We slept in at a vacation late time of 8:30. After eating a hearty hot breakfast at the local diner, we grabbed as many warm clothes as we could and headed off into the park. The weather report talked about wind advisory of winds going from 25 to 38 miles an hour in gusts and even as we just walked out to our car we could feel it was a windy day and it was only 42° outside. We had brought layers but no winter jackets. We were hopeful that we could enjoy the park without getting blown away or frozen.
We drove about 10 minutes to one of the lesser used entry gates into the park. After having a nice chat with the Ranger, we headed off to explore a quieter area of the park: two medicine lake. When we got into yhe parking lot at the trail head, it wasn’t looking very promising. The wind was blowing and gusting, and it was very very cold. It was blowing across the lake with big whitecaps. Dick optimistically chose a path that headed off into the forest, hoping that we could get out of the wind and be able to enjoy the beautiful landscape and flowers. As it turns out, he was correct. Almost immediately, the trees blocked the wind from us and we proceeded to go out of very nice about 3 mile round-trip hike and sometimes even a stroll through Valley and the forest.
The wildflowers were wonderful here. The highlight are bare grass with beautiful, white, puffy flowers. We hadn’t seen those so far on this trip and enjoyed taking their pictures as well as many other beautiful flowers.
We were also so glad to see a prairie dog who popped out of his hole and posed for a number of photos. He kept a good eye on us, but was a delightful greeter in the meadow.
We hiked up to Ashton Falls a small bit pretty waterfall. We had to of course take photos there.
During the hike we kept meeting up with two women from Maryland, Pam and Sharon. Both of them were horseback riders, and had spent most of the week and a dude ranch, but we’re finishing it out with several days in glacier Park. We exchanged all kinds of stories about the park about the dude ranch and about our travels. they were delightful travel companions and we really enjoyed sharing time together with them.
At about 1230 we were off the trail and enjoying the sunshine and decided it was time to go up to one of the parks most famous roads going to the Sun Highway. we had heard from Sharon and Pam that yesterday up in that area they had tried to do a little bit more hiking and had gotten caught with hail and sleet and everything was fogged in and snow. They had had a very disappointing time trying to enjoy the awesome beautiful views up there.
Our drive across the eastern half of glacier Park was beautiful. Views of the mountains and of grasslands and ponds. Just made for a lovely, lovely drive. We saw Saint Marys Lake which was just lovely.
We decided to go up to the highest place you can visit driving in the park to Logan Pass. There’s a visitor center up there, and really amazing views. Just outside of the visitor center. We saw a couple of bighorn sheep, staring at the people as we were looking at them. What fun! The road coming up to going down from Logan point is called going to the sun Highway. We joined a long parade of cars and tour vehicles, that drove this very high up in the air road hugging the rock face. Every once in a while, you could see a beautiful waterfall. Oh, that guy was OK.
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