Disappearing Roads and Mountain Tops around Glacier

June 16  GLACIER NATIONAL PARK

It was an interesting, different drive to the park.  We expected to arrive about noon but with the road repairs and a 1 hour time change we didn’t arrive until about 2:30.

We had warnings of road repair

U.S. Hwy. 2 in Montana

Then a sign simply said:   "Pavement Ends"

That was a big long oops

 It worked out though and we finally arrived and found a nice campsite in the park safe and sound.  

Glacier abuts the United States-Canada border and Canada’s Waterton Lakes National Park.  In 1932, the two countries symbolically joined the parks as Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park, the world’s first such park (designated as a World Heritage site in 1995).

We arrived with light rain coming and overcast, but we

did get some pictures of the animals around our site.

Looking at Ton and thinking

Oops, He caught me!

Did you know?  In 1850, the area had 150 glaciers; today there are 26.  Looking at the effects of global climate change, some scientists predict that by the year 2030, there may be none and many of the park’s smaller glaciers will melt even sooner.  There is only one that you can see from the road on a clear day and it’s near Logans pass.

We have looked forward to traveling the Going-to-the-Sun Road.  It is a 50-mile engineering marvel through the parks wild interior.  Due to the heavy snow we can only travel 15.5 miles up to Avalanche.

It is only a height of 3,250 feet. We had hoped to make it to Logan’s pass at a height of 6,640 feet (2024 m) but no such luck.  That would have been the next place for a person to just pull over or look around.  It is the highest point a person can ever drive.   The highest peak in the park is 10,466 ft (3,190 m).

We didn’t see any snow at all which was disappointing, but we knew the reason we could not go higher

We'll let you see for yourself

Logan's Pass Visitor's Center is being cleared.  These

pictures from the Nat'l Park website shows how far they are on the road

daily with pictures of where they are clearing.

 About 1,500 feet higher then we were, they were still cleaning the snow away. Looking at these conditions, I’m glad the road is closed as safety must come first.

I wouldn't want this job!!

I've been posting the park secrets and another one is the most scenic fossil sites in America, and among the oldest, lie along the Continental Divide in Glacier.  The fossils here are stromatolites, ancient bacterial mats that appear as cabbage size swirls in the Precambrian rock.  This part of the park has to pictures, as it is snowed in. 

It rained and the fog took over but the short 16 mile drive was a pretty one.

Parts of the 1994 movie “The River Wild” with Meryl Streep and Kevin Bacon were shot on location in Glacier on the Middle Fork of the Flathead River.

This was also at the higher elevation

Glacier’s largest lake, McDonald (called Sacred Dancing Lake by the Kootenai Indians), 

is 10 miles long and  472 feet deep occupying a basin gouged out 

by a glacier estimated to have been 2,200 feet thick.

The top 2 pictures of the lake are taken before we go up the mountain

and the one below is taken when we arrived back to our campground

and had a very short clearing at 6:00 in the evening.

One Native American described the land now in Glacier as “The Backbone of the World”.

This is the parks tour bus parked at Avalanche point which is

the highest we could go today

Here are some of the sights we saw today

The rivers and waterfalls were pretty

but the mountains were hidden by the mist and the fog

and snow was not seen by us today.

We enjoyed the day

and it would be great if the road was open all the way

The park’s Lake Sherburne submerged much of Altyn, a boomtown built during the mining frenzy that started and fizzled out here at the turn of the 20^th century.

Thanks for following us on our Blog and we'll write more later.

Tomorrow will be a short overnight stop just to break the drive to Yellowstone.

Goodnight for now.