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Glacier National Park: Part IITouring, hiking and photography in Glacier National Park All of the pictures in this article were taken in Glacier National Park. See larger pictures, and more pictures of Glacier National Park plus picture locations.
This article is the second article in a series of three articles. You might like to read the first article before beginning this article. The first article ended with a description of the trail of the Cedars and the Avalanche Creek Gorge. After leaving the Avalanche Creek Gorge area, resume traveling east on the Going to the Sun Highway. After a few miles the road leaves McDonald creek and heads up a steep, narrow highway toward Logan Pass. Oversize vehicles and trailers are not allowed on this part of the road. If you have one of these vehicles, you can reach the east side of the park by taking US 2 on the south edge of the park. Many people have praised the Going to the Sun Road as one of the most beautiful and scenic mountain roads anywhere. In my opinion they are not far wrong. The towering mountain wall that the road switch-backs up is called the Garden Wall, so named for the hanging ferns and wildflowers that line its crevices and ledges for thousands of vertical feet. Many of the pull offs on this road are worth stopping at for a picture. The picture below was taken on this part of the Going to the Sun Road. \ One hike that you have to take, no matter how many other people do it with you, is the Hidden Lake Nature Trail. This is an approximately three mile round trip hike to Hidden Lake through the famous Hanging Gardens, one of the premier wildflower locations anywhere. You have to be there at the right time of year of course to see it in all of its glory but when it's right it's really great. Sometime in July is usually the best time, depending on the year. This is a great place to get wildflower shots with tremendous mountain scenery in the background. (You might want to read my article about How to Photograph Wildflowers as well as the article on Depth of Field if you really want to do it right.) This trail is also a good place to see mountain goats, marmots or possibly even golden eagles. Be sure to stay on the trail though. This is one of those places that way too many people visit and it is very easy to love a place like this to death. The Alpine tundra is very easily damaged by only a few footsteps into it. The other great hike you can take from the Visitor Center at the top of Logan Pass is the Garden Wall Trial that goes along the edge and top of the Garden Wall to the Granite Chalet which is a back-country chalet about seven miles away. You don't have to go all the way of course; the first part of the trail is the best part anyway. The views on this trail are truly spectacular. This is also a very easy trail to do as the ups and downs are relatively minor. You certainly don't have to stop with these two hikes. There are over 600 lakes in Glacier National Park and hundreds and hundreds of beautiful peaks and streams and meadows all connected by well maintained trails. Most of Glacier's trails are open by mid June and with a little luck can be hiked well into October. I have been in Glacier in October however, when the road over Logan Pass has been closed because of early snow. I highly recommend the Falcon Guide, "Hiking Glacier and Waterton Lakes National Parks" by Erik Molvar as a good guide to hiking Glacier. You can get this book for a few dollars from Amazon.com. Any hiker, no matter how experienced, can get a lot more out of any hike in Glacier by consulting this guide book or one similar to it. Almost all of us who have hiked for a while tend to think we don't need a guide, but it never hurts to read about a hike by someone who has already done it. Here is a quick story to illustrate the point. I am writing this article in Green Valley, Arizona. Yesterday my brother Tom and I set off to hike up to and climb a huge granite pinnacle in the Santa Rita mountains just outside Green Valley called The Elephant Head. We didn't bother doing any research before leaving as we thought we knew where we were going. Tom had heard that you turned off the main trail somewhere or other and followed this secondary trail down into a valley and then up the other side to a ridge where the pinnacle was located. His casual informant then told him it was an easy scramble up the East Ridge to the summit.
