Glacier National Park -- Days 43-47

Well, we are finally in a motel for the night in Great Falls,. Montana. After leaving Seattle, we headed East (Warren's new favorite direction). The weather was pretty overcast but Western Washington State in beautiful. I was most impressed by the precision of the trees which are tall and all perfectly shaped. When you look at the distant landscape, it looks like zig zags -- I believe there was a fabric with that kind of imagery which I hadn't gotten before as nothing could be that even. We headed into Idaho and stayed there for an evening and got caught up with shopping, laundry and showers although we did have showers in Washington.



The weather kept getting worst until we got to Glacier when it was very overcast, cold and then rainy. That was our first tastes of beautiful glacier which was not so beautiful with those conditions. Fortunately, the rain dissipated and we were just left with clouds on the western side of Glacier. Unfortunately, there have been significant forest fires over the past 7 or 8 years and large, large areas are just black where once there were beautiful forests. It was so cloudy and the clouds were so low, you couldn't even see the mountains the first day and a half. We knew the weather was going to improve so we moved toward the eastern part of the park. The famous road that traverses the park was not open for the middle section (80 foot snow drifts plus 100 feet of road that is just gone from horrendous rain storms last fall). We took the long way around the park but it was worth the ride. By the time we got to the other side, it was sunny with lingering clouds in the mountains. That also made it freezing, freezing cold I might add.


We did get to see quite a bit of the park. It is beautiful but Yosemite still wins the beauty contest for me. Of course I took tons of pictures and hopefully some will come out. We saw a coyote (different from the ones in the east), a snowshoe hare (brown with huge white paws), a herd of longhorn sheep and many deer.


A ranger came by to talk to us the last day we were there and was called away as a mother bear and her cubs were heading for the campground. Guess she has been making an occasional appearance. All the parks now are incredibly careful about outlawing even leaving food of any kind out when you are not specifically eating. We have had bear boxes most places to store our food. So we haven't seen any bear as a consequence which is okay with me. Seeing one by the side of the road might be fun but not when you are sleeping in a tent!!

Again, I have been more than amazed with the variety and number of wildflowers that I have seen along the side of the road.

I tried to get pictures on the blog and Picasa said they had gone but they never appeared!!

I will try to get some on later tonight!!