Glacier National Park
Montana, USA
Welcome back to the Passion Blog! I know we missed a week with the Deliberation Nation project, but be sure that the wait was worth your while! Glacier National Park is one of the most famous National Parks in the USA.
Although it is usually outshine by its southern Montana/ Wyoming neighbors, Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons, the amazing landscapes and blue lakes of Glacier cannot be beat.
Glacier is not just US National Park, it also crosses the Canadian Border! Many visitors also make the short trek to the Canadian side, but my family stayed in the Montana regions of the park.
Just the drive to Glacier is entertaining! You can pass a town called Hungry Horse or see “the world’s largest spoon” and buy pastries from a Swedish hostel! You never know what you’ll end up seeing with my family.
This trip was linked with the Yellowstone and Grand Teton trips (as I’ve discussed in past blogs). We were visiting my crazy uncle and meeting some of my second cousins. In total I had 25 family members on this trip! Glacier was at the end of our trip (June 30/ July 1).
This detail may not seem important, but the shuttle buses only start running on July 1. So if you show up with 30 people trying to get to a hike on June 30, you have to transport them yourselves… lol whoops hahaha
(This is a picture of a fancy red tour shuttle. We were on the normal white buses, but it was fun to sport the red cars driving around the switchbacks!)
So we did a super rainy hike and decided to try for Logan Pass the next day.Thankfully the buses were running, but we had to split up.
Some of the family took the first shuttle and then the rest of us took up the entire second shuttle (with one random stranger).
In true Boell fashion, we befriended this grad student, Gage, basically adopted him into the family, and hiked to the top of the Pass with him!
Despite the name, we expected most of Glacier National Park to be slightly warm as it was down near Lake MacDonald and our campsite. Boy were we wrong!
We got to the top of the pass and were faced with mountains of snow. Most of us had extra layers and good hiking boots so we adapted and enjoyed the July snow!
Unfortunately, Josh was not a hiking boot guy. He prefers to be barefoot, but was willing to wear Keens. His keens were the water shoe sandal type meant for beaches and warm hikes.
Not Glacier snow! He froze on the hike and we had to makeshift shoes/socks with bandanas and zip lock bags!
We were able to look out over two lakes and see mountain goats at the top of the hike which was my first time seeing them! The hike back was even better than the hike up! We saw a bunch of skiers using the slopes of the mountain to cross country ski.
Crazy Uncle Jim told us about how he had sled down the slopes on cookie sheets and rushed back to the car to find something to use as a sled. We, being super impatient, decided to slide just by sitting down on the snow!
The slope was so steep, icy, and high that about halfway down you would lose control, lay on your back, and end up spinning like a frisbee with you hands out like a starfish!
It was crazy! All of the hats we were wearing and water bottles we were carrying went flying and the people who had already gone down had to A) pick up the stuff and B) stop the other sliders in order to prevent them from going too far and going over the next hill!
We looked absolutely crazy. There we were, Boell family age range 8-73 sliding down the hill. A bunch of kids realized there were a bunch of small children and older people sliding down, so they decided to join!
We all had to take turns because you would lose all control once you went down.This was especially cool because we landed in a patch of watermelon snow which is snow that looks pink because of the bacteria on top of it.
This was just one of many hikes we did in Glacier, so you can look forward to another Glacier Post throughout your spring break! To end, here is a picture of my brother Danny laughing/choking on s’more at our campsite.
