This picks up from Part 1, obviously. Friday morning we didn’t wake up as early as planned. It began to rain again in the night and there was no point in starting a hike at 6:00 am if it was pouring. This was ok with me because the little espresso shack didn’t open until 6:00 am anyway!
We started our hike to Grinnell Glacier at about 8:00 am and we were just about the first ones on the trail. Hiking in national parks is interesting, as most everyone is on vacation and therefore enjoys a leisurely start to their day. With thunderstorms often intermittent, an 8:00 am start is 2-3 hours later than we would begin a similar Colorado hike, so it was funny to feel like we were running late, but have the trail completely to ourselves with the exception of a ranger that passed by us, and the family we passed right after the trailhead. It drizzled a bit on the way but the views and flowers were more than enough to distract us from any bad weather. This is a “must do” hike if you go to Glacier.
Waterfalls were everywhere.
There was even a waterfall that spewed water onto our trail. See below – Sandy on the way up and me on the way down.
And the plants and flowers were plentiful and gorgeous!
We saw a tiny bit of wildlife - a Columbian ground squirrel (with dried grass in its mouth) and a bighorn sheep:
This was our parting view of the trail:
But the day didn’t end there! The hike took us through a wetland area (on a wooden walkway) and I got some photos of some unique fungus. Here is the fungus and then me in position to take the photos:
This is a macro – these things were tiny!
We finished this 11.5 mile hike at the Many Glacier Lodge where we had a well-deserved and very satisfying late lunch at the Interlocken Lounge. The lounge had Great Northern Brewing beer on tap! It seriously hit the spot. The scenery alone put this hike into our top 5 hikes list, to put an eatery at its end may be enough to crack the top 3.
We popped into our Bessie Shannon room and could not resist taking a nap. I mean why not? We were on vacation and the sun doesn’t set until around 10 pm! At 6:30 pm we headed out for a shorter evening hike to Hidden Lake, just 3 miles roundtrip. This was what we saw at the trail endpoint:
On the hike out we were treated to the sight of a Hoary Marmot (different from Colorado’s Yellow-Bellied Marmots) and her babies!! She was actually nursing the three wee ones when we saw her.
These are the three babies by themselves, for some reason the mom marmot ran off for a bit.
Of course, we saw a deer in a field of avalanche lilies also, which was so perfect it had a certain Disney feel to it:
When we arrived back at the parking lot we found two big horned sheep roaming around along with their deer buddies. But! We also saw a mountain goat and its kid! Interestingly, mountain goats vacuum up the avalanche lilies, they just love to eat them. I have to say that the humans behaved very poorly. There was a couple on a motorcycle that basically followed the big horned sheep around the parking lot taking pictures and a huge, loud, stinky truck that idled for a while near the mountain goat and its kid.
It was a long but extremely satisfying day in Glacier. The next few days pale a bit in comparison. Next up – Day 2!!
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