Tuesday, August 23: Glacier from the East

      Saint Mary Lake is on the east side of Logan Pass, so we decided to drive around the mountains on an easy, but long road and enter at the Saint Mary entrance. I wanted to get a good view of this lake, but didn’t want to drive all the way to Logan Pass, so we decided to Jackson Glacier Overlook, which was about half way up. There had been some talk about the difference between a snow field and a glacier and concluded that a glacier moved but a snow field didn’t. The Glacier was viewable from the road turn out, but it was pretty far away, so I had to use the binoculars. It looked like a snow field to me, however I could see some of that blue ice that glaciers seem to have.

Saint Mary's Lake

Jackson Glacier

      We left the park again and went even further north to Many Glacier, the area I had heard was “The Heart of the Park”, but when we got to the end of the road and the Many Glacier visitor’s center, we couldn’t see much. Sure there were a lot of mountains around us, but no spectacular views. We turned around in disappointment. On the way down, we saw cars parked on the side of the road with the people out of their cars and binoculars and cameras pointed up the hill across the road. We stopped and ran up the hill to join the others to whatever there was to see. We didn’t see anything. I started asking other people what we were trying to see and every one said, “I don’t know, I came up here because everybody else was up here!” I felt like a lemming going over the cliff with the other lemmings. However, all was not lost because in the binoculars we spotted a hotel on a nearby lake and groups of people up on a hill behind the hotel. We drove up the access road to a parking lot high above the hotel and were treated to a beautiful view of the lake and surrounding mountains. The groups of people we had seen were groups of school kids getting a talk on the geology of the region and how they though it was formed. We took some pictures and headed on our long drive back to Glacier Haven.

Jan & Dave in back of Hotel