The plan is working

Odometer: 65,345
Price of gas: $3.90
Glacier National Park

With the cold night, I’m up early, about 6:45. Earlier than the generators can get started (7 a.m.) I fix my oatmeal, contemplate the sky – will it clear? – it looks promising, but I’m not sure. About 8 I head for the camp check in station and get that done, since the night before it was closed when I came in. Then I go to Apgar Village and check in at the ranger station. Guy in front of me says, “It’s my first time here and I’m hiking by myself. Where can I go that I don’t have to worry about bears?” I say, “Me too!” The lady laughs and says we should hike together. She tells us there’s a ranger-guided hike of Avalanche Lake, which is what I had been considering anyway, so I’m sold.

I drive on up, meet up with many folks, including my ranger-station encounter, and a volunteer ranger named Tegan, who is a master’s student of Geology at BYU. She does a terrific job of walking us through the geology of Glacier and the time frames – from 1.5 billion years ago up to about 6,000 years ago when the glaciers we have today began to form (and are now expected to be gone by 2020, already revised upward from 2030). It’s not a long hike – about 2.3 miles up – but we take about 2 or 2 ½ hours to get there.



It’s good, because the hike is mainly through forest and so pointing out details along the way really helps my appreciation of where I am. When we finally get to Avalanche Lake, it is quite beautiful: a mountain lake with peaks on all sides around it.



I get to know my ranger-station friend along the way, whose name is Chris, and we decide to finish hiking around the lake together, getting some pictures from the opposite shore. We head back down, chatting along the way.



He’s from Michigan and has a sister in Spokane that he spent a few days with before driving up here. He’s clearly an outdoorsy kind of guy – most of his vacations are set up to go somewhere natural. Like me, he’s traveling solo, and like me, would like a hiking buddy. I invite him to share my campsite (but not my tent) as you can have two tents and two vehicles on a site.

After Chris pitches his tent, we head out to the northwest corner of the site, an area called Bowman lake. I’m a little nervous about this, but Chris resonates “Midwestern goodness” and I think I’ll be okay. We travel paved and non-paved roads up to Polebridge, then go to Bowman Lake, which is glorious, and soooooo quiet. Nothing around for miles.



Until people start showing up… We try to wait out the light to see if it will do a better job of illuminating the mountains ringing the far shore, but the sun is sinking behind a bank of clouds and it looks like we’re out of luck. It does seem finally to be clearing up and warming up, thankfully, but there’s still clouds around. Chris and I head for dinner in Columbia Falls to a random Mexican place, and the evening is complete.