Montana, Part 2

Up from Yellowstone and Wade Lake we went, to the wilderness of Glacier National Park.  Unlike Yellowstone, which has a great system for handling high traffic, Glacier is packed in the places you can park, not to mention there's only one main road in the park.  That is, one road that stretches all the way across it, there are other roads that cut into the park but they do not connect.  And for good reason:

                           

Good luck getting a few connecting roads through that...but beautiful scenery.  Don't let the parking scare you away, if I had to choose, I would go back to Glacier over Yellowstone in a heart beat, believe it or not.

The park has, if I recall, 700 miles of trails in it.  Fishing the the mountain creeks and lakes, glacier overlooks, and enough hiking to last you till your feet came off!  The first day in Glacier, we went to Avalanche Lake, supposedly a two mile hike.  What felt like 10 miles later, we made it to the lake.

The lake is mostly inhabited by cutthroat trout.  It's shallow for the first couple feet and then drops to 40 feet (as I was told), very quickly.  The water is so clear and blue, surrounded by mountains, it was fantastic.  However, me and my floating line were presented a problem.  How to I get my flies to sink?  Turns out one trout made sure I didn't have to worry, as he kept coming up for bugs on the surface.  I made a perfect cast to where he had been feeding and put a beetle right in front of him.  Side note, if you've seen The Lego Movie where Batman tries to hit the button with his batarangs, and tries about a 100 times, that was me attempting the perfect cast.  Not gonna lie.  Might have taken me 10 attempts, not sure.  Anyway, he took the beetle, and I was able to bring him in, a trout from a high mountain lake in Glacier National Park:

That's a Captain America shirt, not Cowboys

If you want to fish surrounded by great scenery, Glacier, in my experience, second to no one.  Behind me are cold mountains with snow on them...in August.  In front of me, behind the camera, is a cliff face with waterfalls that are feeding into the lake.  It's such a majestic place.

We spent a couple more days in and around Glacier and Whitefish, but sadly, we had to leave.  There was so much more to explore, I merely got a taste of what's there, and I want to go back.  There's a small lodge on top of a ridge that makes a for a good place to take a break on a 7 mile hike, only to walk the last 4 miles almost all downhill for a total of an 11 mile hike. That was a rough last 4 miles.  But there was so much to see and explore, pull off trails leading to Glacier overlooks, Two Medicine Lakes, Many Glacier, so much to see, so little time.  It was sad moment for me as we lifted off from Bozeman airport.

Until next time Montana.

On the banks of the Missouri River