Glacier National Park

Day 10-Montana
We left Cardston and came back to the States; we were welcomed back by the friendly border official. So nice. We headed into the east side of Glacier National Park to explore the Many Glacier area, an area we did not see last summer. The first thing we saw after arriving at Many Glacier was a bighorn sheep trotting down the road.
We purchased tickets for a boat trip to Grinnell Lake, then ate lunch and looked around the fancy hotel there. It’s built like a Swiss chalet. A really large chalet.
We got on the 1:00 boat which crossed Swiftcurrent Lake and deposited us on the opposite shore.

We all disembarked to hike a quarter mile hump between Swiftcurrent Lake and Josephine Lake and heard from hikers going the other way that some grizzlies had been sighted on the trail. Everyone was skeptical and thought they were just fooling with us, and we arrived safely at the lake where we boarded another boat. About halfway across the lake we saw those two grizzlies along the shore and in the water and we were so excited! We got lots of pictures.

Note: this ends our bear sightings for the trip. Total: 5. Three black bears and two grizzlies. Impressive!

We settled back in our seats to finish the trip and at the end of the lake we exited the boat and took off on foot to Grinnell Lake. The trail was easy, wound through forest with streams, and there were lots of bugs.
Even with super bug spray they managed to bite us a couple times. We made it to Grinnell Lake with water draining into it from several small waterfalls and one large, spectacular one. We sat by the shore for quite a while and enjoyed the beauty of the lake and falls. Gorgeous.

On the way back, we took a short side trail to Hidden Falls which was steep, and on the trail we saw fresh droppings that looked suspiciously like bear. Scott consulted a book in a Yellowstone bookstore later and it was! So we narrowly missed being lunch for some hungry bear. Ouch! Hidden Falls were lovely and the trail was by a swinging bridge that warned only one hiker at a time because the bridge couldn’t take a higher load. I tried to walk slow and straight but I still set that thing to swinging.

We took the boats and hike back and the views on the lakes were beautiful. Then we left Many Glacier, drove to the St. Mary entrance and stopped at Sunrift Gorge on the way. The river comes through a very narrow rift in the high rocks then tumbles down some small falls right along the paved path.

As we walked along, we saw the sign for a hiking trail to Baring Falls and since I never see a waterfall sign that doesn’t intrigue me, I prevailed upon Scott and we decided to go for it. It was getting dusk and the trail took us through some pretty tall and dense vegetation so Scott was getting nervous about surprising a bear. He took the lead, clapping and whistling to alert all bears in the vicinity that two defenseless humans were passing through their territory, in case they were interested.
We finally got to the falls and they were well worth the hike although coming out was a constant up grade, and we proceeded out in the same manner described above.
Thanks to Scott’s diligent defensive tactics, we escaped unscathed. Note: Scott lives in a continual conundrum on these hikes-he wants to have a close (medium close) encounter with a bear but he doesn’t want his wife to get eaten. It’s tough. You may have wondered why I am often shown in the photos wearing the day pack. It’s bear protection in case I am attacked from the back. He read this somewhere.

We headed up to Logan Pass, admiring the views along the way, which truly are stunning and spectacular. We were headed up there at sunset because at the beginning of this trip I had read something interesting in an old Sunset magazine I brought along to finally read and recycle. It had some letters to the editor about Glacier and one said there were more animals to see in the parking lot at Logan Pass at sunset than elsewhere. They bring food in a cooler and have dinner and a show. So we decided to check it out. There were only a few cars left and there were bighorn sheep EVERYWHERE. They were all over the parking lot, on the sidewalks, by the visitor center, everywhere.
We walked around and took photos then got in our car to leave and took some close-ups of sheep walking right by our car.

We took some photos of various waterfalls on the way out of the park.


Now began the drive to h*#€. We had not been successful finding accommodations near Glacier, as everything was booked. Scott found a hotel in Shelby which was about 90 miles away. We naively thought this would take us about 90 minutes to get to; oh, the error of our thinking. First, the road from St. Mary to Browning had twists and turns, so that was slow going. To make matters worse, the road was littered with cattle, some of which were actually licking the pavement, so we had to slow even more to avoid creaming our car with a cow. We finally reached the highway to go east to Shelby. We were about halfway across, just outside Cut Bank, Montana, when we pulled up to a portable construction stop light with a sign telling us to stop here on red. The lights were red so we dutifully stopped and waited. And waited. And waited. The portable sign had two red lights on it and after some time, one of them went off while the other remained red. What to do? Go or stay? We wondered if this was a one-way road, but both sides were open and we had been sitting there a LONG time with no cars coming the opposite direction. We waited some more and then the light that had gone out came back on, giving us two red lights again. Another car pulled up behind us and Scott got out in the dark to ask if he was local and knew the situation, but he was from Colorado and was no help. One light turned completely off again, so Scott made an executive decision and we took off on the gravelly, under-construction road. The speed limit said 35 and we still had over 30 miles to go. For the longest time we saw zero cars coming the other direction and were puzzled by this, but then we saw a truck with flashing yellow lights leading a convoy of cars coming toward us. Oops! We were nervous there would be irate troopers after us, but we saw nobody on our side except our Colorado follower and three total convoys coming the other way. It took us about an hour to get across that stretch. We got close to Shelby and I asked Siri for directions to the hotel and she took us off to the fairgrounds, so finally Scott’s phone got us directions to the hotel and we pulled in at 12:30 instead of 11:00 pm, which was already stressing Scott out as being way too late in the first place. Oh my word! Oh, and along the way we saw an alien landing strip of fifty or sixty blinking red lights in the black middle of nowhere. Note: these were actually lights on windmills, but it was a very creepy sight.