Glacier National Park (Last Blog on the CDT)

I arrived at Glacier National Park in mid-afternoon, the fourth of July, and looked up the Back Country Office.  This office issues permits to sleep at remote campsites within the park.  For weeks I had had two ideas in my mind.  One, I would find the wildflowers that thus far on the trip had eluded me and, two, I would photograph the sunrise at Logan Pass on Going to the Sun Road that bisects the park at 6,646 feet.

Number two was in trouble right away.  The road was closed each night from 9 PM to 7 AM for repairs.  The sun rose at 5:40 on the 4^th.  Then it dawned on me that the next day was a holiday.  The road crew shouldn’t be working.  But the weather report was for rain on that day, and clearing the next.  I had no choice.  I had to go the next day, rain or shine.

So I set the alarm for 2:30, left the RV at 3:15 and for the next two hours drove up hill on a winding road through the dark and the rain.  What a bad idea.  I could have been nestled in a warm down bag.

I pulled into the vacant parking lot at the visitor center at 5:00, just as the sky was lightening.  I dropped the seat back and dozed.  Around 5:30 I was aware that the rain had stopped.  Well, why not get out and put the camera on the tripod?

About 5:50 I looked up from my camera and saw a warm glow streaming in the valley from the east.  I couldn’t believe it.  I picked up the tripod and raced to the far end of the parking lot to get asphalt out of the picture and may have gotten a dramatic photograph.  In two or three minutes the dawn light was gone.

Later in the day I drove down the east side of the pass about five miles, parked at Gunsight Pass and walked out the CDT to Reynolds Campground and beyond.  Only when I got back to the truck at the end of the day did it start to rain again.

On Tuesday, I had the truck serviced for the long drive down the Pacific Coast in September to follow the Pacific Crest Trail, and then my journey home, and tended to other business.  On Wednesday I went back out to day-hike with Shannon Freix, trail coordinator for the Continental Divide Trail Alliance.  I told Shannon my need for wildflower photographs, and she suggested we try a road off Highway 2 that went south into the Badger Forest District instead of north into the park.  We hit pay dirt.  For the first time since April I was surrounded with a plethora of wildflowers: lupine, Indian paint brush, arnica, penstemon, potentilla, and wallflower, to name just a few.

Then we went down into East Glacier Park and had lunch at Two Medicine Lake.  In the afternoon we climbed toward Scenic Peak and again found abundant wildflowers along the trail, a real score, and a great way to end a journey up the Continental Divide Trail.