Glacier National Park
Glacier National Park
In order to get to the park early to get a campsite we spent the night in Coram, MT at Glacier Under Canvas, a glamping site with extremely comfy beds, stoves and furniture but in a tent. It is also fenced three sides to the highway to keep bears out which is nice but some critters still made it in. I highly recommend it if you get a chance.
Upon arrival at the park we realized that our two tripods were still at home and had failed to make the trip with us. When you are looking forward to long exposure shots of rivers and stars this is not a good thing! We managed to find a camera store in West Glacier and bought the last one in the store for $40. I'm sure you can picture the high quality and stability of this tripod in your mind (where is the "Sarcasm" font?) Catastrophe partially avoided we went exploring and fell in love with the place.
Our original campsite was now off limits to us as tent campers due to bear activity but we found a site at Lake McDonald. Of course, since it was OUR camping trip, half of the park was on fire and no campfires were allowed so we were relegated to placing our folding chairs around the camp stove to warm up in the mornings. Trying to be optimistic about it we were fascinated by the helicopters that would scoop water from the lake.
As you can tell by the last photo, the skies were pretty grey for our trip and we never really got a clean look at the stars, Glacier NP is one of the best locations for it though, far from light pollution and nearby towns have strict rules about light pollution after 10:00 pm, we just got unlucky. The hiking was superb though, on our first day we did the Trail of the Cedars, a short .7 mile loop with interesting waterfalls and foliage and kept hiking up to Avalanche Lake.
The next day we traveled the "Going to the Sun" road which is widely considered the most beautiful drive in the country, through narrow winding asphalt carved into cliffs and 4000' drops with a 12" rock "guard rail", it is supremely beautiful but with my fear of heights it was also very nerve racking. Needless to say, there were very few pictures taken by me. We did make one stop on a turnout so that I could stretch and un-clench. Logan Pass on the main road is a great spot to find mountain goats, they are all over the park but very prevalent up top. We found one munching on grass less than 10' from the decking.
We drove through the East side of the park which was where most of the fires were at and there were views of lakes that previously nobody had been able to see with all of the fire damage. Sad to see but it's part of nature. We entered Canada and had lunch at the Prince of Wales Hotel in Waterton, AB., it's not nearly as fancy as it sounds but the food was good and the setting is spectacular. The wind was blowing really hard at 60-70mph so my 5 shot hand held panoramic was not very good but still better than what I thought would be.
The next few days were a lot of walking by the lake and taking random trails to see where they would lead us but eventually the weather turned on us and we left a day early but fully intend to go back soon.
