Days 1-2: Glacier National Park!

I already wrote our high-level overview of the trip and now we'll dive back into each stop!

Day 1: Travel from Dallas to Montana

We woke up early on Tuesday to catch the one direct flight from Dallas to Kalispell, MT out of DFW (and drop our car in the uncovered far remote parking and take a 20 minute bus ride to our terminal, something that would come back to bite us in the end for sure). The flight was easy and uneventful and we landed in Montana, 30 minutes from Glacier National Park, marveling at what that drive from Dallas would have looked like (long, mostly). We picked up our rental minivan and headed over to West Glacier, stopping for groceries on the way and buying our Bear Spray and a little cooler bag to keep the cold food in.

Our cabin was in Essex, which is past the West Glacier entrance and on your way over to the East side. You need a vehicle registration pass to drive past the Apgar Village and Visitor's Center, but you can explore the village and that west shore of beautiful Lake McDonald without one.

Landon immediately took off his shoes and waded into the water. I didn't even see him do it- I was admiring the view and taking a picture and then Landon's head crossed over into my iPhone frame.

The lake is beautiful, the colored rocks are more vibrant than they appear in the pictures, and we enjoyed just hanging out on the water's edge, walking through the few little shops in the village, and trying our first huckleberry ice cream.

After 3 pm you can drive past the Visitor's Center without a pass so we drove along Lake McDonald for a little ways, listening to our GuideAlong and learning about the park (there is NO cell service, none, download everything before you leave home). We stopped at the east end of Lake McDonald, explored Lake McDonald lodge, and then drove back out to our cabin, enjoying our newly acquired Huckleberry Jellybeans along the way. (Note: I will now try anything with huckleberry in it; everything was amazing and we should all have more huckleberries in our life.)

The cabin was cozy and comfortable- 3 bedrooms, 1 bathroom (note to my future self: we really need 2 if possible). It was warm- they didn't have a/c, which isn't unusual up there, but it was a 90-degree day that luckily turned into a 55-degree night. We made pasta, garlic bread, and salad for dinner, prepped our hiking backpacks and picnic lunches, and tucked ourselves in bed, knowing we had another big early day in the morning.

Day 2: Grinnell Glacier Hike

Our alarms went off at 5:30 to begin our journey to the Many Glacier entrance in East Glacier! There are many great blog posts about how to get around Glacier, what hikes to do, etc., but know that most of the hikes are long so unless you have more days than we did, you'll need to narrow it down. I settled on Grinnell Glacier, purely from the pictures, and I have no regrets.

(I took that picture with my phone; it's hard to believe it's real and I was there.)

The hike is 11 miles, leaving from the Grinnell Glacier Trailhead by the Many Glacier hotel. You can carve 2 miles off the hike each direction by booking tickets with the Glacier Park Boat Company. The boat tickets also get you a vehicle registration pass to enter the Many Glacier portion of the park for that day, which is good, because those passes sold out way quicker than the boat reservations when I tried to get them.

The drive to the Many Glacier entrance is LONG, nearly 2 hours from where we started at our cabin, and the last part of the drive is slow-going and gravel, though the views are beautiful. It took a while to get into the park because of the line to check passes and registrations, so we ended up cutting it WAY closer to our 8:30 boat launch time than we meant to. James dropped me off at the Many Glacier hotel entrance and I raced to the ticket office to pick up our passes just as they were releasing any not-yet-claimed to the waitlist, something they do EXACTLY 10 minutes before the boat leaves. Then I got to stand by the boat dock panicking as my husband and children did not immediately appear to board the boat. There is no cell service, so I kept debating going to find them in the parking lot or hotel lobby or wherever they were v. waiting in a position where I could yell at them from a distance to hurry up and the captain might not leave without us. Life before cell phones is wild.

They finally made it, maybe 30 seconds before 8:30, and we RAN onto the boat just before it pushed off.

The boat ride was beautiful. We all got to breathe a little. The boat captain told great stories. We traveled across Swiftcurrent Lake, walked a short ways, and then boated across Lake Josephine. At the drop-off you can choose to ride the boat back (many people did this), hang out for a bit to catch the next boat back, or begin the now-7 mile out-and-back hike to Grinnell Glacier. If you don't get a boat ride you can just walk along the lake. It's an easy, flat path, but long and I'm glad we got to skip it. Plus the views from the boats were beautiful.

Once at the far end of Lake Josephine, we began our hike.

Flat at first, it immediately began to climb a total of 1,750 vertical feet over 3.5 miles.

It was hard. It was spectacular. It was busier than I expected but not crowded.

We saw wildlife: a deer, a herd of big horned sheep, a fluffy marmot, a pure white mountain goat, and at the very end: a mama and baby Moose!

We ate a lot of snacks. We drank a lot of our water. It was a lot of climbing.

But the views- it felt like I took a picture every 5 minutes but not one of them captured the beauty of our hike and I deleted nearly all of them on returning.

The glacial lakes are SO blur, the mountain is so green, the waterfalls are plentiful and everywhere... we alternated feeling like we were in Colorado, the Pacific Northwest, and the Swiss Alps, but it was all Montana. This picture reminded me of the end of Sound of Music when they're hiking over the Alps to Switzerland.

Once you get to the end of the trail, you can can stop at a little rest area with some log benches and a view of the lake or continue on to the glacier itself.

We continued on of course, our sweaty clothes turing frigid in the suddenly icy wind.

But we made it!

We ate our packed lunches, Landon claimed he was going to swim but settled for his feet getting wet, and then we fast-hiked back to make the list for the 1:30 boat back.

We did (barely! the next boat wasn't for another 2 hours so if we hadn't made the cut we probably would have just walked along the lakes back). While we waited for the boat, James changed into his swimsuit and dove into the (freezing!) lake for a swim, to the shock and applause of our fellow hikers/boat riders.

This is also when the mama moose and baby appeared across the lake, which was a delight.

We boated back across both lakes and then, on our drive back from the Many Glacier entrance to our cabin, we saw a mama bear and THREE baby bears foraging for berries!! We stopped and watched from our car on the side of the road, laughing at the curious bear cubs who kept popping their little fuzzy faces up to look around, before continuing our long drive home to the cabin.

Two hours later we climbed out of the car with shaky legs, rested a bit, and drove into town to eat some pizza for dinner. I think we were all asleep within 30 minutes of getting back to the cabin. What a great day.