Mile 2262 - Route 89 - 0 Miles - Glacier National Park
Hello after two days. In the last two days we drove from Butte to Glacier National Park. Unfortunately when we wanted to update the Blog yesterday, the router at our Hotel was down so we had to wait until today. Wouldn't you know it, when we tried to update the Blog tonight, we coundn't log on to the internet. Turns out the router at our motel (after a lot of fiddling around) needed to be rebooted. Whew!
So . . . on our way to Glacier from Butte we tried to figure how how close we could get to the East Entrance at St. Mary. We had taken Interstate 15 to Shelby, Montana. Shelby is about 72 miles from the gate. We thought we would take a chance and drive to St. Mary and if we had to turn around and go back to Shelby, we would. Turns out we found a wonderful lodge; St. Mary Lodge and Resort which is about 200 yards from the entrance to the park. The rates were reasonable and the food was great. We were up to have breakfast at 7:00 a.m. this morning and were on a shuttle at 8:00. By the way, one of the best kept secrets is you can take a National Park Shuttle free from one side of the park to the other and back on the "Going to the Sun road".
Since we did this today, Friday, we also felt fortunate since the road was shut down on Wednesday due to 80 mph winds at Logan Pass along with some amount of snow. We were also fortunate since the last day of the shuttle is Monday, 1 September. You can take the shuttle like a city bus; get off when you want and get on when you want. This pretty much took the whole day. We left Glacier at about 4:00 p.m. and headed for our current destination, Great Falls.
We got off the bus at "Sun Point". Shortly before this stop we noticed a black bear sow and her two cubs. So we were just a little nervous when we were the only people at this site. In addition there were warnings about bear and finally this listing of a person who has been missing since the 8th of August. We were pretty happy to get back on the bus.
Here's a picture of one of the many waterfalls along the way. Some is the normal runoff from rain and the rest is from melting snow/ice. Glacier National Park is now forecasting all glaciers will be melted by 2030.
This is lake McDonald on the west side of the park. A very old and elegant resort.
This is a small stream emptying into Lake McDonald.
This is the lodge we stayed at last night. We got up early this morning as we were loading the luggage into the car the sun was just coming up and we saw the picture below.
It was really wierd that we were going on "Going to the Sun Road" and before we got started we saw this from the parking lot of the Lodge. Actually the sun (and clouds) create an infinite variation of how the mountains and valleys appear. Many times throughout today we saw so many incredible views and we just couldn't get pictures of everything.
We got off the bus at "Sun Point". Shortly before this stop we noticed a black bear sow and her two cubs. So we were just a little nervous when we were the only people at this site. In addition there were warnings about bear and finally this listing of a person who has been missing since the 8th of August. We were pretty happy to get back on the bus.
This is another picture of "Sun Point" on St. Mary Lake.
Here's a picture of one of the many waterfalls along the way. Some is the normal runoff from rain and the rest is from melting snow/ice. Glacier National Park is now forecasting all glaciers will be melted by 2030.
This is lake McDonald on the west side of the park. A very old and elegant resort.
This is a small stream emptying into Lake McDonald.
Tomorrow we are on our way to Yellowstone National Park. It's about 200 miles from Great Falls. We haven't decided if we will try to see some of the park tomorrow or wait until Sunday.
Hope you are all doing well,
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