Candy and Jim's Great Canadian Adventure: The Amazing Glacier National Park!

This will be our last summer in Calgary so Jim and I are trying to see as many of the parks and preserves as possible. This past week, we finally made it to Glacier National Park, which is about a five hour drive south of Calgary. The park was established in 1910, and is located in Montana on the Canadian/US border. The park sits in the Rocky Mountains with over a million acres of land and more than 130 lakes. The main road through the park, up and over Logan's Pass, is called the "Going to the Sun Road," and it is not to be missed. The road was completed in 1932 and is designated as a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark.

We arrived at Logan's Pass (elevation 6,646), located along the Continental Divide, where we started our hike to the Granite Chalet and on to The Loop, a trail head where we would catch a shuttle back up to Logan's Pass where our car was parked, completing a 12 mile hike. That was the plan..........

We started out at 11:00 A.M. and walked along the Highline Trail, a trail that follows the Garden Wall ridge and the Continental Divide. The trail overlooks the Going to the Sun Road and the valleys through the park. And when I say overlooks the Going to the Sun Road, I mean you are literally walking along a ridge cut into the rock face hundreds of feet above the road. A bit scary at times..... The first part of the hike, 7.6 miles, is a relatively easy hike. After that, you take a short side trip to the Grinnell Glacier overlook, where you will climb a mere thousand feet in a little less than a mile. The the long slow slog is worth the effort. We stopped a lot to catch our breath, probably every hundred steps.

After the amazing views and a short stop at the Granite Chalet, we started down a steep 4 mile trek to The Loop where we would catch our shuttle back to Logan's Pass. We had been told the shuttle ran every 15 minutes until 7:20 P.M. Well, just as we approached The Loop parking lot, we saw a shuttle pull away. It was 6:35 P.M., but there would be another one along in a bit.....or so we thought. As we were patiently waiting for the next bus, we noticed a sign that showed the times of the shuttle pick-ups. Well, guess what..... yup, we missed the last shuttle at 6:35.

I saw a shuttle picking up across the street, which was headed the other way, so I ran over and asked the driver what we should do, thinking she would let us on her bus and would take us back up to Logan's Pass after her drop off (since we're such nice people). She told me, "there are a lot of cars still coming into the park, so you can hitch hike back up to the pass." Seriously?

Okay, we asked every car in the parking lot if they were headed back up to Logan's Pass, but nobody was heading back in that direction, a twenty minute ride in the wrong direction. Finally a mother and her grown son told us they only had room for one of us, and that we would have to sit/lay in a bed thingy in the back of their car, which looked like a KIA Soul or something like that. We decided I would ride up and bring the car back down to pick Jim up. They prefaced their offer with, "we are taking pictures at every turn out so the ride might be a lot longer than 20 minutes." Great. Well, luckily, three little ladies took pity on us and told us that they had not intended to go all the way to Logan's Pass, but that they would go out of their way to give us a ride. These ladies had never driven in the mountains on a narrow two lane road, so the ride that should have taken 20 minutes turned into 40! Just guess where these angels were from......Texas! Yup, they were fellow Texans! We tried to give them money for gas, but they weren't having any of it. They did it out of the goodness of their sweet little hearts. They finally did acquiesce and accept a bottle of wine. Good ole Texans!

Please enjoy these amazing pictures, and if you ever get the chance to hike in Glacier National Park, don't miss it! Just make sure you don't miss the last shuttle!