August 5th
As I said, we woke up at 4 am, knowing that we had a very long drive ahead of us. Everything seems like it will be close together when you are picturing the west from the couch in North Carolina, because Wyoming and Montana are literally right next to each other, how long could it possibly take? 8 hours and 10 minutes, 449 miles, without traffic or stops. Unfortunately we were not so lucky as to go without traffic or stops. We took our usual bathroom and gas breaks with tentative plans to just snack for lunch along the road or grab fast food to refill our dwindling condiment packet supply. We also planned to stop outside in Missoula for groceries and an REI stop which we knew would probably take a little bit of time. We did take one very long extra stop.
I was driving the car and had started to hear a flapping sound but didn’t think much of it as I assumed the straps on the bikes rigged to the top of the camper just got a little free. Also not an insignificant amount of crosswinds were hitting us as we were driving through Central Montana which complicated telling if there was anything funky going on. Until the flapping grew louder so Greg started to notice it, and being cautious he told me to pull over, which I promptly did. Slowing down, the whole car and trailer started shaking. We got the car to stop and started looking around. We started checking straps on the bikes, with nothing overtly amiss. Then we started looking at tires on the camper, went to go check tire pressures. The passenger’s side tire looked fine, and I watched Greg check so I could check the driver’s side, the pressure was reading variably so I assumed I was just doing it wrong. Greg went to double check when he noted that there were no lug nuts or lugs on the tire. For those of you who know as much as I do about lugs, these are large screw things that hold your tire onto your axle, the lug nuts are the things on the ends that hold the lugs in place, the things you have to loosen to change the tire. There are supposed to be five, we had zero, meaning nothing was holding the tire on to the pop up. If we had kept driving even just a little bit longer or if luck had flown a different direction the tire may have exploded or flown off the axle and taken half of the pop up siding with it; our pop up would have been totaled. We got very lucky.
We counted our blessings that this happened in the 25% of Montana that we actually got phone signal. I vaguely remembered my insurance policy on the pop-up covering towing and such so we called our insurance company. Unfortunately that was on our previous policy, not the one we changed to after we got married. But hey parents how adult am I for having insurance on the pop up? So we called Nationwide to get a tow, they said we would have to pay out of pocket and maybe could submit for reimbursement, we were like cool let’s get that tow set up and take it to a tire shop. They said great, the company will call when they are five minutes out. So we tried to relax and were reading our books and snacking and waiting. We waited about an hour and a half and still hadn’t heard anything so we called back, found out that the request didn’t go through, no tow truck was coming. Then we lost the call. Since at this point I really needed to pee we drove up to the next exit to find a store with a bathroom while we were on hold with Nationwide. After 30 minutes of holding and finally getting back to the car we found out there are no flatbed tow trucks in central Montana, zero. At this point Greg had already decided to take things into his own hands and figure out how to get the wheel off the pop up so we could just bring it to the tire shop ourselves. Greg was able to get it off in relatively short order, which was very frustrating to him that he didn’t just do that before we waited 2 hours for a non-existent tow truck.
Wheel in hand we drove 20 minutes to Deer Lodge Les Schwab Tire Company and finally met Bo who I had talked to multiple times on the phone about the situation and who had reassured us that he had all the parts. Bo and his crew were exceptional. They got us our new parts promptly and sent us back on our way. Greg installed the wheel back on the pop up but felt like he heard some grinding in one of the wheel bearings and was worried it had gotten damaged the shaking of the loose tire. So we drove exceedingly slow and cautiously on back roads back to Deer Lodge and Les Schwab to have them take a look at the wheel bearings. They gave it the once over and felt like it was probably just some dirt which they cleaned out and gave us the stamp of approval. No new wheel bearings were needed! So four hours later we got back onto the ever-loving I-90 and headed on towards Missoula.
Shout out to Nate Jones for always being on call for all car related issues!
We eventually got to Missoula, angry and hungry, around 6 pm. We grabbed Subway for dinner, filled with gas and headed to Mecca. I mean REI. Here we felt we both deserved some solid self-care in the form of new hiking shoes. Greg bought a pair of Solomon trail runners and I bought myself the Keen mid rises that just came out that I had my eye on. We were both very happy. Then headed to fill up on groceries and get back on the road close to 8 pm.
We had another 2+ hours of driving to make it up to West Glacier which is close to where we were staying. We made it without further event. We got to our campsite at Fish Creek and set up the pop-up. We drank a very hard earned beer and fell directly to sleep after a very long day, still very grateful that it went as smoothly as it did with all of our belongings and selves intact. We were also grateful that we decided to wake up at 4am, otherwise there is no way the tire shop would have been open or that we would have even made it to Glacier that day.
