Sunday, July 6, 2014

We were as close to Glacier National Park's "Going to the Sun Road" as we were going to get, so that was our goal for the day.  It meant a lot of driving, but it also gave us the opportunity to preview how the border crossing at Chief Mountain would go. 

No line at the border, that was a bonus.

Back into Montana we saw signs warning us to watch for open range cattle - our Honda FIT has great brakes so the cattle were no problem, but in the coach I will have to drive a lot slower and stay vigilant!

We now had a heads up that we will be sharing the road with our bovine friends.

Chief Mountain viewed from the Montana side looks a lot like the view from our RV site in Canada.  Its very distinctive shape is what makes it such an icon among all of the other mountain peaks in the area.  Like so many of the unique places in the west, this one is still a sacred Indian site and has been for many hundreds or even thousands of years.

Chief Mountain is shared - located on Glaciers eastern border and the Blackfoot Indian Reservation.

It is 50 miles from West Glacier to St. Mary at the east entrance.

From the east entrance to Glacier, the Going to the Sun Road was pretty rough gravel undergoing repair for about 10 miles.  I thought, if the entire road is no better than this, we may not make it to the top. Fortunately, we cleared the construction zone and the road was remarkable well maintained.

Logan pass still had a lot of snow piled up.  It was warm and it seemed like the snow was melting, but I suspect they rarely ever see all of the ground around this Visitor's Center (elevation, 6880 ft.).

This was a challenging year for the snowplows.  The road didn't open until July 3, 2014.

The Weeping Wall was fun to drive by in the car.

I would think for motorcycles and convertibles, not so much.

We traveled the road over the pass and saw most of the features highlighted on the map.  Once we passed the Loop we turned around and headed back.  It was only a few more miles to Avalanche Creek (the eastern most point of our travels from the west entrance a month ago), but we thought we had seen most everything of interest and it was already getting late in the afternoon.  Next time maybe we will drive the entire length and back in one day.

The Triple Arch was easy to miss heading west, but could easily be seen while driving east.

There was a little of the glacier blue showing through the holes in the snow.

One of the best views along the road was near the east end of St. Mary Lake where Wild Goose Island was framed by the trees with the mountains in the background.  It was "closed" but I flagrantly ignored the orange cones that tried to deny us access to this iconic picture. Once I pulled in between the cones it seemed to start a little trend as others did the same. 

Wild Goose Island is an iconic view of Glacier.

We stopped at the East Entrance Visitor's Center on our way out.  I saw in the corner a new Celestron, 14 inch, Edge Optics Telescope on a CGEM mount.  The Ranger said there was an astronomy session that night starting at 9:30 pm.  Sadly, the border was closed at 10:00 so there was no way to stay.  I found out a bit later, from the Ranger who does the astronomy program, that the telescope was in fact, just out of the box and had not been under the stars yet.  It also was not going to be used for a while because the "boss" wanted to be there when it was used for the first time.  I did get a good peak at the sun through a couple of telescopes set up for solar viewing.  One was "white light" showing quite a few sunspots and the other was a hydrogen-alpha scope that showed spicules and prominances. 

A Ranger suggested we should not miss a drive along the Many Glacier Road to the north.  It was said that it is, to some, the heart of the park.  We were underwhelmed after just having seen the fantastic views along the Going to the Sun Road and I'm not sure we even took a single picture.  We did stop in for some frozen yogurt and a few cold drinks that hit the spot.

Back at the border we found ourselves in quite a long line including maybe a dozen or so folks on motorcycles.  Hopefully when we pass through in the coach it will be more like the morning crossing (no line) than this!

It was another one of those long days where we almost could not remember all of what we had seen and done and it felt so good to be back at the coach where we could relax.  We need to remember we are retired - we are not on vacation - we have to pace ourselves!