After clearing Kalispell in mid-morning, we entered Glacier National Park and made a quick "get oriented" visit at the Apgar visitor center. The most interesting thing we learned about there was a bald eagle formerly of Glacier that had been illegally killed and buried by a rancher in Washington, who subsequently went to jail. Apparently he didn't notice the radio tag that allowed researchers to track the eagle from its Glacier home to a point more than a hundred miles to the west.
Our first day in the park resulted in the selection of a campsite at Avalanche Campground (Sprague Creek Campground is right up against the road, and Apgar was an absolute zoo). We pitched our tent in a race against storms which were blowing in rapidly, despite the weather forecast being favorable. Welcome to the mountains! An unfortunate side-effect of this storm was the discovery that our tent was not as waterproof as we had hoped. That is, we had hoped it would give more protection from the rain than sitting out in the middle of an open field....
Day Two had us taking in an excellent breakfast at Russels Trails End (near McDonald Lodge). The high quality of the food at the concessioner's restaurants caused non-serious trouble with our trip budget. Since the day promised to be drizzly at best and stormy at worst, we decided to spend it crossing Going-To-The-Sun Road in a leisurely fashion.
Shortly after passing Avalanche Creek heading west, and just as we began the long climb to Logan Pass, we were treated to an excellent display of fast-moving adiabatic clouding. This cloud was high-tailing it up the slope at a frightening rate, but expanding its point of formation downslope at almost as rapid a rate. Once the cloud reached the top of the slope, it dissipated.
Singleshot Mountain was named after an exploit of George Bird Grinnell, one of the imporant figures in insuring that Glacier became a park (rather than mining claims or ranchland). Two Dog Flats, a fertile prarie on the east side of the park, lies in the foreground. This area is rich with deer, elk, and other wildlife - but mostly for the patient. The best strategy is to park at the observation point and get out of the car. If there is no obvious wildlife in the Flats, use binoculars to scan the treeline.
For much of the drive, the clouding was abrupt and severe. Taking ten steps into a cloud could result in visibility going down to around ten feet; the clearing effect was equally dramatic coming out.
Bird Woman Falls hangs off a triple cirque and is fed by melting snowfields. The creek drains into McDonald Creek almost 3,000 feet below and at the end of a miles-long glacial valley. To judge from the U-shaped valleys that dominate the landscape, the glaciers that carved them absolutely dwarfed the mountains they formed in. In places one must visualize ice hundreds if not thousands of feet thick and three miles long to convincingly explain the resulting valley.
A slightly less deep glacial valley, but a textbook example, is the Reynolds Creek valley on the other side of Logan Pass from Bird Woman Falls. Like Bird Woman Falls, Reynolds Creek starts in an old cirque, fed by snowmelt and creating a beautiful waterfall. From the pullout on Going-To-The-Sun Road one can glance from this falls to the left and take in the two mile glacial valley that extends to the east until it meets up with another, longer and deeper glacial valley.
Our Going-To-The-Sun Road day also saw us purchasing tent waterproofing and rainsuits at the outfitter's gouge shop in St. Mary. We would see approximately seven drops of precipitation in the next two weeks.
Day two dawned cold and wet, and we set out for a hike to Avalanche Lake hoping that the weather would discourage the hordes of bearbell-equipped walkers who take this hike daily. Nice thought, but the weather seemed to have no effect. Before reaching the halfway point, I had counted 600 people pass us in either direction. As a slow hiker who likes to look around carefully and take in the surroundings completely, a good proportion of the destination- and schedule-obsessed were overtaking me, and I was happy to step off the trail to allow clots of All-American Family go by. By doing so I was treated to many sights that almost everyone else missed - including incredibly large and complex spider webs, numerous deerprints in the mud, and several signs of bear - probably, considering the habitat, black bear.
