Joe & Wilma's Excellent Adventures

Monday, June 24, 2024

First Day Exploring the Park

Our temperature range today is 42-61.  The wind melted a lot of snow off the mountains yesterday, but there is still some out there, especially on the north side.  Wednesday, we are supposed to hit 70 degrees, but Thursday our high is forecast at 52, with a low Thursday morning of 39, and rain.

Fed, fueled, windows washed, ice in the cooler, and at 10:30 we are ready to go.  We paid $4.49 for fuel in St. Mary’s  for the jeep, but only $4.04 in West Glacier.  (He only took 3 gallons, but he likes to keep the tank full on our drives). 

We entered the park free with our senior pass and stopped at the visitor center. Then we headed on in. We’re a bit disappointed that the only road to drive from our entrance is the Road to the Sun. We were hoping for side roads to drive, especially dirt roads.  We had not planned on driving the Road to the Sun today, at least not all of it, but that's what we ended up doing since there were no side roads.  

The road starts out following the very pretty St. Mary Lake.  It even has a boat ramp, and we saw a tour boat on it later.

At this lower elevation, we saw lots of pretty wildflowers.  My picture doesn't do this justice, but they were bright blue and orange.

Although yesterday's sun and wind melted a lot of the snow on the mountains, there is still a lot out there.  One of the mountains further back in this range seemed to be completely snow-covered.

 

This became the Day of Waterfalls.  We saw more waterfalls today than we had ever seen in one day before.  With the warmer temperature and the recent snow, practically every mountain had a waterfall of melting snow pouring off of it.  Some were far away but still easy enough to see, some were really close to the road, some were so close it kept the road wet.  

There were also beautiful valleys in the canyons here.  

Joe is loving it here.

I caught sight of one waterfall right beside me just as we passed it, so Joe turned around twice and we came back and got a picture. 

 Just as we left it with the photo, I saw another waterfall that he didn’t see, so we turned around again twice (same places)  and we got picture of that one.

This rock wall is just dripping with water.  I had my window down and got splashed in one spot.

 There’s two tunnels on this road, lots and lots of pull offs. 

There was another visitor center at Logan’s Pass. Lots of snow still on the ground, even at our elevation. I got out here to use the restroom and Joe took a picture of me by the snow.  Elevation of 6,656.

We saw a few areas that we thought could have glaciers, but we don’t know for sure,  There is supposed to be 25 glaciers in the park but only one you can see from the road.  We did see this one on the way back.  All the glaciers here have receded a lot in the last decade.

 You can drive the Road to the Sun from the east side at any time, but to come back from the west side between the hours of 10 and 3, you have to make a reservation for a timeslot.  There is more traffic from the west side, and they try to control the number of cars between those busy hours.  Originally, we thought we would just go partway to Logan‘s Pass and turn around, but then we decided we would go all the way out on the west side, have lunch, and that should bring us back after 3:00 so we shouldn’t have any problem with needing reservations. Traffic was heavy, especially the further west we got.

This drive is not for the faint of heart.  Joe got to exercise his excellent driving skills today.  Not only is the road crooked and narrow, there are often rock overhangs right above us.

We got to West Glacier about 2:30, had lunch and then headed back about 3:20 -- shortly after the timeframe that you needed a reservation.  It’s it was a beautiful day for this drive -- sunny, temperatures in the mid 60s 

The west end of the lake has beautiful Lake McDonald that we drove next to for several miles.  It is as pretty as Saint Mary Lake on the east end.  

Before we reached Lake McDonald, we drove alongside a roaring river for quite a while.  It was beautiful, bouncing over rocks, clear water.  We finally stopped at a pull-off named Red Rock and walked around a little.  This was my favorite spot.

On our return trip, we stopped at Cascading Falls. That’s a very beautiful strip of falls, one after another. We didn’t walk down to the second viewpoint because it looked like a pretty hard to walk back up.  I'm sure we would have gotten a better view.

It was going on 5:00 before we ever saw any wildlife.  But we saw 3 bighorn rams from a pretty close range and they stayed right there. One of them got up and then laid down again, but they posed for us until we just finally left.  This was right across from a pull-off, and there were tons of people watching them but it didn't bother them one bit.  

Also, the Gunsight Trail was another spot we missed heading west.  I think I figured out the "gunsight" is on the right side, where the 2 little points stick up.

And last but not least is Wild Goose Island.  This is actually one of the early highlights of this drive  but there were too many cars in the way on our way west, so we didn't stop.  It is a tiny speck of land that dots the waters of St. Mary Lake.  The island rises only 14 feet from the surface of water yet is in the center of one of the most often photographed locations along the Going to the Sun Road. The story goes that when warriors arrived on the island, they found not a man and a woman, but two lovely geese walking among the small trees and bracken.  At the sight of the warriors, the two geese stroked their necks together lovingly and then flew away, never to return.  

I have literally worked all day trying to get this blog to post.  I have redone it 2 1/2 times, so I am done!!  If it doesn't make sense, just ignore it.