Glacier National Park
Wouldn’t you know it – after weeks of rainy, cloudy weather, just as we’re almost home we’ve had four days of fantastic, clear, sunny weather. We’ve woken up each of the last four mornings, looked outside, and seen nothing but blue sky above. Oh well, be thankful for what we have and make the most of it.
After breaking camp – not much to that: turn off the water heater pilot, stow the front window shades, and put away the single leveling block we needed at this site – we drove back down toward Babb for Mass at St Mary’s Church. Along the way we stopped at the Many Glacier Hotel and took a couple of pictures of this historic structure as well as a few of the gorgeous backdrop of a sky-blue lake and the mountains beyond. This is such a beautiful place; we’re already talking about coming back and spending more time here.
We got down to Babb with about ten minutes to spare. We were greeted at the door of the church by a deacon, who was to lead the Communion Service. Again, as in so many of the small towns here and in Alaska, there was no priest and thus no Mass. This deacon was a very humble man of obvious Native American descent, which is quite natural given that the town of Babb and the larger surrounding area east of the park is part of the Blackfeet Indian Reservation. (Side note: The tribal lands stretch across the U.S./Canadian border. On the Canadian side the tribe calls themselves the Blackfoot, but on the U.S. side they call themselves the Blackfeet.)
After mass we drove down to the town of St Mary for lunch before starting up the Going to the Sun Road. As mentioned previously, this is a narrow, winding road the crosses the park, going over Logan Pass, and dropping down into the McDonald River valley on the west side of the pass. Driving up the east side, I began to wonder why they have such strict size limitations for vehicles. Sure, it was somewhat narrow and had some sharp curves, but nothing really out of the ordinary for typical mountain roads. There were several viewpoints and overlooks along the way, and we stopped and took our share of photos. By the way, I’m nearing the maximum on my second 16-gig card on my Nikon DSLR, and have just about filled up an 8-gig card on my backup Canon G10. That’s a lot of photos, even considering the large file sizes these two cameras create. I’ll probably finish the second 16-gig card and be into my final card for the DSLR tomorrow. Plus Jeanette is into her second card for her little Canon point-and-shoot camera. We’ll be busy sorting photos for months when we get home.
But back to the Going to the Sun Road…There’s a lot of road repair and reconstruction going on as you near Logan Pass and beyond on the west side. It’s not too bad on the east side – there are a few short constricted sections, but even with all the two-way traffic it’s not too bad. The west side is another story, but I’ll get to that in a minute. There is a Visitor Center with a large parking lot at Logan Pass, just like that on Trail Ridge Road in Rocky Mountain National Park. The parking lot was totally full, so we circled around the lot for a couple of times until we finally found someone pulling out that didn’t already have another car waiting to snag the spot. As we walked up to the Visitor Center, everyone was looking at a couple of Bighorn sheep up on the hillside across the road.
The Logan Pass Visitor Center, and the pass itself, are right at the transition between the sub-alpine and the alpine vegetation zones, what some call the Krumholz zone. The elevation is approximately 6800 feet, or roughly 5000 feet below where the same zone occurs in Colorado and 3000 to 3500 feet above where it occurs in most of southern Alaska. There are several trails leading up into the tundra from the Visitor Center, but since we’ve experienced a lot of tundra hikes, we passed on going up any higher. The wildflowers were in full bloom around the Visitor Center, however, including a couple we hadn’t seen before, Sugarbowl (a gentian), and pink one we haven’t identified yet.
Westbound from the Visitor Center the road immediately drops down along the side of the long ridge that forms the central spine of the park, which is known as the Garden Wall Divide. This is where the road gets, ahem, interesting – especially if you’re driving a vehicle that’s on the cusp of the size limit. All of a sudden you’re driving along an extremely narrow shelf road, with near vertical cliffs towering above on one side and near vertical cliffs plunging a thousand feet or more on the other. The pavement is barely 16 to 18 feet wide at most, with cut rock on the inside and a low stone wall on the outside, which leaves no room for error. Throw in a few construction zones and it really gets interesting. Thank goodness the Tiger’s mirrors retract, otherwise they would have been scraping the rock on one side or hitting oncoming vehicles on the other. Plus, all this is on a curving, seven to eight percent downgrade, and it goes on like this for at least twelve miles before finally making a sharp switchback and leveling out a bit. It’s a gear-down, both hands on the wheel segment for sure. It would be great fun if we still had our Miata and there was no traffic, but we were in an almost eight-foot wide motorhome and it was Sunday afternoon on one of the most popular drives in one of the most popular National Parks. Now I know why they won’t let larger vehicles on the Going to the Sun Road.
Once down off the side of the mountain, the road levels out and follows the McDonald River for several miles. We stopped at a campground for the night so the report of the rest of the road will have to wait until tomorrow.
Our campground is called Avalanche Creek Campground, a typical NPS dry campground similar to the Many Glacier Campground where we stayed last night. It sits in the middle of a towering forest of Western Red Cedar and Hemlock trees. The sites, at least on this loop, are all short drive-through types, which make it convenient for RV’ers, especially those towing trailers. We chilled for an hour or so to unwind from the drive before fixing dinner, then went for a nice walk along the “Trail of Cedars,” an eight-tenths of a mile loop through the old-growth Cedar forest that starts just outside the campground. This trail follows Avalanche Creek up to the steep gorge where it flows in a roaring cascade out of the base of the mountain behind our campground. The trail then crosses the creek on a well-built wooden bridge, and continues on an elevated boardwalk above the forest floor for another half-mile to the road. It then turns and loops back to a small parking area just outside the campground. It’s a magical stroll through a mystical environment, although it’s nowhere near the equal to the Ancient Forest trail we took through the rainforest of giant cedars between Prince George and Mt Logan Provincial Park a week ago.
I’d like to close tonight with a prayer of thanks that Russell and Carol made it through the hurricane with no serious damage to their home in Alexandria. We’re still anxious over their boat, which they keep in a marina on Chesapeake Bay, but will know nothing until they get over to check on it (and we get back into cell phone range).
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