** Side note about another unplanned stop in Minnesota. We were again driving I-90 from Wisconsin to South Dakota back at the beginning of the trip. Greg was driving and starts to slow down, turn on the hazards, and pulls off. I’m like what are you doing, what’s wrong? Then I see that we are getting pulled over by the State Trooper. Then a tall blond lady Trooper comes up to the window and tells us that we are getting pulled over because we didn’t slow down during a work zone. She asks for license and information to run through the system, you know to look at all of Greg’s priors. Then comes back, says she couldn’t find him in the system, but we look nice, so decides to just give us a lecture about how the law states that we should slow down to a speed that we believe is appropriate based on if the crew were our family. She mommed us hard. She let us go with a warning, because we were still driving under the speed limit when we got pulled over. She was the most polite police officer, which leads me to believe that whole Minnesota/Midwest hospitality is just the cutest, don’t you know. But also this is a story about white privilege (please read the lack of fear, lack of ticket, lack of police aggression, letting us go without finding us in the system, the maternalistic lecture).**
Sunday August 6th
We slept in, given our crazy preceding day. Then we decided to drive the Going to the Sun Road at least in partiality, because that is what you do in Glacier! We drove up to Logan Pass and headed to the visitor center. There is a little hike out in back of the visitor center so we decided to do that. It is called Hidden Lake, it’s about 2.5 miles round trip to the overlook, and about 5 miles round trip if you decide to go down to the lake.
Since we never stop half way we continued all the way to the lake. We loved the hike going down because it just had the most insane views of snow fields, alpine meadows, glacial lakes, beautiful mud rock ridgelines, luxuriating marmots, and MOUNTAIN GOATS! We met like 6 mountain goat friends on the way down, they dgaf about people and just weave in and out on the paths. Mountain goats and marmots are salt deprived so they gravitate towards people and their delicious savory sweaty skin and packs. We lunched at the lake then headed back up. Greg decided he wanted to stretch his legs so he essentially ran up the switch backs from the lake up to the path. I followed, I think I almost died.
Something you should know about me. A lot of people get Hangry, angry when they are very hungry, me not so much. I get Swangry, angry because I am so sweaty. Thanks to my genetics I sweat very easily, so I have some tolerance and expectation of sweat with exertion and outdoor activities. However, going up inclines with any speed at all causes me to sweat from every pore in my body. So you can extrapolate my emotional reaction to running up hill.
I got overheated ie very displeased, but eventually started feeling better after slowing down and more flat terrain. I didn’t feel quite myself till we got all the way back to the car. We did stop at the gift shop and purchase some long sleeve spf moisture wicking shirts and some postcards.
We have been purchasing post cards at most stops and trying to late wedding thank you notes in this manner throughout the trip. We are a little over half way through, so if you haven’t gotten yours yet, it will be on the way in the next few weeks or you are one of twenty people that decided to move between receiving saves the dates and today.
We then drove back down the Going to the Sun road back to West Glacier. Stopped at the visitor center at Apgar then called it a day and headed back to the campsite.
Glacier is a hiker’s park. There is a lifetime worth of backpacking, hiking, back country exploring to be done within the park, and we only had a few days in which to do it. We had to narrow down what we thought would be the best hikes and were most doable in the time we had. We planned to do the Loop to the Highline trail the following day, then a rest-ish day, then Wednesday Sperry Trail to Sperry Chalet, Thursday Sperry Glacier Trail, Friday maybe Lake Overlook trail to Sperry Trail again or Gunsight Pass, then Saturday Grinnell Glacier Viewpoint. We were trying to pack a lot in, but we would still be missing big parts of the park such as Two Medicine, Belly River, Goat Haunt, and the entire Canadian side in Waterton Park.
We went to bed with ambitious hopes in our hearts.
Monday August 7th
We woke up early to get started on our trail. We decided to park at The Loop and then climb this trail to Granite Chalet, then follow it along Highline Ridge Trail back to Logan Pass where we would catch a shuttle back down to our car. It would be about a 12 mile hike, a hike for us. We opted to do it this way as opposed to from Logan Pass down to the Loop because we thought it would be easier to catch a shuttle from Logan Pass.
Glacier runs a free shuttle pass along the entirety of the Going to the Sun Road. Except the break the road up into 3 sections so you would need to switch buses twice in order to complete the trip, one way. They have you go on a big bus from Apgar to Avalanche, then switch to small 15 passenger vans from Avalanche to Logan Pass, and a different bus from Logan Pass to Saint Mary. They use small 15 passenger vans because there are size restrictions on vehicles on the road of 21 ft max because of the tight sharp turns. The buses are scheduled to go every 30 minutes, if however they are full and several have to pass you it could take an hour to actually even get on a bus. We wanted to avoid having to wait an hour after a long hike.
We started our hike by 8 am without any problems. It was a steep initial four miles from the Loop to Granite Chalet, ascending 2200ft. We only passed a couple of people on the whole trail. At one point the weather started looking a little sketch, but seemed to pass to the southwest of us. This section of park had been burned in the last decade and so it had a lot of thick underbrush with little shade. The underbrush consisted of sage, wildflowers and tons of berries. We were walking, alone, through prime bear country. The one group we passed was even kind enough to point out that a bear had been on the trail the night before as there were some well-preserved foot prints. Grrrrreat. We always carry bear spray and so we continued along, thankfully bear free.
