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Home for the holidays…and then some

16/02/03 at 12.24pm   /   by Jason   /   0 Comment

If you’ve been following along with us on Instagram it’s pretty clear that we are “home” now.  We arrived in Casar, NC in mid-December, low-on-funds, tired, cold, and eternally grateful for 2015 on the road. We loved it. It wasn’t always easy and certainly there were some surprises but it was everything we’d hoped and planned for. And so much more.

I suppose with the start of this new year I’m officially unemployed. I’ve begun my job search knowing that it will take some time to find the right professional fit. Jessie has the good fortune of being highly employable and began an open-ended/temporary position in her medical field in Shelby, NC. This should allow us to continue to eat, pay bills, and give us some flexibility moving forward.

I have been spending a significant amount of time at the local YMCA training for my upcoming triathlon season. It’s been good to get back into workout routine. I’m officially in the best “winter shape” of my life. I guess that is the major plus of being without work. If I can avoid injury I’m hoping for my best season yet. I plan to cap it off with Ironman North Carolina. Problem is the entry fee is $715. Yep. You read that right. So I’m in the process of trying to justify that expense while I’m out of work all for the privilege of propelling myself through 140.6 miles of pain. When not at the Y I’m spending time at the county library where internet is slightly faster and more reliable than the satellite internet at my in-laws.

Being “home” has been more challenging than we anticipated. The holidays were great but now that Jessie is back to work and I’m working hard on finding meaningful employment we feel greatly unsettled. Much more so than at any point last year. This is counterintuitive to us. We almost never knew where we were headed next in 2015. We frequently started the day not knowing where we’d sleep. Yet now that we are somewhere familiar and have more of a routine we feel out-of-sorts.  Perhaps this is/was to be expected. We underestimated it.

That said we are happy to be home. Catching up with family and friends has been wonderful and while we ate well on the road, nothing can beat home cooking.

 

Catching Up

15/10/09 at 1.39pm   /   by Jessie   /   0 Comment

Greetings from the Eastern Sierras in California!

Seeing as how we’re woefully behind in our blogging, I think it’s time for another Glee-like update. Since we visited North Cascades National Park in Washington and misadventured our way south toward Mount Rainier National Park in mid-August, here’s a quick run-down of what we’ve been up to:

-My parents flew in from North Carolina and joined us for 10 wonderful days in which we were thoroughly impressed by their ability to hike some tough, long trails at high altitudes while we explored Mount Rainier National Park (one of our favorite parks this year), Mount Saint Helens National Volcanic Monument, Olympic National Park and the greater peninsula area. It was a full, fun, great visit with nearly perfect weather (Mount Rainier was out for us all week!).

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-Thanks to my parents, we learned a new game called Quirkle, which we’re enjoying mastering. It’s sort of like a less sophisticated version of Scrabble with colors and shapes (you know, like for 4 year-olds).

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-We’ve been reading some great books, including The Measure of a Mountain: Beauty and Terror on Mount Rainier (Bruce Barcott), All the Light We Cannot See (Anthony Doerr), and The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics (Daniel James Brown). It’s been especially fun to read books set in places we’ve recently visited (e.g., Mount Rainier and Seattle/the Olympic Peninsula in Boys in the Boat).

-We got chased off the Washington coast by hurricane-like winds and rain. Literally, we got evacuated from our campground and then from a picnic area where we were trying to wait out the storm in an open area away from super tall, old trees. It wasn’t our best travel day.

-We thoroughly enjoyed a few weeks in Oregon. We visited and explored the beautiful northern OR coast, Mount Hood (who refused to show herself after many, many attempts) and the historic Timberline Lodge, the Columbia River Gorge, Portland where I got to see an old college friend, the Evergreen Aviation and Space Museum where we celebrated Jason’s birthday, the cool town of Bend and surrounding outdoor recreational areas where we did some tough mountain biking and enjoyed the beauty, and Crater Lake National Park. Oregon was good to us.

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-We spent a weekend in the Lake Tahoe area where we had fun watching hot air balloons from our campsite, eating overpriced Mexican food, and cheering on athletes at Ironman and 70.3 Lake Tahoe.

-We popped into Nevada from rural eastern CA to get the truck and trailer serviced. When the trailer had to spend the night in the shop, we were grateful to be in casino country where it’s possible to find a nice hotel room for $40/night.

-My sister and brother-in-law flew out from North Carolina and joined us for a week in Yosemite National Park and a quick trip to San Francisco to visit dear cousins. It was fabulous to spend time together, as we’ve missed them like crazy, and to hike up a storm with them in such a special place.

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-We took a quick drive down part of Hwy. 1 in California and thoroughly enjoyed the beauty despite cool, rainy weather.

-We cruised back through Yosemite on our way east and got snowed on up on the high mountain passes. Gorgeous!