Despite a crowd worthy of a large city mall, my second hike on this trail was well worth it. I had hiked the trail in June 1986, and my half-a-lifetime later visit refreshed my memory in startling ways. I had photos of my 1986 visit to Avalanche Lake, and I had been under the impression that the mountains were small and distant across the lake. In fact, once you come out of the trees, the mountains and the five large and ten small creeks forming Monument Falls tower above you, dominating the experience visually and aurally. The photo above is taken with a 24mm lens; approximately 90 degrees from corner to corner.
Like almost all lakes in the park, Avalanche Lake is colored by glacial flour, the finest of the erosional products of the glacier that formed Avalanche Basin, in which the lake is found. In this photo you can see clearly the effects of currents in Avalanche Lake, probably formed by somewhat different water chemistry entering the lake from the creeks, as well as temperature differences. As Avalanche Lake is rather shallow, and in view of the impressive amount of water flowing out as Avalanche Creek, the lake must turn over its water relatively rapidly.
The creeks are fed by snowmelt. Sperry Glacier (a strenuous hike to get there) resides up beyond the peaks visible here.
The strand of Avalanche Lake at this point is moraine gravel, and it was pretty clear that we were standing close to a moraine of an ancient - but small - glacier that used to reside in the basin.
One of the many families taking the hike is visible taking a break on the deadfall, while my pack and my wife's is sitting in the vegetation just beside the strand. Little did we know it, but a ground squirrel was trying to figure out how to break into our supply of Granola Bars at the time.
You can also have a look at a panorama of this area.
Eating is Serious Business to this little guy. It was pretty clear he'd been habituated to hikers. Anytime we would point something out to each other, he'd dash up to us, apparently in hopes that we were offering him a treat.
Unfortunately, there is a saying to the effect that A Fed Animal Is A Dead Animal. The signs warning people not to feed the animals are apparently ineffective.
Logan Visitor Center, located in the psychological middle of Going-To-The-Sun Road, is one of several places in the park that are apparently designated zoos - places set aside for high-impact uses, and intended to attract the masses. I suspected that the Park Service does this deliberately, on the theory that trashing of a few specific areas, which are attended to by rangers in order to help control problems and recover from abuse, helps keep the rest of the park more pristine.
Almost all tourist behaviour at Logal Pass is mitigated by selfishness. Families will erupt into snowball fights, the line of fire of which is across a walkway, putting the cameras, camcorders, and craniums of strangers in danger. Drivers (mostly of pickup trucks) will blare their horns at pedestrians for no apparent reason. And, as you can see, getting a parking spot in good weather can be a pain in the neck!
On the particular day we were there, a few mountain goats were hanging around the area of the Logan Visitor Center. The less wildlife savvy of the tourists chased one around for a while in order to get a picture with their point-and-shoot cameras. This is an ineffective strategy; you will either get a picture of a goat butt, or you will get seriously injured or killed. There are no intermediate options.
As I took the above picture, I was chatting with a photographer who had been sent there on assignment. He had also been ruminating on the tourists chasing the goats. Assignment be damned, he said; he was waiting right there to see one of the goats turn the table and chase a tourist off the cliff. He looked pretty serious about his goals, and it was unclear to me just whose side he was on in any potential goat-versus-human battle. We performed an analysis of any potential goat attack:
An out-of-shape couch potato human whose only exercise is walking from the car to the front door can do about six miles an hour top speed in an open course, wind at the back, and downhill. Add an icky stunted alpine evergreen obstacle course and speed drops to a brisk three miles per hour.
A buff male mountain goat on his home turf motivated by an irritating tourist can do about twenty miles per hour with a bone-crushing accelleration and turn-on-a-dime maneuvering.
Out of shape tourists are armed with flabby butts (an inviting target, see below), cheap point-and-shoot cameras, and cute two-toned ball caps.
Our friend Arnold Scwartzengoat is armed with two nine inch, pin-pointed, razor-sharp horns that he intends to plunge into the aforementioned flab. This is not a problem, since Scwartzengoat has probably previously bucked elk and possibly bear off cliffs in order to protect his food supply.
We figured the tourist would have a pretty bad time of it. Not two minutes later, we got the opportunity for just the sort of picture we were envisioning.