By the time we got to Granite Chalet I was a little swangry and ready to be done going uphill. Granite Chalet is one of two remaining chalets in the park. These were originally built 100 years ago by the railroad company to attract visitors to the park. There were originally eight chalets in the park, each a one day horse ride apart. Six of the chalets were constructed predominantly out of wood and fell into disrepair after years of disuse during the Second World War and subsequently were burned to the ground. The two remaining chalets are Sperry and Granite Chalets. You can reserve rooms at the chalets. Sperry Chalet will also include meals, Granite Chalet does not. In order to secure a reservation you have to put in your request within ten minutes of the system opening as space is very limited. Luckily I have a very dedicated husband who had done his research. He had obtained reservations for two nights at Sperry Chalet for us to enjoy during our trip. It allows you to hike in, enjoy incredibly views, eat some food, and relax without having to backpack all of your supplies up a mountain. We were scheduled to be at Sperry from Wednesday through Friday. This was one of our biggest splurges of our trip and we were very much looking forward to it.
Granite Chalet was just a nice resting point to enjoy a snack on our current hike. After a couple of minutes of rest and looking around we headed on. We expected this next portion of the hike to be relatively flat or downhill, albeit long, 7.6 miles. I was disappointed with how much uphill climbing I had to do, and how long 7.6 miles is when you are hiking on a bright sunny day. We pushed ourselves at a good pace through the hike and eventually with about 3 miles left took another break. It was at this point that I tried to remind myself that hiking should be fun, not a race, and to be more mindful and enjoy the experience not the destination. We did get some incredible views, got to see amazing parts of the park. Thankfully it was a relatively good visibility day, as smoke was still a big issue from fires in British Columbia (now much closer) and Missoula.
We eventually got to Logan Pass, caked in dirt and sweat, very ready for a break. It ended being our longest hike to date at close to 13 miles. Heads up, you don’t want to be our Fitbit friends right now, as we will crush you. This was a surprisingly crowded trail for its length. Most people seem to start and end at Logan’s Pass and just walk until they feel tired, then turn around. The rest of everyone else starts with Logan Pass and ends at the Loop as you get to descend 300ft instead of ascending 3000ft. We are not most people, and we were a little jealous. Let’s call this a training hike for bigger things to come.
We were able to catch a shuttle pretty quickly, get back to our car, and back down to the campsite. Glacier actually had a very nice camping set up. We were next to the bathrooms and there were FREE showers a couple of loops over. Today was a real shower day, and it was lovely.
Tuesday August 8th
We planned for a much more relaxed day as we knew we had big hikes scheduled the next few days and were still feeling our hike from the prior day. We also wanted to minimize driving on the Going to the Sun Road as it had construction, was crowded, and very slow going. We just took a casual stroll, a couple of miles partially around John’s Lake Loop. Here we met a lovely mule deer friend who followed us pretty closely and allowed us to get great pictures of her. We named her Laci, as she is in Glacier. Is anyone enjoying my puns? It led us to John’s Lake and along the river which was crystal clear from the glacier run off. It was a beautiful not very crowded hike. A similar hike is Avalanche Lake, but this trail is significantly more crowded as all of the rangers and guides recommend it. Well we recommend John’s Lake instead, as we prefer solitude in which to enjoy nature. It does overlap with a common horse trail which means we had to watch where we were stepping a lot of the time.
We packed our backpacks and talked about the pros and cons of taking Gunsight Pass out of the Chalet. Gunsight Pass is a 13.6 mile hike with some elevation change to get up to the actual passes through the mountains and then back down to the lakes. To get to the chalet we had to use their free shuttle service. This allows us to park the ca, and more importantly the pop-up, at the West Glacier Outdoor Center and then get a ride to the trailhead. This shuttle service only runs to and from the Sperry Trailhead, which is the base of a 6.5 mile trail that leads up to the chalet with 3400 feet of elevation. So in order to use the transportation we would have to take the bus system back over to West Glacier then call to let them know we missed our pick up. This would involve using 3 separate buses and likely 2 hours to get back to the car, which on a day we would have to drive to a new campsite 2 hours away and set up seemed like a lot. So we decided to keep our 2pm pick up at the Sperry Trailhead for our route down.
Side note, why is our campsite, also in Glacier, 2 hours away? Because you can’t take a pop-up through the Going to The Sun Road, so you have to take the long way around the outside of the park. We didn’t know this when we booked our campsites, we were just excited to get to different campgrounds and check out new parts of the park. We were less excited about doing it in real life.
Our main task for the evening was also cleaning out the cooler so we wouldn’t have to keep ice in it while we were gone for three days up at the Chalet. We had a few beers to drink to accomplish this goal. Was probably not our brightest idea the day before a hike, c’est la vie.
Coming Up – Glacier Part 2 Chalet and St. Mary’s
Pictures coming soon!
Honey Popping 