After we got home we looked up the correct trail turnoff and approach to Elephant head and commented on how much better it all would have gone if we had read the guide first. Oh well, it was a nice hike anyway, kind of. And we got another good lesson that desert bushwhacking isn't all that it's cracked up to be. After all of that walking through mesquite and 16,000 different kinds of cactus and yucca and other nasty prickers and stickers, my bare legs resembled chopped liver more than anything else. This is a rather extreme example of a hike gone astray after not reading the guide, but you get the point. Anyway, back to Glacier National Park. After you leave Logan Pass and head down toward St. Mary's Lake there are a number of wonderful places to stop along the road and enjoy the alpine wonders of Glacier National Park. One of the nicest is Sun Rift Gorge where there are wonderful river views on both sides of the road and another is the trail to St. Mary Falls. The walk to the falls is a mile or so but the Falls are quite scenic and make it all worthwhile. Shots of the rivers and falls in both of these spots can be very spectacular. If you are photographing them, try to eliminate the contrast by making sure the scene is entirely in the shade. If you include both sun and shade, you can be pretty sure that the resulting photograph will be worthless. Neither film nor digital cameras can deal with extreme contrast like your eye can. The scene will look great to your eye but horrible in the picture. Try to get the whole picture in the shade, or even better shoot on an overcast day when all the tonalities are about the same. When you get down to St. Mary's Lake be sure and stop at the Goose Island Scenic turnoff. This is the place to take the famous picture of St. Mary's Lake with tall pines in the foreground, tiny and scenic Wild Goose Island in the middle ground, and a background of the most scenic peaks you have ever seen. If you take one picture in Glacier this is probably the one to take; the best time is either sunset or dawn when there is a chance of getting color in the sky and water. However, the best part of the Goose island scenic turnoff is the lake shore below. The shore line is a good bit below the highway and the trail down to the lake is primitive, but this is quite a beautiful spot that only about 1/10 of 1% of the tourists who stop at the overlook above actually reach. At this lake shore spot there are a lot of nice shots of Goose Island and the surrounding mountains from the shoreline and an interesting peninsula to walk around on. This is the spot where the famous landscape photographer David Muench shot the cover photograph of his book, "The Rocky Mountains" which is, by the way, quite a good book. At this same spot on the shore of St. Mary Lake, look closely into the water right along the shore. There are thousands of thin little flakes of rock like miniature playing cards of various shapes and colors and sizes that wash ashore here and that are sorted by the wind and waves into intricate little patterns of similarly shapes that are astoundingly beautiful. These patterns constantly shift and change and re-sort themselves into new designs and patterns. The rocks are quite small and mostly underwater right by the shoreline and you have to look closely to see them. Joan and I once spent hours watching these little rocks sort themselves in different shifting patterns and trying un-successfully to take pictures of them. It may have been the high winds and big waves that were causing this phenomenon the day we were there, but I'll bet there are many days when you can see this happening. The best campground in the St. Mary Lake area is the one situated at the far eastern end of the Lake; it is only a mile of two from the eastern end of Going to the Sun Road where the eastern Visitor Center is located. This campground is very different from the one at Apgar at the Western end of McDonald Lake which is swallowed up so tightly in a huge aspen grove as to be almost claustrophobic. The campground is spread out on a wide open hillside with great views of St. Mary Lake and the distant mountains. You can sit in many of the campsites, especially those high on the hillside, with a cup of morning coffee or a cold evening beer and gaze over hundreds of square miles of some of the best scenery in Glacier National Park. Many Glacier is a third area of the park that is located North of St. Mary Lake; it is about twenty miles or so by car and perhaps five miles as the crow flies north of St. Mary Lake. It is one of my very favorite parts of Glacier National Park and definitely not to be missed. When you get out of your car in the parking lot, the famous Many Glacier Hotel will be right in front on you so you might as well spend a few minutes checking it out. This hotel has got to be the grandest of all the grand National Park lodges. It contains several restaurants, a number of little hidey-hole bars, a grand lobby large enough for a steam locomotive and a fire place that could easily accommodate a Volkswagen. The views out the mammoth plate glass windows facing Swift Current Lake and a panorama of some of the most spectacular mountains in the world will absolutely take your breath away. Many Glacier is a hiker's and photographer's heaven. Probably the best hikes leave from the hotel and head up the valley toward Grinnell Glacier (which is no where near as large as it used to be but still very much worth visiting) . This hike which is roughly an 11 mile round trip up to the glacier and back is a wonderland of rock, snow, ice, Bear Grass, spectacular There are grizzly bears in the Glacier high country so be aware that it is possible to encounter one. It is something to keep in mind when hiking or backpacking in some of the more remote Glacier areas, but if you are on major trails and there are a lot of other people around, you are very unlikely to run into one. However, if you are walking lonesome trails high in the wilderness, it is good if you are with several other people and making as much racket as possible to warn bears of your approach. It is important not to come on grizzly bears suddenly and surprise them; talk loudly while These two articles on Glacier National Park have been mostly about the more easily reached front country of the park. In the final article on Glacier, which I won't write until next fall after I finish my planned 2008 trip to the park, I will concentrate more on the back country of this most beautiful of our National Parks. If all goes as planned, I will write on some of the very best hikes into the interior of the park in much greater detail. Fred Hanselmann
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When you finally reach Logan Pass at the top be sure to stop at the Visitor Center. The Visitor Center itself isn't all that wonderful but the meadows and mountain peaks that surround it definitely are. If you are unlucky, the wind may be howling at about 150 miles per hour and it may be sleeting or snowing with sub zero temperatures as very often happens at this spot. If this is the case, take a quick look around, get back in your car and come back another day. However, if it is midsummer and the skies are blue and the sun is warm, you are now at one of the most perfect places in the world. Perfect, that is except for all the hordes of people from all over the world who also realize that this is one of the most perfect places in the world. However, it is possible to escape most of these people by getting out and walking. The further you go the less people and amazingly soon almost all of them are gone.
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So, off we went at a brisk clip on the approach hike, talking busily as we walked since we hadn't seen each other for awhile. After three miles or so we came to an old, abandoned mine that we were not supposed to see since we should have turned off before getting there. So we looked around and found a faint side trail and figured this must be the trail that we wanted. Off we went. Almost immediately the trail petered out and we figured we would drop down into the valley and climb up the other side and we should find the right trail someplace up there. Wrong. We ended up dropping down 800 feet into the wrong valley, bushwhacking 800 feet up the other side and then bushwhacking along the side of a huge ridge for another mile. Finally we found the right trail after walking an extra two miles and an extra 1600 feet of vertical climbing. It turns out we were so busy talking that we had walked a mile beyond the correct turn off. After climbing back down into the wrong valley and out again to regain the original trail we were so tired that we said the heck with it and went home./Goose-Island-Vista-LN.jpg)
wildflower meadows, and falling water. It is also possible to take a cruise boat across Swift Current Lake and then to the far side of the next lake in the chain of lakes, Josephine Lake, and then begin hiking from there. The really ambitious hiker can begin at Swift Current Lake and take another trial to the top of Swift Current Pass and on to the Granite Chalet, a hiker's back-country lodge and campground, and then on to the Going to the Sun Highway. This is probably too long for a one day trip for most people as it is about 12 miles one way. An even better way to do this hike is to begin at the Going to the Sun Highway and walk to Swift Current lake as it is mostly down hill going in this direction. If you do this, get a very early start and be sure you have a map. Usually there is a shuttle at Swift Current Lake that will take you back to your car on Going to the Sun Highway but check this out before beginning. Check out a hiking guide before getting started on any of these hikes as there is a maze of trails between Swift Current Lake and the high country including all kinds of wonderful and scenic side trips you won't want to miss.
you walk, wear bear bells on your boots or whistle or sing or do something that makes noise. Be especially careful if you are walking into the wind as bears won't be able to smell you. If you are camping in the back country the most important way to avoid bear trouble is to do all your cooking and dish washing at least a hundred yards or so away from your camp. Also keep all food, soap, tooth paste and other strong smelling items in a bag that you suspend between two trees a good distance from camp. Be sure you have nothing bears might be interested in eating in your tent or anywhere near your campsite. After you do all this, don't worry about bears, it is very, very unlikely that you will have bear trouble. You actually have an far greater chance of getting injured in your drive up to the park than from bears./Snag-at-Goose-Island,.jpg)
