Glacier National Park

June 18-19, 2008

Rising Sun campground in Glacier National Park. After the boring plains of Montana, this is a beautiful place to camp. It is along the Going to the Sun highway and next to St. Mary Lake.

Ghost Island

St. Mary Lake with Wild Goose Island and beautiful mountains in the background. The view makes the trip here worthwhile.

Across from St. Mary Lake was a large burn area due to a forest fire in 2006. According to a ranger, the natural path of fires in this area is to to travel to the east and on to the Blackfeet reservation. Because of that, they attempted to fight this one, but it burned a large area.

Logan Pass still closed due to snow

The Going to the Sun highway was still closed from the winter's snowfall. We were told there was 80 feet of snow at Logan Pass.

osprey nest

This osprey has her nest on a pole and platform outside the visitor center at St. Mary. I have not seen an osprey this close before. Nice of it to be so accomodating.

Since we couldn't explore much of the Going to the Sun highway, we decided to move over to the Many Glacier area for our second night at Glacier. The hotel there is a real classic beauty, and the mountain scenery is outstanding.

The view from the deck of the Many Glacier hotel. The curvature of the railing is an optical distortion due to this image being a composite of five images stitched together; the angle of view in this composite image is almost 180 degrees.

On a hike around Swiftcurrent Lake we took a detour to Josephine Lake and saw some bighorn sheep high above us on the mountainside.

young moose browsing

Heading back to our campsite, Nancy spotted this young moose having lunch. He took note of our presence and went back to his meal.

Tomorrow we head into Canada.