We got up very early this morning (5:00 am) and headed out just after 6:00 to drive the Going to the Sun Road to Logan Pass. We wanted to assure that we would get a parking space and also to get the hiking in during the cooler hours of the day. We arrived there just after 7:00.
Logans Pass has a 3 hour parking limit. Once we got our pass from the kiosk we had a 10:08 am deadline to return to the car.
The hike was pretty strenuous but definitely worth it!
The wildflowers all along the way are amazing! We were also able to see the sun rise over the mountains as we started our hike.
It took us a little over an hour to reach our destination of Hidden Lake. We did not see any mountain goats this time as we have our past two visits to Glacier (back in 2002 and then in 2015). We did see some long horn sheep up on the mountain ridge both on our way up and again coming back down. Plus a lot of ground squirrels posing for us and some marmots.
Here are some other shots that Jim took (just a few of many, many, great ones!)
I couldn’t really compete with Jim’s photos, but I did try 🙂
The destination of our hike was Hidden Lake.
We arrived back at the parking lot with about 15 minutes to spare. Then we drove a bit farther east to the Jackson Glacier Overlook and took a coffee break with some absolutely gorgeous scenery all around.
We turned around there and headed back west because we had seen everything east of that point on Tuesday. One the way back we stopped at many turn outs to take pictures of one of the most beautiful roads we have ever been on (Going to the Sun). We found a couple of beautiful spots that I don’t remember seeing on past trips.
We looked for a picnic spot for lunch back in the Lake McDonald area however everything was getting extremely busy so we headed back to the camper to have lunch there and take advantage of the allowed generator hours to get batteries charged up again since this is a rustic campground.
This afternoon we drove to West Glacier Village to see if we could get any internet access but were not successful. We did find an ice cream stop though 🙂 On our way back to the camper we stopped at the Apgar Visitor Center to check on weather predictions for tomorrow (very hot again as it was today in the valley) and we did find that there was limited public wi-fi there but not enough to really do much with.
We headed back to the camper for supper and decided to make it an early to bed, early to rise plan so as to again take advantage of the cooler morning hours tomorrow.
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