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-We visited Death Valley National Park where we experienced flash flooding, lots of rain (a year’s worth in about 24 hours), and virtually unheard of cool temperatures and humidity. Despite many road closures due to the floods, we made the most of our time there and enjoyed feeling very small in the expansive desert surrounded by big skies, high mountains and canyons. We also met up with dear family friends whose travel path crossed ours.

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-And now, we’re back in the eastern Sierra region finishing up our explorations of unexpected treasures like the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest, Devils Postpile National Monument, Manzanar National Historic Site, the Alabama Hills, and Mount Whitney (the highest mountain peak in the lower 48) before heading to Joshua Tree National Park.

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Whew! There’s your whirlwind update. We really do hope to return to more regular posting (and to posts that aren’t written in bullet-point format). In the meantime, don’t forget that you can follow us on Facebook and Instagram for more regular updates and lots more photos (links on the right). We also regularly update our Travel Log (Oh, the Places We’ve Been – link under “Pages” on the right) so that you can follow along in relative real-time.

As always, thanks so much for reading, following, and supporting our adventures!

Running from Smoke and Other Recent Misadventures

15/08/21 at 10.08am   /   by Jason   /   0 Comment

Sometimes we might be guilty of painting too rosy a picture of our travels. We feel fortunate to have this opportunity, and we don’t want to sound like we’re complaining. But we also want to present a true account of what life is like for us on the road. With this in mind, we present a brief (each of these could be its own blog post) account of our five days after being driven out of North Cascades NP by wildfire smoke:

  • We needed propane. Like good citizens, we turned off our refrigerator (active pilot light) before pulling into the gas station where we’d buy propane. The problem here is that we forgot to turn the refrigerator back on. When we woke up the next morning we realized we’d thawed about 2.5 lbs of expensive salmon and 1 lb of grass-fed ground beef. All of this went into the refrigerator and needed to be cooked ASAP!
  • We tried to drive through Seattle on Friday afternoon in a downpour, which also happened to be the evening of the Seahawks first preseason game (and they take their NFL football VERY seriously in this area, even preseason). After creeping along at 30mph on the interstate for way too long, we saw a casino, Wal-Mart, Cabela’s, Panera, and Home Depot within a quarter mile of one another. We decided we’d try driving through Seattle on Saturday and settled into the comfort of suburbia for yet another night of parking lot slumber. As an aside, we are surprised by how bad Pacific North Westerners seem to be at driving in the rain.
  • We found a spot among the 50 or so RVs who would call the casino parking lot home for the night and headed into the casino looking for a cheap meal.We opened the door to the casino only to be met by a wall of cigarette smoke. Jessie turned around and walked back to the RV in the cold rain to make some soup and read her book. I soldiered on into the casino bound and determined to find a cheap meal. In many casinos this is a fairly easy task (they don’t want you to leave!) . Not this one. Not a single meal under $13 in the whole place. So I went back to the RV to have some soup and a Snicker’s bar for dinner.
  • On Saturday morning, after waking up in the middle of the night to an overeager LP alarm, we decided enough was enough. We needed to install a roof vent cover that would allow us to leave our vent open even in bad weather or while driving. Our LP detector simply doesn’t like air that is heavy/humid or doesn’t move (and it hates Jessie’s shampoo). Most of the time you have to buy these covers at an RV dealership (expensive!) or order them online. But, we found one at our local (for the day) Wal-Mart. So while parked at Cabela’s, we took 30 minutes to climb up on the roof and install our new vent cover. Classy.

