Glacier National Park, Thursday, 9/4/14

Thursday, September 4, 2014 

It was thirty nine degrees when we got up this morning, and we started off from the hotel at 8:30 a.m.  We skirted along the east side of Glacier National Park for several miles and it was slow going but we had some beautiful views.   It was 10:00 a.m. when we entered the park at a little town called Saint Mary.  This park is very different from Yellowstone.  There are lots of thick trees along much of the road and very few places to pull out and take in the scenery.  The road was under construction for much of the way, and we were stopped several times to wait for our turn on a one lane dirt road.  (This didn’t do much for truck’s appearance that was so clean after having accidentally gone through the car wash yesterday.)  We drove so close to a rock cliff at points that Chuck folded in the mirrors so they wouldn’t get damaged.   

Since we were not able to stop too often, Chuck got the brilliant idea that Cindy could stand up in her seat and poke her head out of the moon roof to take pictures.  That worked pretty well, except that Cindy felt like a gopher as she frequently popped her head up and got stares from passing motorists.  We got a nice picture of one glacier, but this was nothing like the scenery we saw last year in Alaska.  We were also disappointed not to have seen any animals.   

We exited the west side of the park at noon and turned south.  We drove down the east side of Flathead Lake which is the largest natural freshwater lake west of the Mississippi River.  It is approximately 27.3 miles long and up to 15.5 miles wide with a maximum depth of 371 feet.  The water was clear and blue and the lake was surrounded by mountains.  We passed through several apple and cherry orchards on our way to Missoula.  We stopped for a late lunch in Missoula and at 4:00 p.m. headed east on I-90.  We checked into our hotel in Bozeman at 7:00 p.m.   

Flathead Lake