July 18: Tour Day 3

I slept really well and woke up around 730am feeling like a champion. Thanks Lola. I went back in to the restaurant for a proper breakfast. Some eggs, coffee, set this party off right. After breakfast, I changed clothes and washed up a bit. The plan was to head west through the park, hike Avalanche Lake Trail, eat a bagged lunch, tell Lola she is a soldier, head to Hungry Horse MT to check out the ultramarathon route I really wanna run in Oct, stay in Glacier NP or drive to Missoula for the night, and that was about as far as I had thought it through. There is only 1 road that cuts all the way across the park and that is through Logan Pass called Going to the Sun road. It is only open 2 or 3 months a yr due to weather and it just opened about 3 weeks ago. This was the road I would be taking all day. So pumped. The pics above are some of the pics I took, there are tons more on my facebook under the Glacier Nat Park Album. I made sure that all my pics are open for anyone and everyone to check out even if you aren’t on facebook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=547979919

The drive really blew me away. Had I known what I know now, I would have worked in Glacier instead of Yellowstone. I started the day in the eastern part of the park at Rising Sun where I spent the night. The first 30 or 40 minutes of driving, the scenery looked like pictures of Fiji I have seen. The road continued to climb and wind into deeper into a valley of mountains, serious mountains. A lot of the pics above are from this stretch, at least my sinful poses. As the road kept climbing, you found yourself on the edge of a cliff on a 2 lane road with no guard rail, usually 500 ft to the bottom. Great views, aggravating when people buzz you going the other way. I was on cloud 9, didn’t bother me in the least. I couldn’t get my camera ready in time as I was driving, but there was one part where skinny waterfalls were falling and splashing all over the road, maybe 6 of them in a 200 ft span. Each waterfall had its own little rainbow. I felt like I was in a cartoon or something. I guess it was how the sun was hitting the water, but that doesn’t explain the unicorn….. So you get the idea, the views were life altering......