We did see Mountain Goats off in the distance that we could look at with binoculars. We did not see and grizzly or black bears but I guess they were active in that part of the park during the day.

When we got back to camp we were getting dinner ready when it started to rain. Because of the rain we ended up getting in the tent around 6:30 and reading books. We had met a couple of English blokes (father and son) who were actually from NH and had an RV. They came over to check on us in the rain and invited us over to warm up in their heated RV. We went over for a while, and had ginger snaps and chocolate chip cookies…I was happy. The rain continued through the night but we could see that we were just below the snow line, I think snow may have been better because the tarp sprung a leak but we were staying mostly dry.

There are a lot of photos here but they are pretty stunning if I do say so myself...