The Crown of the United States

This year for our summer vacation we wanted to go somewhere that we had never been.  Matt and I have both always talked about going to Glacier National Park, and we decided that now was the time to do it!  We planned the trip over the 24th of July, because I get the extra day off of work, and it is always nice to conserve vacation days.  Since neither of us had ever been there, we borrowed some planning books from my parent's and did a bunch of research on the Internet, but really, we went in blind.  We didn't know what we wanted to see, where the best places were to go, or anything really.  But we set out determined to have a good time.

We drove up on a Saturday, spending our first night just outside of Kalispell Montana. It was a long drive up, but very pretty, and we gave ourselves enough time to take it slow and still get up there before it was too late.  The next morning we loaded in our little car and headed into the park for the first time.  

I think we were both surprised at how beautiful it all was.  We started out at Lake McDonald and Apgar Village.  From there we took the bus to the Avalanche Lake hike and just continued to be amazed. We returned to our hotel in Kalispell that night and watched an amazing thunderstorm roll through.  

The next day we drove over the Going to the Sun road and hiked to the Hidden Lake overlook.  We also did a hike to a couple waterfalls and had our first real encounter with a Black bear (it was about 6 feet off the trail, but I still couldn't get a good picture).  We had planned to camp that night at St. Mary's, but the weather had a different plan.  With steady 30 mph winds and gusts up to 60 the tent didn't last long and we spent the night in the Corolla (it was awesome!).

We lucked out and found a room at Many Glacier the next night and spend most of the day up there, taking a boat ride across the lakes there and also spending time just relaxing in the Many Glacier Lodge.

The next day we went up to Waterton Park in Canada (totally crossed the boarder for the first time!)  and we spent a couple of nights in the Prince of Wales hotel.  We found out that Matt's Great Grandpa actually worked on the plumbing on the hotel, we should have received the family discount.  We spent another day in Canada checking out most of the park and then we were supposed to drive down to Bozeman, but we were having so much fun that we decided to add an extra night to our say and spent one more day driving around the park before we headed down to Matt's grandparent's house in Bozeman and then home.

Well, if you made it this far, you deserve to see some pictures. Click on the pictures to make them bigger.  The panoramics ones are awesome!

 Cedar Forest

 Waterfall

 View from Going to the Sun

 Tent Pole - the morning after

 Tent Down

 Hidden lake on a windy day

 that is our close-up bear, we were happy there was so much vegetation between us.  He was close!

 this is our bear again

 avalanche lake 

 view from Bears Hump Waterton Lakes

 Bowman lake - long drive to get here, but totally worth it

 Bullhead lake

 Going to the sun road

Grinnell Lake

 Hidden Lake

 Prince of Wales Hotel Lobby

 Many Glacier on a windy day

 Many Glacier on a clear day

 Prince of Wales Hotel

 Two Medicine

Waterton Lakes Park