Just a few miles on from our Hungry Horse pull-out [layby] is the entrance to Glacier National Park and the start of the “Going To The Sun” road – an ancient route that the Indians followed up into the mountains to bond with the gods. The plan was to hike a trail up to the ptarmigan tunnel, but the guy in the back-country permit station said that it was still closed due to snow – in mid July! Speaking to other folk a few days later we found out that they’d had 3 feet of fresh snow on the peaks just last week, finishing off a winter season with 1.5 times the normal precipitation. Not like California where we had a pitiful winder for snow.
Not able to do that hike, we got a permit for a shorter route up to Okotomi Lake. A shame, since the ptarmigan tunnel trail looks incredible – a high country route winding along cliff faces and over knife edge arêtes. The back country camping permit system here is really strict – you need to book your site a day or so ahead of time, and watch a video which explains the dangers involved. It seems like this park has a much higher bear population than other parks – both Brown and Grizzly – and as a result, the rangers need to make sure that people are sensible. Okotomi Lake camp only has 3 spaces, which looks fairly typical for the twenty or so back country camps around the park. This in turn limits the number of people that can stay out overnight and restricts the impact that people make on the pristine natural mountains. It’s pretty clear that the human presence in this park is well managed – the high country is so sensitive to people that if it wasn’t managed well it would be overrun and destroyed in no time. There would be trails everywhere, scree slopes scarred by human traffic, probably rubbish in the trees and no doubt the wildlife would have done a runner and moved elsewhere.
We drove over the Going To The Sun road, an impressive 50 mile route that wound its way along vertiginous cliff faces and past hissing waterfalls to Logan Pass, where all the tourists congregate for photos and perhaps a short walk up the hill behind the visitor centre.
Knowing that the campgrounds fill up early (previous day “full” times are posted at the entrance to the park), we headed straight for Rising Sun campground on the east side of the mountains, and took one of the last spaces at about 1pm. It was hot hot hot – and with the sun overhead there was no shade. We rigged our sheet from the van as an awning to give some shade, hiding us from the blazing ball of fire, and got down to some drawing.
Just as the sun was setting there were shouts of “bear!” further up the campground. As the bear moved down the valley, a group of campers followed its progress, until it ended up just a few yards from the back of our site. It was a small brown bear, which was actually more blonde in colour – completely ambivalent to everyone watching it. Not finding much of interest to eat round our place, it wandered off back into the bushes.
Road and Ocean 