Glacier National Park – Wed 1 to Fri 3 July

We spent a full day driving to Glacier National Park, and spent the night just outside the park. On Thursday we drove the Going-to-the-Sun Road, which is one of the most amazing drives I have ever done. The road itself is pretty impressive, especially given it was completed in 1932. It winds its way along the edge of the mountains, up above the glacier-carved valley. It is still a major mission plowing the snow there each year so that the road can open, let alone getting all the road construction equipment there back in the 20s and 30s!

The scenery is pretty much what you would expect to see in Switzerland – very alpine with sheer mountains and deep valleys, and incredibly beautiful. Even after all our national park-ing it managed to seriously impress us!

We did a walk to Hidden Lake, which is only a fairly short walk and sounded pretty tame, until we realised it was almost entirely through snow! It still wasn`t a difficult walk, but there was lots of slipping and sliding, and we were quite glad we hadn`t worn thongs/jandals like we had been contemplating in the carpark!!

Further along the Going-to-the-Sun Road we stopped and did a walk along the St Mary section of the park, overlooking the glacial St Mary Lake. The park guide had suggested doing the walk one way and catching the shuttle back, so since we were feeling pretty lazy and the next shuttle was due shortly we figured it sounded like a good idea. Somehow we ended up having to wait about 1.5 hours for the shuttle, which was interesting given they supposedly come every half hour... Luckily Justin had the foresight to pick up our books before we left, so at least we had something to do while we waited – although we could have walked back twice in that time!

After waiting so long for the shuttle it was getting late afternoon, and almost all of the park campgrounds were already full, so we ended up right on the edge of the park. After telling the middle-aged biker in the tent site next door that we would be leaving at sunrise (he was concerned that he wouldn’t be able to get through the 5 metre gap beside us, and his motorbike didn’t have reverse for him to turn it around – Justin suggested that he did actually have legs, but he didn’t seem to like that suggestion!), we managed to sleep in until mid-morning... By this point in our trip we had done way too many sunrises and had too many nights of not getting enough sleep, and it was majorly catching up!! We were so lethargic, and all we wanted to do was sleep and blob!

On that note, rather than heading back into the park again like we had planned, we headed on up into Canada.

More Glacier National Park photos at http://picasaweb.google.com/canadianmport/GlacierNationalPark?authkey=Gv1sRgCL6ptrvs5_e9Vg#