Glacier: Avalanche Lake

Tuesday, July 17, we awoke in our tent at the KOA campground outside the St. Mary entrance to Glacier National Park. It took a while to make breakfast and get everyone going, but the twelve of us eventually made it to the visitor center to start our exploration. The six of us were joined by Roy & Mary, RJ & Haley, Craig (15) and Reese (4).

Glacier is bigger and busier than the other parks we had visited, and it has its own public transportation. We planned to take the shuttle from the visitor center up to Logan Pass and west, but had to wait patiently to find parking. It turns out there are larger parking lots up the road inside the park, but this worked out, because we all got to enjoy the scenery on the way up the Going-to-the-Sun Road.

At Logan Pass, we transferred to a westbound shuttle. Just over the pass, we saw a large herd of bighorn sheep at a bend in the road. On the way back up, we saw a single mountain goat near the same spot. The shuttle driver told us all about his sailboat in Baja California where he spends winters, and then dropped us off at Avalanche Creek. It was already early afternoon.

We walked the gentle Trail of the Cedars, among cedar, hemlock, and yew, and then hiked up the two-mile trail to Avalanche Lake. Lydia and Colin got ahead of the rest of us with Uncle RJ and Craig, so Nicole and I spent most of the two miles trying to catch up. I carried Eric.

At the lake, we had a late lunch of PBJ sandwiches assembled on the spot, sitting on a large fallen log.

On the way back down, we found a hollow log, and posed Eric.

Back at the bottom we went around the other side of the Trail of the Cedars loop, and to the shuttle stop. We arrived back at Logan Pass in plenty of time to catch the east side shuttle back to our cars.

We carried bear spray on the hike, just in case, but the trail was so busy there wasn't much chance of encountering any megafauna. There were some ground squirrels a little farther up the trail along the lake, but most of us stopped at the bottom of the lake.