• Travel

    Glacier National Park: Saint Mary to Logan Pass

    One of the nice things about Glacier is that there aren’t a lot of roads through the park. Except for the Going-to-the-Sun road, you have to go outside the park to move from place to place, then come in at a separate entrance.

    This day we entered at the Saint Mary entrance for a ride up to Logan Pass. Unfortunately, we didn’t get to drive the whole Going-to-the-Sun road because it had been closed the day before for the winter. That drive will have to wait for another visit. But just the portion from the entrance to Logan Pass gave us some beautiful views.

    The pictures of the little island in the middle of the lake are of Goose Island. Very picturesque. You’ll see pictures from both sides–going up and coming down.

    A nice surprise was Sunrift Gorge. This didn’t look like anything but a bridge from the road, but Bill (who was driving) stopped anyway and we went to investigate. Just the portion around (under) the bridge was beautiful with wonderful blue-green water.

    The mountains are majestic and the valleys are quite beautiful in their own right. The picture just after the Logan Pass sign is a great example of the natural forces at work. As the mountains erode, the rock piles up around the base. Eventually vegetation takes root in the ground-up rock and then grass, flowers, and finally even trees grow.

    The Hidden Lake Trailhead was a hike we didn’t take all the way, but we did go some ways up toward the mountain. There was a nice boardwalk through a beautiful meadow.

    On our way back down the road, we stopped at Siyeh Creek, which was one of the prettiest meadows we saw. At a bend in the road between two large mountain areas, I think it was protected enough to still have wildflowers, most of which had come and gone in the rest of the park here at the end of September.