Monday, August 22: Glacier West Entrance

            Not knowing the layout of Glacier NP, I decided that we should take the free shuttle bus and avoid driving my long truck on the narrow, curvy roads of the park. We wish we had. From the transportation center, we took a large bus along an easily drivable portion of going-to-the-sun highway, which first ran the length of Lake McDonald until we came to Lake McDonald lodge, where we had to change over to a smaller bus for the drive to Logan Pass, the highest road accessible point in the park. They said that if you were afraid of peering over a cliff, sit on the driver’s side, which Jan promptly did. At first, the road followed the river that feeds Lake McDonald, then it turned right and began to climb up the side of a very steep U shaped valley, characteristic of a glacial valley such as Yosemite. As we got higher and higher, we could see the famous glacial mountains that the park is famous for. Suddenly, the driver cried’ “Bear!” and stopped. As we looked out the front window, we could see that there was a grizzly bear in the road. I could tell it was a Grizzly and not a black bear because it had the characteristic hump on its back. It walked across the road to our side of the bus where it disappeared into the woods. As we went higher, we could see that the road was literally carved out of the rocky side of the mountain. We passed by a curious area called “The Weeping Wall” where water flowed out of that rock above and made the rock wet for several hundred yards.

There was a visitor’s center and a large parking lot at Logan Pass, so we bought some post cards and decided to hike about a mile over the ridge to view Hidden Lake. Much of the path was a boardwalk, but that gave way to a dirt trail and a few snow fields. Jan loved sloshing trough the slippery snow fields (not!), but she troopered on.


Jan ready to hike

Spectacular view from the trail; I wanted to backpack so bad!

We saw a mountain goat from a distance, but then as we crested the ridge, we saw a family of mountain goats right next to the trail. I think they were a plant by the parks department because they seemed to love poising for pictures.


View of Hidden Lake

 Hidden lake was beautiful. I had seen pictures of it many times on the internet while in “jail” at my job and vowed to visit one day. I wanted to get my backpack, hike down to that lake and spend the night. Maybe some other time, but as Robert Frost says in his poem The Road Not Taken, “Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back.” The bus rides back seemed long, so we decided to drive to the east entrance the next day and see things on our own.