This weekend, Charlotte and I finally made it out to Glacier National Park! Glacier is a spectacular place– if you’ve never been, I highly recommend it. Early on Friday morning (~7am) Charlotte, Lauren and Marisa (BLM summer interns) and myself were jamming ourselves and all our gear into Lauren’s subaru. Before we truly began our journey, we had to stop in Malta to pick up Spencer, another BLM intern who was coming with us. After we picked up Spencer we drove for another 5-6 hours across the prairie until the mountains popped into view. We went to the gate on the road to Many Glacier, a campsite recommended to us by a co-worker, but by that time it was already midafternoon and this popular campsite was full. We drove around and found ourselves another spot at Sun Point, pitched our tents and went out for a leisurely afternoon stroll to some local waterfalls. We walked about 4 or 5 miles and saw three waterfalls, an elk a mule deer (thanks john), and a chipmunk trying frantically to cover up a hole it had made in the middle of the trail while we stood about three feet away. Charlotte also found a caterpillar at war with some ants.
The mule deer. We saw it on the trail, and it ran up into the trees to go around us and then got back on the trail behind us.
St. Mary's falls-- very impressive.
The caterpillar. Two ants are trying to carry it away, probably to become dinner.
On the second day, we undertook a hike which would take us up to a lake, and which had an optional spur to a nice lookout through a tunnel. On our way up to the first lake (aptly named iceberg lake) we came across some fresh, still-wet bear (grizzly??) poop on the trail. I checked it out, and determined that it definitely had fur in it, along with what might have been berries and sticks at some point. Before starting our hike, we sprung for some bear spray ($45), but still we preferred not to run in to one.
Bear scat. Cool.
We continued our journey, unfettered by bears, and saw some very cool flowers.
alpine meadow wildflowers. The red one on the right is red paintbrush. Red paintbrush grows at a lower altitude than lemon paintbrush, but there is a zone where their ranges overlap, called an ecotone.
Beargrass. Apparently it is neither eaten by bears nor a grass. The early pioneers just named it this because they sometimes saw bears near it.
At last we arrived at our first destination, iceberg lake!
Iceberg lake. Very cold to the feet.
Charlotte, Lauren, Spencer and I decided that we wanted to keep hiking, and we headed off towards ptarmigan lake. We decided not to go all the way to ptarmigan tunnel because we had just made up our minds to hike to do a long hike to a glacier the next day, and we wanted to save our feet. It turned out that ptarmigan lake was nothing to write home about, but we did see some cool wildlife, including a marmot and a butterfly that landed on my hand.
This marmot was extremely habituated to people. It walked right by us, and munched on some veg less than 20 feet away.
Butterfly.
After our hike that day (~13miles), we were tuckered out, so we decided to just drive around and check out the park. We drove up to logan pass and saw some mountain goats and bighorn sheep.
mountain goats in a parking lot near logan pass.
That night there was a ferocious thunderstorm, but it could not keep us awake, especially after the day we’d had. The next morning we were up bright and early again, hiking by 7:45 to see Grinnell Glacier. As far as we could tell, this 5.5 mile hike (11 round trip) is the shortest hike to a glacier in the park. There is an interesting little display at the trailhead with photos of the glacier over the past hundred years and some information about climate change. The hike was beautiful and not too too strenuous, with nice views of the glacier and a few lakes the whole way up. We also had to walk through a waterfall to get there and back, which was refreshing in the 80 degree weather. This glacier is enormous (or so it looked to me, but perhaps it isn’t compared with what it used to be) and is definitely the biggest chunk of ice i’ve ever seen.
Spencer on the other side of the waterfall.
Nice view on the way up to the glacier.
Grinnell glacier. Note Marisa for scale.
The group (minus Spencer, he's taking the photo) at Grinnell Glacier.