Glacier

Posted on by merryme

My days of sailing the endless, waving, green grass of the flat prairie have come to an end.  We have finally reached the mountains.  It always amazes me how flat it is forever and then the mountains just rise out of the ground suddenly.

Our guide today explained it by saying that these mountains were formed from the Pacific plate butting up against the North American plate, and that it’s a buckling of the earth.  If there are small hills just before the mountains they are piles of moraine left over from the glaciers.

We are staying at St Mary’s/East Glacier KOA.  Instead of greeting me with “Watch out for snakes!”, they warn me this is bear country.    It’s always something, isn’t it.

And this is just in the campground.
St Mary’s KOA. That’s my rig, the third one with the bicycle.

After our campground cookout of chili and salad, I caught a ride with Robbin and Lynn who wanted to search for wildlife up on Many Glacier Road.

The views on Many Glacier Road were incredible!

And… we saw 3 bears – 2 black bears and one grizzly.  We were so hopped up on excitement seeing them so close.

This is a black bear (even though it is brown). No, I wasn’t that close. I was inside a car with the zoom maxed out on my iPhone.
This is a grizzly which you can tell by the hump over his shoulders and blond color. And obviously he’s much farther away.

At the end of the road we were pleasantly surprised to see the Many Glacier Hotel.

Today we had a Red Bus Tour around the park.  These old buses seat about 12 people so we needed 3.  They are well known to be open air buses, but at 40 degrees and constant rain, we had a tent like roof and all the windows rolled up.  I wore a shirt, sweater, sweatshirt, my pleather jacket, a hat, both hoods and gloves and was still chilled to the bone.  The Wagon-masters said when they were here last year, it was 100 degrees.

They took us up as far as they could on the Going to the Sun Highway…  14 miles, the rest was closed because they are still removing snow from the road.

There are many sedimentary layers that were buckled up. This shows one whiter layer. The stones here are all colors – red, green, tan.

Then we had lunch at the Big Tree Lodge.  They brought these Douglas Fir trees in from Washington state to build it.  The poles still have the bark on them.

Big Tree Lodge at Glacier National Park.

This is probably the only mountain goat we’ll see on this trip.

Notice on the right the bark still on the pole. Most of the people sitting in the lodge were hikers trying to get out of the rain.

They we had a short 1/2 mile hike to Running Eagle (Trick) Falls.  It’s really 2 waterfalls in one.  The first is obvious, the second you can see about 1/3 the way up on the right – the water comes out of a hole in the cliff.  When things dry out late summer, the top one dries up and only the shorter one runs.

Running Eagle Falls was named to honor Pitamakan (Running Eagle). She became the only famed female warrior of the Blackfeet tribe. She led many successful hunting and war parties, and was the only woman given a man’s name in the tribe.

 

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