Day 11 Glacier National Park

 "No camping except hard side camping due to bear activity!"  (on the park website yesterday)

Glacier National Park is an area of the country that has very healthy ecosystems.  Meaning that things are in balance from the Grizzly Bears to the tiny fishes.  They said that there is a very "healthy" Grizzly Bear population!

We started out for the park early as the sun rose behind us -- 
You know what they say about red sky in the morning, sailor's warning -- well this proved to be true.
It was drizzling on and off today at Glacier National Park.

"Above the clouds"  This was really beautiful and mesmerizing to watch the clouds moving below us.  At one area, we watched as a long cloud climb up the side of a mountain as the tips of the evergreens poked through.

Apparently they are predicting that by 2030 -- in just 11 years -- there won't be any more glaciers in Glacier National Park!!

This is Jackson Glacier. (It's shrinking.) Somehow this photo that I took looks like a painting!

At the Apgar Visitors Center:  "Woven throughout these massive mountains ringed with shimmering lakes, species from five distinct regions of the continent converge in Glacier National Park."

This picture was also at the visitor's center.  That's a lot of snow to plow -- up here in the very northwestern corner of Montana!! (the 3rd least populated state with an average of 7 people per square mile.  Wyoming is second with 6 people per square mile.  And Alaska is the first.)

This is the road we went on -- the 48 mile "Going-to-the-Sun Road".



                                                   Lake McDonald Lodge

We invited this nice couple, Terry and Wendy to have lunch at our table at the lodge restaurant.  They are from Saskatchewan, the province in Canada just north Montana where they don't keep the children in from recess until it gets below -25 degrees -- that's MINUS 25 degrees!!

Larger stream running into Lake McDonald

Tour boat on Lake McDonald

These three pictures are of Lake McDonald and one of many streams that run into it.  The water in the streams that we saw at some places running down the mountains comes from the alpine glaciers and snowpack.  I cheered for this young woman when she made it across the rushing stream.


                                                               Continental Divide
In Yellowstone the Continental Divide (which spans the USA north to south) divides the watersheds of two great oceans:  In the east the rivers drain into the Atlantic and to the west they drain into the Pacific.
But in Glacier National Park, the peak called the Triple Divide (which is at Logan Pass where we were today) sheds melted snow into 3 different oceans from each of its 3 sides: runoff from the southwest slope flows toward the Pacific, runoff from the east slope flows toward the Gulf of Mexico, and the north face drains to Canada's Hudson Bay (and then to the Atlantic).

Rest day tomorrow before heading to Yellowstone.