We got up after a night of rain, cooked breakfast and broke camp trying to dry things off as best we could. We departed pretty early and hit the road to Siyeh Bend. There we got on the Piegan Pass trail which promised to take us to 7600 feet into the alpine zone in quest of goats and bighorn sheep.
The trail starts
at the bend in the road and follows Siyeh Creek (left) for a short distance
before heading up into the forest. Below is Catherine leading
the way up into the forest slopes...
Just about 15 minutes into the hike we had our excitement for the day when Catherine yelled "Polenta Power!" before rounding a bend and scared a bear that was below us feeding. We got a good view of the bear's butt as he headed into the forest just crashing down everything in site. Not sure if it was a grizzly or a black but it had us on our toes for the rest of the hike.
The trail breaks out of the forest to an open slope where you do a 1-mile long traverse across the slopes to the pass itself. In the picture below you can just see the trail cutting to the pass...
The traverse was pretty spectacular actually and from the pass you could look back south to the Jackson Glacier or peek over the north side to the Many Glacier Valley...
At the pass we were accosted by marmots who were hell-bent on getting in our packs. Here's one of the killer beasts coming at me...
As we ate lunch on top we saw a small herd of bighorns going down over a ridge below us. We swapped photo ops with another couple from Washington D.C. (the other Washington) and then headed down. Here we are at the top of the pass:
On the traverse we spotted the bighorns again, there were 6 of them total. We sat and watched these males occasionally rear up and butt heads, graze, lie down and get up to move again for about 15 minutes before continuing down on our hike. Here's a shot of one of the glacier lily meadows we passed and another of the road from the top...
We left the park via Going to the Sun Road and drove west to Whitefish, MT. We found a small lodge in Whitefish for the night, ate pizza and had beer and wine at Troby's (home of the "big pour") before heading to Big Mountain Resort. Big Mountain was having their summer festival so it looked interesting. We found a mini-Whistler there but the lifts were open so we rode up to the top of Big Mountain at 7000 feet to look down over the whole Flathead Valley. We then went on a quest in Whitefish for Huckleberry Pie but came up empty, bummer. There is a great fly shop in town though.