It was another early morning in order to get a parking spot. (It seems like we have been using that phrase a lot since we've been at Glacier National Park!) The trail starts with a hike around Swiftcurrent Lake.
We saw a squirrel posed perfectly in a tree beside the lake, so we stopped to take a picture. That's when Denisa noticed the low battery light was flashing on her best wildlife camera. We always bring a spare set of batteres on hikes, but she had forgotten them this morning. It would be quite a long walk back to the car, so we decided against it. After all, we probably won't see any good wildlife today.
We continued hiking thirty minutes further, and found ourselves beside another body of water. This is Josephine Lake.
There is a boat ride that helps to make this hike a little shorter for the price of a boat ticket. We watched as the 8:30 boat floated by us on the lake. We later found out that the passengers on the boat spotted a black bear in the meadow above us.
There is a chain of three lakes on this hike. As we hiked closer to the glacier, we noticed the color of each lake changed. By now we are getting our first glimpse of Lower Grinnell Lake. Denisa is standing on the right hand side of the picture, looking down on that beautiful teal green lake in the morning light.
It's right about this time that we got our first glimpse of our first grizzly bear. We wrote about that encounter in the last blog, but we have to include just one picture today since we took about a hundred pictures. The low-battery light was flashing the entire time, but thankfully the camera kept working!
We spent the rest of the hike to the top watching that grizzly make his way across the meadow. But Denisa couldn't help but take a picture of the lovely wildflowers as we looked down on the lake and the bear.
We also paused to take this picture along the trail with a weeping wall. Denisa probably wouldn't be smiling if she knew that there was another bear following us on the trail.
We stopped again to take this picture of Mark on the mountain side, with more beautiful mountains behind him. The trail reviews were right, this is a great hike even without a bear sighting!
We have to include one more picture of Mark on that mountain-side, just to show the grandeur of the scene around us.
We finally got to the top of the mountain, where a herd of big horn sheep are resting by the snow close to the trail. Thankfully, our camera batteries are still hanging in there as Denisa is taking more pictures.
We are taking more pictures of the alpha male in the group, who seems to be able to convince the other sheep to move just by turning his huge set of horns towards them.
We are also talking to other hikers at the top, telling them our incredible encounter with the grizzly bear. That's when we heard another group of hikers coming up the trail making lots of noise. We found out that they had seen a grizzly in front of them on the trail, and they were purposefully being noisy so the bear wouldn't be surprised. Sure enough, the bear in front of them ran through the forest right beside us. That's when we figured out that he had been following us for the last mile or so! Denisa took this picture of the back of Mark's head as he snapped a picture of bear.
Two close-up encounters with a grizzly on the same hike. Incredible!
There are also lots of pictures of this grizzly in yesterday's blog! We watched him for thirty minutes. We also watched the big horn sheep (who had moved safely up the mountain) watching the grizzly.
It was finally time to top the final rise to see the climax of this hike--Upper Grinnell Lake and its surrounding glaciers.
There are only 26 glaciers left in Glacier National Park, and we could see three of them from here. On the upper left hand is Gem Glacier. On the right is Salamander Glacier, and on the bottom left is Grinnell Glacier.
We hiked closer to the water and got this pictorial proof that we made it to the top. This upper lake is a milky aqua color as a result of a high concentration of glacier silt.
Glaciers are solid masses of ice that move independent of the mountains. As they move, their weight crushes and grinds the rocks under them into "rock flour." It's that powder that empties into glacier lakes and gives them that interesting color.
There were icebergs floating in the lake, and the water was literally freezing cold. Two guys had taken the iceberg plunge and were still shivering because the air was cool today. Denisa is happy to report that Mark was not one of those two guys taking the plunge in the ice water.
From this vantage point, we could see the saddle of the mountain where hikers can look down on Grinnell Glacier. We did that hike a couple weeks ago.
Standing at the top of the mountain two weeks ago, we had taken fuzzy pictures of the hikers far below us by the water. Today we are standing by the water, taking fuzzy pictures of the hikers high above us on the mountain top.
Between the wind and cold temperatures near the ice, it was time to dawn our jackets. We left the water edge, and started hiking towards the glaciers. That took us over the boulders with some interesting rock formations at our feet.
We added some mileage to this hike, but we made it all the way over to stand on Grinnell Glacier. That's a lot of ice for the middle of August!
Mark is standing on the top of the biggest boulder in the middle of the glacier. We heard lots of stories about how Grinnell Glacier has receded in the last thirty years.
We exchanged picture-taking with another couple that we have seen on our last two hikes. This looks more like a January photo, rather than the hottest part of the summer.
We have totally wandered into another of God's wonders today!
Before we left the top, we took a picture down the valley. From this vantage point we could see the chain of three lakes we had walked beside to get here. Now we're headed back down the trail to see them up close again.
When the bear appeared, the big horn sheep had moved high up on the steep rocky walls. As we came back down the trail, they were relocating to the lower meadow. We caught this guy making a sure-footed leap from one rocky ledge to another.
Those camera batteries are still working as we got this close-up of the biggest set of horns.
As we hiked back down the trail, we realized that we had missed some of the trail views since we were so busy watching the first bear. We totally missed the big waterfall coming down the mountain into Lower Grinnell Lake.
We missed how tall the mountain face is that we had hiked beside.
Likewise, we hadn't realized how tall the trail was from the valley below us. You can barely see Denisa on the trail in both these pictures, dwarfed by the mountain majesty around her.
Mark was snapping all kinds of pictures as we both exclaimed over the epic proportions of this hike. We're so glad we came here today!
Denisa just gathered another handful of huckleberries, and we realized we were back at the same point in the trail when we saw our first grizzly. We saw a group of hikers gathered at the side of the trail with cameras poised. Could it be another bear? No, that would be too redundant. It was even better--a bull moose!
Surprisingly our camera batteries were still working, and we got more pictures of this big guy grazing on everything green not far from the trail. We've been blessed again!
Because we were so close to the point where we saw the first bear, we wanted to see how far he was from us when we were taking pictures. So Mark climbed down into that same ditch and Denisa took a picture of him looking very bear-like. He stepped off the distance from where we were standing--about 15 yards.
We took another picture of Lower Grinnell Lake, checking the shores for any wildlife. We didn't see any here, but a few steps later Mark saw a moose cow and her calf in the nearby meadow through the binoculars. While he was watching them, Denisa saw a black bear scamper across a gravel area beside the little stream that connects the lakes. Both sightings were too far away for good pictures, but we were being blessed over and over on this last hike at Glacier National Park!
It was almost 5:00 by the time we were hiking by the final lake closest to the car. We saw one of the tour boats coming toward us, with the lodge in the background. That big lodge looks tiny beside the majestic mountain behind it. We've been on the trail for over eight hours, and we'd have to agree with all those trail reviews that called this an epic hike. The scenery was beautiful, and our chance encounters with the wildlife were just icing on the top!
We hiked 15 miles today and we were tired! But we stopped by St. Mary's to say good-bye to some great friends we met at our campground. They insisted we stay for dinner while we showed off our bear and moose pictures. God blesses us in many ways on many days! Thanks Dennis and Judy! It was almost 9:00 as we drove on the winding road back to our home on wheels. The last rays of sunshine were streaming through the clouds.
We saw a glimpse of color in the clouds as Denisa snapped pictures of the sky. It was like our own personal-sized rainbow. It's been an epic day of wandering among God's wonders!
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