Long Weekend at Glacier National Park

Did you know that Glacier National Park is only about nine hours away from Seattle? We didn't. In my mind, Montana was super far away. As in, too far away to consider driving with less than a week of time to spare. Oh how wrong! Kevin was the one with the idea for this trip, and after looking up the travel time we decided to go for it.

I recently started a new job, and had approximately one week off in between ending my previous job and starting the new one. So, Kevin decided to take a Friday off and we headed out of town for a short long weekend to Glacier National Park. True, it would be better to have more time, and some may think it's too long of a drive for such a short timeframe, but it's ideas like those that sometimes keep you from enjoying the time that you do have in favor of waiting for some more ideal future time that may or may not arrive. In other words, we didn't want to put it off just because it wasn't ideal.

We ended up taking off on Thursday night and drove from Seattle to Spokane, which is a bit better than half way. We got in pretty late, but it was worth it to get the extra head start. Before heading out, we went for breakfast at Frank's Diner, which was lovely. Funny story, though. I had a bit of a misunderstanding with the menu and ending up ordering what was essentially scrambled eggs with two sunny side eggs on top. Yup. Eggs on eggs. Ah well.

We drove the rest of the way to Glacier pretty leisurely and got to our first camp at Fish Creek Campground in the early afternoon. Camp was set up and extra groceries and firewood were procured. And some obligatory huckleberry ice cream (they seem to have huckleberry everything in those parts). Then the weather started to turn a bit and we got some rain. However, we were able to start a fire before it got too wet out and spent the night quite comfortably wrapped in a wool blanket enjoying the fire despite the light rain.

Saturday was our full day of exploring. Since we only had limited time, we decided to focus on driving Going-to-the-Sun Road and only doing a few short hikes along the way. The weather wasn't the greatest (a trend for the whole trip), so we didn't get the best views driving along the road. There was a lot of fog and a little drizzle, but we still got glimpses of views here and there as the clouds shifted.

 Once at the top, we did a short hike. Again, with intermittent views. I was pretty bummed that we didn't see any mountain goats - mostly due to fog - but we did get to see a marmot! It was just hanging out along the trail munching and not paying the slightest bit of attention to the passersby. I'd never seen one before and thought it was utterly adorable.

After the hike we drove the rest of Going-to-the-Sun Road, and were delighted to find that the other side of the pass was rain-free! We got some excellent both going down, and coming back through the second half of the road.


Saturday night we moved campsites to the larger Apgar camping area, once again were able to enjoy a fire (best part of camping!) and went to a ranger talk. We were so impressed with the ranger! She taught us all about the Whitepark Pine and it's symbiotic relationship with the Clark's Nutcracker. One super cool thing we learned about this particular bird is that once it harvest the pine nuts it hides them all around in little dug holes or caches. Then, it simply remembers were all it's caches are for later, and does a pretty good job of it too! In a world where we increasingly rely on technology rather than our good 'ole fashion memories I found this to be pretty cool.

Sunday was for packing up and heading out, as I started my new job on Monday morning and didn't want to cut it too close. The drive back was sunny and gorgeous, though, and the whole trip was worth the short amount of time we had. It was a good introduction to Glacier and we've now got lots of ideas for a next - hopefully longer - trip there.