Many Glacier area of Glacier National Park

It rained quite a bit on Thursday, so we just stayed at home in the Alfa.

On Friday morning we were quite surprised by this view. Clear, blue sky in the same direction as the smoky view I posted on Wednesday evening.

Yippee! It looks like our decision to not cancel our reservation and come to Glacier was the right one!



There are several wonderful destinations in the park and we choose the Many Glacier area for our first explorations.

The large, charming Swiss style lodge was fascinating. I would love to spend a few days being pampered there. 

We love to walk thru and see these magnificent spaces. It will be a challenge to choose one of the lodges for our one super treat dinner this week. 

I wish we could dine at them all.

So much for history and architecture. 





After sitting around the rig for a day in Shelby, and a rainy first day in Glacier, we were more than ready to get out and hike a bit. There are quite a few easy trails in the park. We had gotten some good pointers from the Ranger at the St. Mary Visitor Center.

We soon found ourselves on a pleasant, 3 mile hike around Swiftcurrent Lake.

The water was a clear turquoise color.

One of the nice things about this soft level trail was that we had it almost to ourselves. There were a few others, but compared to the crowds at Yellowstone we were delightfully alone.

Just look at those colors!  Fantastic!

After our hike, we came back to the lodge.  On the "transportation desk" we noticed an announcement that the Going-to-the-Sun Road (which crosses the park through spectacular terrain) had been re-opened, presumably in response to the effect of Thursday's rain on the fire.  So we decided to go on a second Friday adventure, driving the Going-to-the-Sun Road.

Which will be the subject of our next post.  :-)