We got up pretty early and headed up Going to the Sun road, the 52 mile scenic drive through the heart of the park. Around 11 a.m. we arrived at Logan's Pass, the high point at the Continental Divide and got very jazzed about the trail we saw that traversed across a cliff. We stopped at the Logan's Pass Visitors Center briefly, changed into some warmer hiking clothes and hit the trail which we found out was a 3.5 mile one-way trip to Haystack Butte which could be continued for 7 miles to Granite Park Chalet. We opted for the 7 mile out and back hike so we could lunch at Haystack Butte and still get back in time to make the rest of our drive.
Here
we are at the Continental Divide on our way to the Highline
Trail. The trail itself started across the road and
wound through a small meadow before heading onto the cliff faces. As you
can tell from the picture below, the trail would be a bit intimidating to
some.
Here's the trail looking ahead and towards our day-hike destination - Haystack Butte.
As we continued on the trail we encountered our first of many mountain goats and got pretty psyched about it. We soon ran into a family of goats coming down the trail and they were not about to move to let us go by.
Here
are some of our hiking companions on the trail. One goat had passed
us as we stood on the side of the trail. The baby in the lead here would
come closer, get shy and back away and try again to pass but just didn't want to
do it. Finally the baby and mother goat headed up on some rocks to get out
of our way.
We
ended up seeing more goats en-route, along with a couple of bighorn sheep that
were grazing in the meadow just up from us. On the way back we encountered
another mother and baby who were in the trail in front of us causing a traffic
jam. Finally they got out of the way on some rocks and posed very well for
us...
Here are Catherine and I on the snow at Haystack Butte, we were totally on top of the world at Glacier at about 7200 feet.
After our hike we finished off Going to the Sun Road, left the park at St. Mary's and headed south to the Two Medicine entrance where we camped the night at Two Medicine Campground. We went to the campfire talk that night about bears and learned a lot about Grizzlies, like the fact they climb mountains to eat moths on top. This talk made me less fearful of the bears actually but put the bear religion into us for future hikes.