Glacier National Park

Us at Avalanche Lake

Siyeh Pass – the view looking East

Jeff on the shore of Bowman Lake

The view over the back side of Dawson Pass

I have never seen anything like Glacier National Park.  We’d both been looking forward to this part of the trip, because we knew it would be scenic.  But we had no idea how overwhelming it would be.

Glacier NP is isolated.  There are a couple of very small towns flanking it, and almost no infrastructure inside the park.  There is only one road that traverses the park – the Going to the Sun road.  It rises from the valley floor up to Logan Pas with no switchbacks – just a steady ascent up the mountainside on an extremely narrow road.  The rest of the access to the park is via minor roads that go from the park boundary in about 5-10 miles to various trailheads.  All this is to say, Glacier NP is not a park for driving.  It’s not a park for really much of anything except hiking.  The best stuff in the park is only accessible by foot, and usually a few thousand feet up.

We happened to have fantastic insider guidance.  Our friend Joanne has some good friends who live right near the park, and they wrote us a super-long email with tips on hikes, where to stay, etc.  We followed it:

Day 1: had some campground issues, then drove the Going-to-the-Sun road from our campsite on the West side of the park over the pass to the East side.  Easily the scariest, and certainly one of the prettiest roads I’ve ever driven.  We also did an easy 4 mile hike to Avalanche Lake, which was fantastically gorgeous.  3+ waterfalls with glacial sources fell thousands of feet to feed the lake.  The glacial bowl took up my entire field of view.

Side note #1: on the hike up to the lake, a couple of locals made snarky comments about the bear bells we were wearing - “did you buy those at the Bear Bait Bell Co?”, and “do I hear Santa Claus coming?”.  We were a bit confused at this point.  We noticed that that the locals don’t wear bear bells and were wondering why.  But we figured they couldn’t hurt and left them on our packs.

Day 2: hiked up and over Siyeh Pass (a local’s favorite).  We hiked it East-to-West, which is sort of backwards from the usual route.  The hike gains over 3,000ft the way we hiked it, but only 2,000ft if you hike the other direction (which is why that direction is the most popular).  Views were indescribable nearly all the way up – above treeline for 75% of the hike, with views of no less than 3 classic U-shaped glacial valleys at the top.

Day 3: rainy and cold.  On the advice of Joanne’s friends, we drove up to Bowman Lake in the NW corner of the park to do some walking along the shore in between rain showers, and a little fishing.  And wow, Bowman lake is like a vision of what a mountain lake should be.  Framed by a glacial valley, deep blue water, etc.  And because this is a very isolated part of the park, there was barely anyone around.  There is, however, a tiny two-store town called Polebridge at the park’s edge.  We stopped in at the Polebridge Mercantile for huckleberry bear claws on the way in, and at the local restaurant-bar-meetup joint for pizza on the way out.  We were probably the only non-locals around.

Day 4: hiked up to Dawson Pass in the Two Medicine area.  There is a boat that crosses Two Medicine lake, cutting about 2 miles off of either end of the hike.  We planned to hike in and take the boat back (for an ~11 mile hike).  Views from the top were great, featuring a swooping U-shaped valley and views of the Divide.  But, the majority of the hike was in the forest, with known grizzly populations in the area.  We went quite slow through the more densely forested sections, making lots of noise as we walked (especially on the way down).  Because of this, we mis-calculated our timing and missed the last boat back.  So we had to walk through MORE grizzly-infested woods at near dusk (also known to us as “bear o’clock”).  Great hike, but pretty stressful for Kristen especially due to her intense fear of bears, made worse by our run-in with a couple who had just seen a huge grizzly just off the trail in the direction we were headed.  However, we didn’t see any bears all day (well, until we spotted two black bears on the mountainside above the trailhead, after the hike).

Side note #2: at the top of the pass, a couple locals noticed our bear bells and told us that they believed the bells might be counter-productive – bears don’t identify the bells as human noise and aren’t scared off, and might actually be curious and come to investigate the unknown sound.  They said making lots of noise was the best bet by far.  And they also had a local joke for us - “how can you tell the difference between grizzly and black bear scat?  If it has jingly bells in it, it’s grizzly scat.”  And that was when we stopped using bear bells.

Day 5: we hadn’t yet seen any grizzlies and were leaving the park, so we drove to the Many Glacier area on our way out of the park.  Many Glacier is known for its high grizzly density.  We were not disappointed.  We saw two grizzlies, approximately 3 years old, playing in the water and catching fish, about 300ft from the road.  Better to meet them there than on the trail!

After we left, we both felt as though we had only scratched the surface of what the park has to offer.  The staggering beauty and isolated corners of the park only reachable by long hike made us desperately want to return.  Hopefully soon.