Who wins? Obviously the tourist thinks she's got it all figured out and is beating a hasty retreat. My friend the assignment photographer maneuvered to get pictures of the resulting gore - I was a little more circumspect. He was spotted about ten minutes later, gave me a grin and a thumbs up, and was never seen again. I'm not sure the fate of the goat's target.
Columbian Ground Squirrels are ubiquitous in Glacier.
Tundra plants start growing well before the snow melts. In the spring, the snow can actually form a sort of greenhouse effect underneath the drift, resulting in warm temperatures allowing the plants to get a head start on their growth.
If you really want to get a good look at a goat, you should hike. And you must not approach the goats too closely. Goats along the Highline Trail near the Logan Visitor Center are among the most calm and tolerant of people (though, as shown above, their patience does have limits).
This large male, just starting the spring molt, had the grace to walk into a clearing for me and pose for twelve shots. Resist the temptation to get closer. Give the goats some room, stand still, and be quiet. Use a good telephoto. Don't be stupid, please!
Mule deer, on the other hand, erupt violently out of the woods ten feet in front of you, hop onto the trail, and walk towards you until it is clear you aren't going to (or can't) yield. Thereupon they will take a slight off-trail detour to walk around you, and they will make sure you know they would rather you just get out of their way. It is abundantly clear that people are intruders in this territorry. (Taken on Bering Falls Trail.)
Bering Falls may not look like much next to this man fiddling with his camera - but look again for the person standing on the rocks in the distance. Waterfalls are ubiquitous in Glacier in the early season, and this was one of the noisier ones.
Bering Falls Trail is a good, easy, basically level trail that should be do-able by anyone. The valley just under Bering Falls runs about 10 or 15 degrees F cooler than other locations on the often sun-exposed trail. The trail continues westerly from Bering Falls and connects to a network of day-hike and backcountry tails that are well worth exploring.
This log, almost three feet in diameter, answers the question "do bear really enter the campgrounds?" The log is actually just off the Trail Of The Cedars, and a few hundred feet from the Avalanche Campground. Don't kid yourself - no mouse did this.
A few feet away Avalanche Gorge is found. Water races through here at a furious pace, and the slope is almost 40 degrees over a few hundred feet of creek. A badly underexposed shot of this gorge recently won a major photography competition. My shot is only slightly underexposed and therefore not art.
A thought that doesn't occurr to many people about old-growth forests is that old-growth forests by defintion cannot often burn. This is so even though the trees do die, and fuel loads accumulate to sometimes alarming levels. In the case of the Avalanche Gorge area, all the water spray from the gorge makes the Trail Of The Cedars area a textbook example of old-growth - it hasn't burned since before the time of Christopher Columbus. The odds of any given forest fire actually burning an old-growth stand is about 1%.
Because water is plentiful, trees have little incentive to plunge tap-like roots deep underground. Most of the trees are balanced on pads of roots that are very close to the surface. When the wind blows, they are in danger of toppling. Here you are looking at a 400 year old cedar and twelve feet of its root system from beneath.
The year we visited Glacier (2002) was the year of the bad western forest fires. Environmentalists across the nation decried the burning of so much "old growth" forest. Almost none of it was as old as this area, and only qualified as "old growth" because we've destructively been putting out forest fires for more than a century - turning our woods into explosive tinderboxes.
For days at Glacier I wished to see a Dipper (called a Water Ouzel by the park people). The Dipper is a peculiar bird which sits on the bank and bobs its head, then plunges into violent rapids, walks along the bottom of the stream, and picks up food in the course of this bizzarre journey. Park literature told us to look for the Dipper at Avalanche Creek, but stopping at McDonald Creek showed us not only where the Dippers were, but where the Dipper watchers were.
Although this site looks somewhat crowded, birders are a breed apart. Fifty birders are better company than any three people who would rather be at the mall.
Majestic alpine scenery unfolds at each bend in the road.
Another glacial basin, this one filled with water - Saint Mary Lake.
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