Glacier National Park - Going-to-the-Sun Road

We all overslept our alarm and woke up at 7:40am. Mass was at 8am, so it was a good thing we were already parked right next to the church! We hurriedly got dressed, used the church bathroom, and went to church. After that it was on to Glacier National Park!

We stopped about 10am to get gas, and were able to get a great FCFS campsite in our first choice Avalanche Campground before noon - Site 21. All thanks to dad driving us so far so quickly! The kids were glad that they were able to sleep most of the drive from North Cascades National Park.

Since it was raining, we decided not set up any of our campsite and instead head to the visitor center. We went to the Apgar visitor center, and Joe decided to try to nap in the van while I took the kids inside to work on getting their Junior Ranger Badges. The booklets were the perfect thing to do during the rain - the kids are actually way more excited about doing the activities and getting the badges than I thought they would be! We listened to a “Wilderness Encounters” talk by one of the park rangers, and it was actually really interesting. The ranger talked about some of the wildlife we might see in the park and how to behave appropriately. She had some really great stories about her past encounters with bears, and I feel a whole lot more prepared now should we happen to come across a bear while hiking around this park. We are planning to spend three days here, so the kids would have plenty of time to get the badges. At some of the parks we have visited there just hasn’t been enough time to do all the activities and get back to a visitor center before they closed in order for them to get their badges. But they all finished this one pretty quickly and were sworn in as Junior Rangers of Glacier National Park. The rain had stopped and we decided to do another ranger-led activity near the visitor center called the "Trees Along the Trail Walk". It was really interesting to learn how to identify a lot of the different trees in the park and learn about the succession patterns after wildfires, which are quite common in these parts.

Lodgepole pines produce two types of pine cones. One of them (shown here) is tightly sealed up, and only will open in the heat of a wildfire. We walked through different areas of the forest to see the succession of which trees grow in the decades after a wildfire.

We thought the rain was done for the day and we would be able to set up our campsite, but it continued to rain on and off. We decided to check out Lake McDonald and found a pull off where we could walk to the shore. There was nobody else around so we had our own private beach!

The lake and the mountains and rocky beach reminded me of our trip to Switzerland

It was perfect for skipping rocks! 

We had a light dinner on the beach and played around there until it started to rain again. It was a little disappointing that it kept raining, but at least there were breaks of sun here and there and we could enjoy the park. At about 5:30 pm it was still raining. We could either continue to sit around in our van at the campsite, or go somewhere else in the park. We decided to drive up the Going-to-the-Sun Road to Logan Pass and scope it out, since we figured we could make it there by 6:00 or so and the visitor center would be open until 7pm. It turned out to be a GREAT decision! The views along this road are absolutely breathtaking and Joe said he thinks this might be his favorite National Park so far. He loves mountains more than anything so I’m not surprised.

Action shot! Our van on the Going-to-the-Sun Road!

Mary bought a wildflower identification guide. I think these were a variety of paintbrush.

Three arches along the Going-to-the-Sun Road

It was surprisingly chilly up at Logan Pass. We also learned that the parking lot often fills up by 8am. Since we were there at the end of the day, we had no problem finding a spot. We plan to come back up here early on Tuesday morning to hike to the Hidden Lake Overlook - and now that we have already pulled over and enjoyed a lot of the views, we’ll be able to more quickly get to the visitor center to get a parking spot before our hike that day.

We got back to the campsite by roughly 7:30pm and fortunately the rain had stopped so we set up our tent. Unfortunately it soon started back up again, but we managed to get everyone ready for bed (hooray for flushing toilets at this campground!) and tucked in. It wasn’t actually raining very hard or very consistently at this point - just light rainfalls on and off - so not too bad. By the time we all went to sleep it had stopped raining I think for good, as the forecast was no rain overnight and even better, warmer weather and no rain for the next couple of days while we are here in Glacier National Park.

Total miles traveled today: 174
Total miles travled on this trip: 4539