It got cold overnight. Very cold. I woke a little later than expected, partly because I’d placed my jacket over my face to keep my nose from freezing and so missed the sunrise. By 8:00 though I was out of the campground and turning onto Going-to-the-Sun Road, pretty much the only road through Glacier National Park. (This was an important thing to plan for: sometimes Going-to-the-Sun Road is closed, which means you have a 200-mile detour just to get from one side of the park to the other.)

No such trouble this time (well, sort of). The road wound around the southern edge of Lake McDonald, then gradually started to climb into the mountains that loomed like a fortress to my east. Many, many times I’d see a view off the edge of the road and involuntarily mutter “Wow” to myself.

The mountains grew impossibly high around me—and as I got higher myself, the drop-offs below me grew impossibly deep. Not for the first time, it blew my mind that a team of engineers with balls of steel had hiked along these wild ridges and worked out the exact route that a road like this had to take. And then built it.

Speaking of which, Going-to-the-Sun Road is currently undergoing its first-ever re-construction, which is almost as impressive an engineering feat, since it’s two lanes the whole way through and there’s bazillions of tourists wanting to pass through. They’ve been at it for three summers now, closing down the road entirely while they work overnight, then closing one lane at a time during the day. At four different points along the 50-mile road, I had to stop and wait for ten or more minutes while a “pilot car” led a line of cars in the opposite direction, turned around, then led my line of cars. (Pilot car driver must be a boring-ass job.)

Oh and I’m officially in bear country now, as the dozens of warning signs like to remind me. Bear spray was clipped to my hip all day like I was some kind of gunslinger, though the impression I gave myself was more Greendale Community College Paintball Tournament.

At noon I made it to Logan Pass, the top of the road and location of one of the big visitor centers. After admiring the taxidermied pikas and ground squirrels, and perusing the book collection (including a sizable variety of bear-attack porn), I went back to the car and grabbed my backpack for my first hike, to the Hidden Lake overlook.

This was to be a practice hike, so I loaded the pack as though I were headed out on my big trip, even though in actuality I was just doing six miles in about two hours. It clocked in at 46 pounds, not including my camera or fanny pack. Call it a stress test.

Using my hiking poles, I worked my way up the massive hill behind the visitor center, part of a continuous snake of tourists navigating a nicely-built boardwalk that led over the next ridge. Many people asked curious questions about what kinds of gear I was carrying (one guy said “You’re crazy, dude” when I told him how much it all weighed).

With a reasonable amount of difficulty, I finally made it to the Hidden Lake overlook, a sweeping view of the lake and Bearhat Mountain behind it. For the very first time I found my 17mm wide-angle lens to be too narrow for the picture I wanted to take.

On the way back down I saw three tourists taking a small side route away from the main trail; a looked back and saw a snowfield where those same three tourists were standing not ten feet away from a pack of white mountain goats. I took a couple pictures from a distance, then decided “screw it” and walked back the way I came.

20 minutes later I was standing on the snowfield myself. And I was within spitting distance of a whole family of mountain goats, just chillin’.

I didn’t even need the telephoto lens, though I got some close-ups anyway. I totally forgot to be excited about the fact that I was standing in snow.

Back down the hill was ANOTHER bit of wildlife, a herd of bighorn sheep about 50 yards to the northwest.

And a quarter-mile beyond that, almost back at the visitor center, a marmot was poking its head up and staring at the passing tourists, probably waiting to see which of us would give it some food first.

I finally got back to the car, memory cards stuffed with pictures, and muscles aching as I’d known they would. I sat in still more construction-related traffic waiting to get out of the parking lot, then was on my way downhill towards the eastern edge of the park.

Spring is probably a better time to see Glacier; the snow really contributes to some of the views, and there wasn’t too much of it this visit. Also it’s presumably not as hot. That’s right, hot. I ended up shedding my long underwear and getting down to t-shirt and shorts. I have an unexpected sense of foreboding about the big hike: what if it’s just as warm in a few days as it is now? I’ve been counting on the cool weather to help my endurance, and I’d just as soon not have to carry my long underwear and rain jacket in my bag instead of on my person.

(Just as a sanity check, when I say “hot,” I mean highs of about 80 degrees. It’s still insanely nice compared to what I left behind in Texas. And as I type this, at a Glacier Park picnic table at 7:30 pm, it’s getting nicely chilly. So don’t worry, you still all hate me.)

I took a couple more side hikes, seeing some incredible views. St. Mary’s Falls and Sun Point were both amazing.

 

I found a campsite at Rising Sun on the east side of the park, and with time to spare, took a drive around to see Chief Mountain, an imposing rectangle of rock near the Canadian border. (Sun was behind it, so I didn’t really get a good picture.)

Back at the campsite, as the sun set, I sat at my picnic table, wrote this blog post, scribbled some postcards, and prepped my smaller backpack for Saturday’s hike, the Highline Trail, apparently one of the nicest parts of the park.

For dinner, I had my first-ever MRE.

Hey, it’s not that bad. Don’t get me wrong, if I were a GI in the field, having three of these a day would be like Chinese water torture. But it’s a sizable amount of food, and equivalent in quality to your average crappy microwave lunch.

It got dark and cold. 80-degree temperatures or no, I definitely need the winter gear for after dark. I got jealous of all the campfires going around me, and so collected some twigs and dead branches (FORBIDDEN AT ALL GLACIER CAMPSITES, I later learned) and made an amusingly wussy little fire that died completely within ten minutes.