After leaving Seattle, our plans included a trip to Glacier National Park. I have never been, and Nathan was last there something like 25 years ago. We traveled down I-90 and stopped in Post Falls to stay at Cabela’s again for a night, to visit with an old friend of Nate’s from College. The next morning we had a great breakfast at the Corner Cafe, and then headed to West Glacier.
In West Glacier, we stayed at the San Suz Ed RV Park. While it was very close to the entrance to Glacier National Park, the cell bandwidth wasn’t the greatest. It was usable, but we struggled. Also, AT&T was the best here. In the future, in order to work without issue we’ll stay closer to Kalispell or Whitefish.
San Suz Ed was very quiet in this somewhat off-season trip. We watched the weather turn from summer to fall in the space of a week. When we arrived, it was 85 degrees outside, and when we left, it was a high of 60, hitting mid 30’s at night. We also watched trees surrounding the area start turning their leaves.
Before our arrival, a fire had started near Lake McDonald. This meant for at least the first few days, the area was very smoky. Also, the Going-To-The-Sun road was closed to all normal traffic. The only way you could get to Logan Pass at the top was to either take a trip with one of the two local tour companies, or manage to get yourself one of 200 Shuttle tickets handed out each morning. You could also drive around to East Glacier and go up, but the view isn’t as great. Here’s a picture from the InciWeb site showing the boundary of the fire.
We got up early on Sunday morning and headed to the Apgar Visitor Center around 6 AM, and were already 50 deep in line for Shuttle tickets. We waited for a couple of hours, got our tickets, and then waited another hour for our ticketed time slot, and hopped on the shuttle. While you needed some patience for this, the advantage was that the shuttle was FREE!
We watched out the windows on the trip up, and were able to see the fire.
When we got to the Logan Pass, we checked out the Visitor’s Center, and then hiked out the Hidden Lake Trail.
We had a chipmunk hang out with us for a bit at one of the summits, and pose for me!
After our visit to the Park, we spent the next several days getting familiar with Kalispell and Whitefish. We had some good BBQ at the DeSoto Grill, visited the local Distillery, and figured out some nice places to shop. We also visited the Hungry Horse Dam, which is a LOT taller than I thought it would be!
During this trip we both also ended up rebuilding our laptops (reinstalling Windows) at the local McDonald’s. McDonald’s here had great bandwidth, sometimes hitting 100 MB/s download speeds.
We are now back at Holter Lake, and plan on doing several fishing trips down the Missouri River. More to come!