Miles 3216-3481: Glacier National Park
This morning, Mom and Dad woke us up at 6:30 so we could get into the park earlier. I had one of Tyler’s waffles again, this time with strawberries and bananas (amazing). We drove two-and-a-half hours to the opposite side of Glacier, to the trail-head of the Grinnell Glacier hike. It was a 10.5 mile hike, round-trip. We walked by Swiftcurrent and Josephine Lake. There was the option to take boats over the lakes to cut off three miles, but we didn’t. It was a really beautiful hike, with an elevation gain of about 1600 feet. It was kind of tough, but not that bad. Grinnell Lake was so blue; it looked kind of like the hot springs at Yellowstone: red and orange around the outside because it was shallow, and a deep turquoise blue in the center. The glacier was kind of underwhelming from far away, just a sheet of snow and ice. It was small, which was really sad, because global warming had been melting it for the past few centuries. We wanted to get closer to the glacier, but there was a snow wall across the path. To get across it, you had to step over a two-foot crevice and walk along a two-foot wide path of ice. There was a sign a while back saying that you shouldn’t go farther unless you have an ice ax and the ability to self-arrest. We went a little ways past it, to where a waterfall spilled over the path. Plenty of people were crossing the snow wall, even one family with a girl much younger than Jackson. Two rangers came up to the wall and were telling people how dangerous it was, but people just walked right past them and did it anyway.
Once we finished the hike, we left the park and drove to another entrance, at St. Mary’s Lake. We ran in the visitor’s center there, to ask a ranger what the weather was like in the park. She said it was very foggy and she wouldn’t recommend driving back through. Instead of going through the park back to Whitefish, we went around again. Back in Whitefish, we got Italian and ate at the hotel. We had lasagna, spaghetti, pizza, Caesar salad, and bread. Tyler sat with us while we ate and we talked. We ate on the porch and everyone in the city seemed to have fireworks they were setting off. As Jackson said, it sounded like we were in the middle of World War II. There were fireworks that made every sound you can think of: loud cracks, deep booms, rapid-fire pops, and the whine that you think of preceding the falling of a bomb. We walked to Sweet Peaks again and got ice cream. It was like walking through a war zone. I got honey cinnamon and it was pretty good. Once we got back to the hotel, we turned and looked back at the town; it looked like it was on fire. There was a blanket of smoke over the whole city. The whole scene was very Americana; the fireworks and celebration of the nation’s birthday. I half expected to find a movie crew somewhere filming it all. Time to finish writing and enjoy the unique downtown of Spokane!!
“Don’t do dumb things.”