Butte, MT

We knew we had a longer than usual drive today and a planned stop at Glacier National Park so we started out much earlier than usual.  It has been a LONG day but oh, the scenery.  I only took 143 pictures today compared to the 5 yesterday.  I don’t even know how to describe what we saw today so I will mostly let the pictures do the talking.  We went through periods of clouds and rain and periods of bright sun.  The fog and clouds give the mountains an interesting look.  Part of the time we had heat on in the car and part of the time we had AC.  It was just that kind of day. 

The majority of our day was spent at Glacier National Park which is part of the Rocky Mountains.  The lady at AAA in Anchorage said you really get the best views if you drive across the park on Going-to-the-Sun Road.  This is a 51 mile road, some of which was dirt due to construction, which meandered across the park from the St. Mary’s entrance to the Apgar entrance.  The road is very narrow.  At times, I could have reached out and touched the rocks we were so close.  Driving in a city makes Danny nervous but if I had been driving that mountain road, I would have been a nervous wreck.  There were frequent areas where you could pull off and take pictures so that extended the drive.  It took about four hours to drive 51 miles.

The rest of the trip we breezed along at anywhere from 50 to 75 mph.  We saw large herds of cattle and a lot of beautiful horses as well a large fields of some kind of grain.  We could see storm clouds building and were hoping it was not raining when we got to the hotel.  It wasn't; the rain was much closer than that, so we drove part of the time in pouring rain.

Tomorrow on to Yellowstone for two nights.

This is Chief Mt.  It was the first mountain from Glacier we saw.  Within two minutes of taking this picture, the mountain could not be seen at all.  The clouds had completely covered it.

The moose was on the side of the road eating leaves off the trees.

Most of these are just pretty scenes.  Without my guide book, I don't know which mountain each is.

There were a lot of lakes and streams.

There were also a lot of water falls.  One section of mountain is called Weeping Wall because water is dripping from the whole mountain wall.  I could not get a picture of that because we were too close to it.

At times, the snow/ice was right beside the road.

There were several tunnels.  This is one of the shorter ones.

I don't like squirrels that eat my bird seed from the feeder but these little ground squirrels are cute.

Lake McDonald is a glacial lake.  About 10,000 years ago a river of ice 2,000 feet thick moved through gouging out huge amounts of rock forming this large lake.  The waves were washing up on shore almost like at the beach.

Mother deer and fawn.

Stormy sunset