Glacier National Park, Part II
After 10 days on the west side of Glacier National Park, we moved over to the east side to finish out the week. We stayed at St. Mary campground, a no hookup national park campground. Michael took a few vacation days, plus it was his birthday!
The St. Mary entrance is connected to the west entrance via the Going to the Sun Road but since our truck alone is over the length restrictions, you obviously can’t tow any kind of trailer, and we took a long way around.
The east side of Glacier is bordered by the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, and it feels less crowded and very remote. The prairie and the mountains meet on the east side and the drastic change of landscape makes the mountains much more visible on this side compared to the west, which is more forested and green.
The day we moved, we did a waterfall hike to see St. Mary and Virginia Falls. The first part of the hike was through a 2015 burn area. While walking through burn areas is a bit of an eyesore, it’s interesting to see all the new plant growth carpeting the ground. The forests in Glacier are fire-adapted and they’ll eventually recover, plus the animals like eating these young plants.
The next morning we did our first of 3 hikes at Many Glacier. Many Glacier is about 30 minutes north of St. Mary and not connected to the rest of the park by roads. There are a few lodging options, including the Many Glacier Lodge, restaurants, and shops. It feels resort-like in its own mini national park. And in our opinion, has the best hiking in the park (besides the Highline trail at Logan Pass).
We started with the Grinnell Glacier Trail, which was still closed at a certain point because of snow. Had we been able to do the entire thing we could have gotten close to the glacier in the cover photo of my first Glacier NP blog post. It was still a good hike with views of the 3 lakes in that cover photo.
Since we couldn’t hike all the way to the glacier, we decided to take another trail to get close to Lower Grinnell Lake. This water was so cold!
The next day was Michael’s birthday. We hiked to Iceberg Lake and he decided he was going to stand on one which is kind of funny because this is a very non-Michael thing to do. He hates being cold more than anything.
The next day we hiked to Red Rock and Bullhead Lakes. And afterward, put our kayaks in Swifcurrent Lake and basically just floated around and soaked our feet because of all the miles we’d hiked the last 4 days.
We went back to our camper and began looking at driving directions for our move day to a state park on Flathead Lake. Google maps alerted us to the Elmo 2 fire that was burning 4 miles away from the campground! We decided that even though the fire seemed to be growing in the opposite direction, we didn’t want to breathe all that smoke for a week so we canceled.
On Sunday morning, with a list of potential options, we decided to first stop at the first come first served campground at Two Medicine, in the southeast area of Glacier NP. Two Medicine is a quiet dead-end entrance to the park, and like the rest of the national park campgrounds, has no hookups or cell reception. We were able to get a large open campsite near the lake where we got decent internet with Dishy, so we got a bonus week at Glacier! This ended up being our favorite area of the park and one of our favorite campsites ever.
I think one reason we liked it is because of the park rangers we met. We initially got to know them because of a bug invasion (which thankfully has resolved itself). One of the rangers even saved us a parking spot at the day use area every day. They all loved the Two Medicine Valley and had been there for a long time and you could tell how much they were trying to take care of it.
During the week we hiked around the Aster Park and Rockwell Falls trails a few times, unsuccessfully looking for moose. So many other people told us they saw moose around Two Medicine but we never did.
On Saturday, we headed out at 6:30 am to do our longest hike ever, the Pitamaken Pass and Dawson Pass Loop. It would have been nearly 19 miles, but we shaved off 2 miles by reserving seats on a boat trip across Two Medicine Lake. We spent the next 8+ hours leapfrogging a couple of other groups along the hike. This was definitely one of the best and least crowded hikes we did at the park.
After ~6 miles through a valley, we hiked up and along the backside of that ridgeline behind Old Man Lake in the photo below.
Once on the backside, the trail looked like this for 2 miles.
We came to a view of Old Man Lake from above. We had started at the other end of that valley!
About 12 miles in, we made it over Dawson Pass and it was time to start going down. We decided to take a spur trail to see No Name Lake, the small green lake on the right. I’m not sure why they didn’t name it something like “Emerald Lake”. Then, we hiked over to Two Medicine Lake, the blue lake on the left of the photo below, and ride the boat back.
I think we could have hiked the last couple of miles, but we were also excited to finally ride a boat at Glacier NP.
That was the end of our 3 weeks at the park and we loved it all!
Next up, we move south through Montana towards Yellowstone.
