Glacier National Park

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Today was our first day visiting Glacier National Park.  We decided to spend it driving from west to east through the park on Going to the Sun Road.  Don't you love that name?  Our first stop was at the Apgar Visitor Center to pick up a hiking book.  While we were there, we strolled down for a view of Lake MacDonald.

We stayed in the lodge that is on this lake when we were here with Erik and Matthew (who were teenagers at the time) in the mid-nineties.  These are the rocks you see when you stand at the edge of the lake and peer into the water.  To the Stanbro Men, this was a rock-skipper's paradise.

After that, we began our trip over the Going to the Sun Road.

We were disappointed to find that there is a lot of road construction on Going to the Sun Road, and we were required to stop and follow a pilot car maybe half a dozen times during the 50-mile journey.  Further, many of the turnouts one might use to stop and see the scenery were completely blocked with construction vehicles.  While the parks service clearly needs to maintain the road, this was quite an inconvenience and it will restrict what we choose to do in the park from here on.  We ended up leaving the park when we reached the east end and driving around the park to get back to our trailer rather than drive back the way we came.  Nevertheless, we saw some spectacular scenery today, and I'll show you some of the images I took.

The thing to remember about Glacier National Park is that these deep valleys were carved out by glaciers.  Clever then that they would give it the name of "Glacier National Park" isn't it?  But the thing I really want you to notice as you look at these images is that valleys carved by rivers, such as the Grand Canyon, tend to be "V" shaped.  Valleys carved by glaciers are more "U" shaped.  As our tour book put it, they look as though they've been scooped out with an ice cream scoop.  I think you'll see exactly what I mean as you look at these pictures.

It was something of an exposure nightmare today with the shadowy valleys and the bright clouds in the sky.  That, and the fact that I'm editing them on my laptop computer, means that I may not have the balance of light and darkness just right.  I'm hopeful that these will be good enough for you to get an idea what a beautiful place this is.  

We could see a few glaciers from the road, but this next one was the largest, known as the Jackson Glacier.

You'll learn as you follow along that I am a lover of these international symbols on signs that demonstrate the next way we're going to die today.  As for this particular sign, here's my question:  What exactly does the posting of our impending drowning have to do with what the little man in the picture is doing?  Hmmmm?

If you want to see wildflowers, you'll need to be here in July, not September.  But we did see a few little things.

The thing I love about the national parks is that everything is immense.  It is very humbling to stand in the presence of such gigantic formations and to consider that the rocks we are looking at are billions of years old.  That is "billions" with a "B".

Excuse me, but did you actually go to college to do this?  These civil engineers were testing the integrity of the roads and walls in the parks.  Sheesh.  I don't want this guy's job.

I like this next image because the scratch marks from the glacier are so evident in that big cliff in the foreground.  Do you see them running vertically up the face of the cliff?

Here's another image of another cliff face, where you can see them running vertically, horizontally, and diagonally.

This is St. Mary's Lake on the eastern side of Logan Pass.  It was so beautiful.

Here's the next way we're going to die today.

Here's another image of St. Mary's Lake taken from the other end.  I love how you can see the layers of cliffs in this one.

This big cliff was above the parking lot where we had our lunch.  Notice how the cliff face is rough and etched by glaciers, while the top is scraped smooth.  The forces of nature never fail to fascinate me.

There was evidence everywhere of forest fires that swept through the area in 2003.  In many places the landscape had been completely burned right down to the water's edge.

That's about all we saw in the park today.  We discovered that our heated hose needs an adapter, and since the temperatures will fall below freezing tonight, it is a significant problem.  Not an unsolvable one, however. We'll have to bring in the hose tonight and use the water in our tanks.  Tomorrow, we will need to drive into Kalispell to a hardware store to get the fittings we need.  This isn't all bad, however, because while Mike peruses the hardware store, I'll be perusing the quilt shops.  Thanks to Heartsease54 for cluing me in about two good quilt shops in Kalispell.  Looking forward to doing some shopping.

Also, here are a couple of housekeeping items for you.  First, when we traveled last time, I wrote a blog post showing you the inside of our rig.  It occurs to me that my blog was less than a year old back then, and many of you were not following along at the time.  If you're curious to see our home on the road, here is a link to that post.

Second, and literally on the housekeeping front, allow me to demonstrate how the dishwasher in our rig works:

Dirty dishes:

Dishwasher is working now:

Dishes clean!  (Dusting off my hands.)

Okay, now Smitty is half starved to death, so I need to give him his dinner.  But before I do this, I wanted to show you their dinner dishes.  George picked our these Spiderman bowls from a Goodwill store on a previous trip.  Smitty likes his Spiderman bowls as much as George liked them.  

Good old George.  He had excellent taste in items for the home.