Glacier National Park, A Jewel

    We arrived at the San-Suz-Ed Campground last night. They have owned and run the park for over 50 years and just a couple of years ago Ed died. We met his wife last year when we stayed here and visited with her over breakfast. She has a daughter who helps out when she can as she is a teacher at a  high school in West Glacier.  Suz does breakfast if you let her know so we will get a chance to visit with her tomorrow and find out how her year as gone. It is a wooded and often used park during the season from mid June to first of September.

    Yesterday was a pretty tiring day. Jim's cold had bloomed into a misery, so he had to take cold medicine and try to recover while I did the drive. We crossed several mountain ranges approaching the Rockies on Highway 2. We will follow it for most of our drive east. Absolutely breath-taking country which makes me understand why people will brave the winters to live in this landscape. Towns tend to be small and fairly widely separated. We saw many signs of upcoming community events even in the smallest towns so it seems people create their own social events. We hope as we get beyond GNP to find some small lunch or breakfast places or just take some walks in some of the towns to meet and talk to people. 

     Today we went into the park, and after stopping at Apgar Resource Center, we went on to McDonald Lake and the McDonald Lodge. It was built in 1914 by a man named Williams and was one of few lodges on the lake not built and owned by the Great Northern Railway. They later did buy him out a few years later. The lake is 9.9 miles long and is a rounded bowl carved out during the last ice age glaciers. We took a boat tour with a ranger and went out on the lake this afternoon followed by a beer and flatbread with elk sausage on it in the Lodge. After that we figured we needed to go find dessert so went into the town of Hunger Horse to the most touristy looking place that sold huckleberry pie and brought it home to pig out on. If we were true adventures, we would go out another month from now and wrestle a bear for the huckleberries but being wimps we let some other person do that for us. Now for the pictures which will show how we managed to secure our huckleberries.

Our tour boat is at back of dock on the rainy day. 

During the boat tour saw results of a fire in 2003 and how west side is slowly recovering. East side forest has some old growth, much over 100 years and some as old as 500 years.

Jimmy fighting off Captain Jack for his huckleberries!

Judy also had to hang out with some pretty weird types to grab her huckleberries, whew what a day.

We enjoyed Glacier National Park with the company of some other members of the family. They really enjoy RV travel!

One of a fleet of Red Buses originally put in service in 1936 and restored with V-8s and all new running gear in last few years.