Mile 2978 - Glacier National Park, MT

So the glaciers are melting, but apparently, they’re never going to change the name of the park.  Glaciers after all, carved the whole thing, so you could argue that it’s still a very appropriate name.  Regardless, it is insanely beautiful.

Our first impression: Glacier has lame visitor centers; they're basically gift shops.  Up to this point we have relied on visitors centers to help us decide what to do in the parks, and every ranger we talked to said, "There's not a bad hike in the park".  Their responses were a little too scripted, and really, just not very helpful.  Since there was no internet to fall back on, Aaron spent some time reading through some of the books in the gift shops and figured out a plan.

To be fair to the unhelpful rangers, Glacier is gigantic and has over 700 miles of trails to hike, and it's quite accurate to say that there isn't a bad hike in the park.  The park has an extensive backcountry for a nice backpacking trip, but there's also a whole variety of day hikes with parking right off the road.  A big factor in planning is that Glacier is extremely popular; most of the park is closed 9 months out of the year because of snowfall and construction, so when it's open, it's packed!  There's four sections of the park that you can drive to, but the two sections you come to see are the Going-to-the-Sun Road and Many Glacier.  We decided Glacier would be a four day stop. 

Our first day we took the Going to the Sun Road from one end of the park to the other, with a little 2 mile hike at the half way point.  We had settled on a plan at the Logan Pass visitor center and the good thing was that there was a popular trailhead right out front, though it looked like a slow line of tourists as far as the eye could see.  To our surprise, we crossed paths with a random ranger who had some excellent advice.  Just 10 yards down the main trail there was a roped off trial that he recommended.  He said it led through fields of flowers, a great waterfall, but we were sold by the promise of hiking alone.  Well, as you can see, we were't totally alone.

Hike #1 was short but so nice. We warmed up to Glacier.

Aaron really changed his mind at the free Ranger-guided star gazing that night. They brought out two huge telescopes and let everyone take turns checking out the skies. And of course, we took pictures, but we took them through a telescope. C'mon how cool is this: