Day 18

Day 18 - Thursday, July 9th 2009

Glacier National Park, MT to Missoula, MT

For the 1st time this trip, we slept past 8 in the tent. After a quick breakfast and some coffee, we broke down the camp. As we were picking up the ground cloth to lay it on the bushes to dry, it caught an air current, creating an airfoil that transfixed us until I fell over and into the cold fire pit. With a bruised ego and thigh, I brushed myself off and we completed the task of loading the car. We decided to drive the entire 50 miles of the Going-To-The-Sun-Road, so we backtracked the 5 miles to St. Mary's Visitor Center, looked around and started our drive. When we reached the Sun Gorge Trailhead, we parked and went on a wonderful 6 mile hike that passed by three waterfalls; Virginia Falls, St. Mary's Falls and Baring Falls.

We also saw numerous ground squirrels,

chipmunks, and a deer that was laying down munching on grass. On the way back to the car we saw two gentlemen paused looking up the hill and taking pictures. They pointed out the brown Black Bear (turns out Black Bears can be a bunch of different colors) that was a little larger than a cub.

After posing for some pictures, the little bear wandered off out of view and we returned to the car to complete the drive.

We made another stop at the Lake McDonald Lodge for a late lunch and exited the park around 6 pm, not knowing where we would stay for the night. We pulled into a Super 8 Hotel in Kalispell, MT to siphon off their WiFi and found another Priceline special in Missoula, MT, a two hour drive. With Nuvi as our ever faithful guide, we stopped at Dairy Queen for a treat and reached Missoula at 9 pm.

Map