08.12.15 A day in Glacier National Park!

Wednesday, August 12, 2015 – What an unbelievable day this was!  Glacier National Park in northwest Montana is open to tourists after the horrible

fires of this past month.  Yay for perfect timing, so we could see it while we’re in the area!

Our RV park is almost 4 hours from the West Entrance to Glacier which made for a very long day of continuous driving to the park, through the park, and home from the park!  It was worth all that driving, as I hope you’ll see from our pictures.

We left at 5:45 am and returned home at 7:50 pm.  The drive there is very pretty along lakes, creeks, hillsides, mountains and many cows, sheep, and mountain homes.

I’ve never heard of Going to the Sun Road before we planned this trip.  It is a two-way road of approximately 50 miles from the west entrance to the east entrance.  Then you turn around and come back the same way.   Some of the drive, near the east entrance of St. Mary’s, has been closed because of the forest fires.  It just opened last Friday and we are quite glad it did!

I plan to publish a blog post tomorrow with several pictures of the burned-out area.  They are quite sad.  Today’s post will be pictures of the beautiful sights we saw today.

The park encompasses over 1 million acres and includes parts of two mountain ranges (sub-ranges of the Rocky Mountains), over 130 named lakes.

The pictures below are in the opposite order to how we drove through the park.  Too many pictures to rearrange.  At our last stop, we bought huckleberry shakes and other huckleberry related items!  The first picture is Roy in our truck enjoying his delicious treat!

Get comfortable wherever you are and enjoy this adventure with us!

I thought it was interesting that drowning is the number one cause of death in Glacier.  I would have thought it would be cars going over the edge of the sharply winding roadways! While driving along the road we saw these beautiful white mountain goats.  I’m not that great at identifying animals so I could be wrong.  There are five of whatever they are in the picture!

Across the road from where water was gushing from above down onto the road.Roy, as Superman, flying across the mountain!The water gushing from the top flowing down to the road.  My cutie, patootie, resting with this glorious view as a background! Me acting silly under the waterfall by the road. A group of young Chinese folks offered to take Roy and my picture! We did the same for them!A young family going where we could not go, up a creek flowing down the mountain!We saw this young painter on our way in and stopped on our way out.  His painting is of the scene on top. Lake McDonald in Glacier National Park.  It is very long.

We loved the two tunnels, one near the beginning and one near the end.  You’ll see more pictures of them down the line.  This is the west tunnel and is 192 feet long.   The second tunnel is way cooler so be sure to check it out! Water cascaded down the mountains in several places along the road. This is known as Triple Arches. Look at the bottom left part of the picture. This is a panoramic picture that can be viewed better by clicking on it. This is known as Heaven’s Peak This tunnel is the East Tunnel which is 408 feet long and runs through Piegan Mountain.  This first picture is through one of the openings on the side of the tunnel overlooking mountains and valleys. In the picture below you can see on the left the two openings, one of which is the picture above.  The view driving down the road.Cutie, patootie again in his cowboy hat by a beautiful creek. Look at the color of this water – it was a beautiful blue-green and so clear! This last picture is of the Weeping Wall.  There was very little weeping going on that day so I found this one on the internet when it was really weeping!  The information we found says it gushes in the early spring and just dribbles in the early to late summer.I reduced our 300 pictures down to about 80.  Every corner, every curve, every minute there was something new and beautiful to see. We drove inches from the rock walls in many places and as the passenger, I could see straight down into valleys along our way in.  RVs longer than 21 feet or 8 feet wide are now allowed through most of the park.  After seeing it, that is very understandable!

God is so amazing and creative in His world-building and growing that I have to give Him praise for this place!  I’ll never forget all we saw and am thankful for all these pictures to help me remember it in the future.

I hope you enjoyed going on this ride with us.  I hope you don’t just zoom through the pictures but look at each one for a while before moving on.  They can always be seen better by clicking on them to enlarge them.

We were so exhausted from this trip that we’ve decided not to go further north to Canada since it’s so far away.  We’ll be touring the Old Prison and Montana Auto museum tomorrow.  Saturday and Sunday we’ll spend some time at the Tri-County Fair which is practically in our back yard.  We’re planning to attend the parade and check out the craft booths on Saturday and the Demolition Derby on Sunday evening.

Tomorrow my blog post will be of as much of the burned area as we could photograph.   There is a new fire burning right now but it is not near the Going to the Sun Road but we saw the smoke from that fire.

Ya’ll come back now, ya’ hear!!

Click on the links below to go there!

Wacky Wonderful Wednesdays published on Wednesdays

Some Things I Learned About Dementia published randomly