Life and times of Craig on Planet Earth: Glacier National Park! July 6-10

Kelsey and I embarked on another epic Summer camping trip. This year we chose Glacier National Park in Montana

We left early Monday am, and made great time. We arrived in Kalispel in the afternoon. We took one wrong turn which had us drive along Flathead Lake. Wow. Sooo many lake front homes and boats and such. It's a huge lake!

Kalispel was cool. We had dinner at The Montana Club, our favorite from last year in Missoula. Unfortunately, it wasn't their best work, but it fed us.

That night the sun was really cool looking as it set.

The next mornig I woke up and was listening to a sound... what was it.. seems familiar.. RAIN!!!!! I had left the windows crackeed in the car because it was so hot and stuffy when we got here! I threw on some clothes and ran out there to roll up the windows. Nothing got too wet.

We had breakfast at Julies Center St Diner.   Julie, as it turns out, is a Chinese immigrant. Her menu was all American. The food was good and fast. The restaurant very clean and Julie seemed to be well liked. Many regulars came in.

Next we went to Super 1 Foods and bought our groceries for the campground.

We headed towards the campground as the weather was calling for afternoon showers. The weather report did NOT mention the AM showers we were getting at the moment. We figured that if the weather report was accurate, we would wat to get our tent up as soon as we could.

However, we had a hard time not stopping at one of many Huckleberry gift shops! We loaded up on Huckleberry products, including a cup of real, fresh Huckleberries. They are not like NW Huckleberries. Darker and a bit sweeter.

We arrived at the campsite around noon. Check in is 1 I think but our campsite was empty.   As we headed down to our site, I looked at the other sites and grew concerned. Yep, our tent was too big for the campsite!    We were able to get it set up, but for all practical purposes, most of the tent space was unusualbe due to the hill we were on.

The entire campsite was on a hill .   Even trying to unload the car was a challenge.

We got set up pretty quickly and as we were setting up, the SUN came out and never left us.

We took a walk out to Rocky Point on Lake McDonald. It was really beautiful. The water is sooo blue.

We went back to camp and made dinner and had a campfire.

The next day, we headed for St Mary on the far other side of the park. We took Going to the Sun Road all the way out of the Park. We had lunch in a little sandwich shop outside the East enterance. Then we went back to St Mary's campground for our boat cruise!

The cruise was interesting and showed many sites we would not ahve seen. The cruise stopped for a while on the West end of the lake and from there you could hike to St Mary Falls. Unfortunately, we didn't know about this ,so did not bring any water for the hike and it was hot. So we walked around and found Baring Falls and a deer hanging around.

We headed back and stopped at the top of Logan Pass. We decided to do the hike to Hidden Lake.   Parking was hjammed but we found a spot.

The hike was pretty easy, but mostly all uphill. We saw lots of Goats and baby Goats and a few Marmots

By the time we got back to teh West side, it was already getting late. We went to Apgar for dinner. I had Baked Almond Trout. It was ok. Kelsey had fried Chicken and didn't like it.

After, we decided to check out the showers in Loop A.   The only showers in the camp ground. We were in loop C and they informed us that there is NO parking. We were too tired to care. I parked in front of the dumpster and we took our showers!

We got back to camp and made a campfire.

The next day we drove back up the Going to the Sun Road till we came to McDonald Falls. We took some picuters and enjoyed the river views.

Next we went into the town at West Glacier entrance . We bought some stuff for dinner, more ice of course and some floats for the lake.   We headed down to the beach, but Kelsey had other plans, she wanted to go to the beach on the trail to Rocky Point.   It was a few minutes walk, but a very nice beach.

We floated and swam and ate sour patch candies for a few hours.   Lots of bugs. The water was great though. So Turquoise! We learned on our cruise that this was from the glacier water. Any lake that is Turquoise is glacier fed.

After we were done swimming, we had lunch and had more time on our hands still . We decided to take a hike. We had no idea where.   We drove out to the main road and saw a trail marker called "Ox Bow".

The trail was along a river for the most part. It was pretty.   We came to a field of white flowers. But more interseting was the butterflies on the plants. There must have been 100's of butterflies! As we walked , they flew up all around us!

We finally came to Ox Bow. It's a big bend in the river, nearly 180 degree turn.   Water flowed past the bend of the curve and created a little bay behind it.

From the distance, we could see a grassy field.   We set off to find the fields. We had to walk on a hourse trail for part of it. The field was big and grassy, but no wildlife. We hoped to see a bear or a moose.

After diner we stayed up to watch the stars.    We walked down to the lake to see the full view. Not a sole awake in the entire campground! It was very peaceful and amazing.

The next morning we pakced and said goodbye. We took higway 2 all the way back to Spokane. It was really cool, so many lakes along the way.

We got into Spokane early afternoon and checked in to the new Davenport Grand. It opened a few weeks ago. Huge room!

We explored Riverfront Park, which is a real gem! So much going on right in the center of the city. We had an average dinner at Luigis and got some much needed rest in a real bed!