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  • Jessie walked to Panera for some coffee and wifi while I did some grocery shopping at Wal-Mart. She was ecstatic to find that she had free coffee for the month as part of the Panera rewards program. So she proceeded to drink way too much coffee and spent the day with a sour stomach.
  • We made one more stop before looking for camping on Saturday. Trader Joe’s. Good place for grocery shopping. Terrible place for navigating a 25 ft travel trailer.
  • So after our soggy, noisy night at the casino and getting our shopping done and roof vent installed, we left north Seattle and headed south through town. There was a seemingly strange amount of traffic for a Saturday which leads us to believe that folks here spend a lot of time driving. And the city does sprawl north and south for hours. Our goal was to find a spot to grill our fish. How about a city park? Seemed like a good idea. Enter low hanging trees and tight parking lots. We didn’t incur any damage, but we do have some new “kisses from nature” on the roof of the RV.
  • Clearly the parks idea didn’t work, so we headed to yet another casino to park, inspect the RV for tree damage, grill our fish, and sleep/camp for the night. Apparently, standing on your truck to inspect the RV and then getting out your grill will earn you a “welcome” visit from casino security. No grilling. “You are welcome to eat at one of our restaurants and see the Elvis show”. So we left hungry.
  • Fed up with the suburban sprawl of Seattle, we pointed the truck southeast determined to get into the national forest near Mt. Rainer, find a campground, and grill our damn fish. We drove through two overpriced campgrounds, neither of which had any availability for us anyway, and finally parked in a picnic area to grill our fish. So at about 9 pm, Jessie with a sour stomach, we both ate a hastily grilled-in-the-dark gigantic piece of salmon after spilling salmon juice all over the RV during the preparation phase of the meal.
  • Not allowed to camp at the picnic area, we pulled out just before 10pm to find “dispersed” camping along a gravel national forest road. We just needed a semi-level 40 ft piece of dirt to park for the night. In the pitch black, we turned off the highway and onto a gravel road. After turning the RV around utilizing an 18 point turn method taught nowhere in Driver Ed., we finally got the RV parked for the night despite the fact that Jessie, “the spotter”, feared a fatal bear attack the entire time.
  • On Sunday, we left our lovely-in-the-daylight “campsite” hoping to find camping at a campground near the Sunrise area in Mt. Rainer National Park. We made it there easily. And they had availability! And a sign that said “no trailers over 18 feet”. It would have been nice of the Park Service to put this sign on the main road BEFORE we made the turn. So we backed out and turned around. Homeless yet again.
  • We left Mt. Rainer and headed south into yet another national forest and another overpriced campground. But we backed into site A6 and debated staying anyway. Nope. Let’s go find free camping in the national forest. So down another narrow forest road we went. Dead-end. So we backed out, uphill about a mile, turned around in what amounted to a shallow drainage ditch and headed back to site A6 eager to pay $20 not to have to be in the truck any longer.
  • Jessie now has reoccurring dreams/nightmares about finding free dispersed camping, and Jason is sick of backing up the trailer.

Clearly the more confident we feel in our travels, the more willing we are to take risks (i.e. drive down narrow gravel roads with no real idea of where we are going). These risks often mean great rewards, but sometimes they mean eating fish off a paper plate three hours later than you planned and in a location you never knew existed.

 

Dodging Wildfires Version 2.0: North Cascades National Park

15/08/19 at 9.01am   /   by Jason   /   0 Comment

On day four (of seven) of our time in North Cascades National Park, we picked up* the two smelliest individuals we’ve ever met. These chaps were from Wales and were ten weeks into a twelve week backpacking adventure in the western US. I’m not sure they’d bathed since arriving. Jessie had a very polite and seemingly delightful conversation with them as I drove as fast as was prudent with my head out the window (perhaps a slight exaggeration, but you get the idea). About 30 minutes later, we parted ways with our foul but enjoyable new acquaintances and were on our way to Mt. Baker National Forest and Recreation Area.

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We’d decided to leave North Cascades National Park for the day for less smoky hiking conditions after winds shifted overnight and sent a lot of smoke our way. You see, there were three separate wildfires burning in the southern part of the park. Not that these fires made CNN headlines like the Glacier NP fire with all of its fancy video footage and road closures. North Cascades is the second least visited National Park in the lower 48, so it isn’t exactly newsworthy the way the more popular parks are.

Mt. Baker National Forest is located about 40 miles west of North Cascades. During the winter of ’98-’99 Mt. Baker received a world record 95 feet of snow. It boasts a peak just under 11,000 feet and seven massive glaciers. The glaciers were the big draw for us, so after winding up 15 or so miles of dirt road we arrived at the Mt. Baker National Recreation Area Trailhead. As we pulled into the small gravel parking lot, we saw two guys hiking into the wilderness with skis. I looked at Jessie and said, “I think we might be in over our heads”. But we decided to press on, determined to get in some hiking. Up we went through alpine forests and boulder fields, across streams and waterfalls until the Easton and Squak Glaciers appeared before us. As we arrived at the fork in the trail where we had to commit to a route for the day, we came upon a lovely French-Canadian gentlemen who recommended one of the two trails we were considering. So we skipped the more popular Park Butte trail with its smoke-limited panoramas in favor of Railroad Grade, which promised an up-close-and-personal view of Mt. Baker. It did not disappoint. This hike is easily in the top ten for the year.

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On day four (of seven) of our time in North Cascades National Park, we picked up* the two smelliest individuals we’ve ever met. These chaps were from Wales and were ten weeks into a twelve week backpacking adventure in the western US. I’m not sure they’d bathed since arriving. Jessie had a very polite and seemingly delightful conversation with them as I drove as fast as was prudent with my head out the window (perhaps a slight exaggeration, but you get the idea). About 30 minutes later, we parted ways with our foul but enjoyable new acquaintances and were on our way to Mt. Baker National Forest and Recreation Area.

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We’d decided to leave North Cascades National Park for the day for less smoky hiking conditions after winds shifted overnight and sent a lot of smoke our way. You see, there were three separate wildfires burning in the southern part of the park. Not that these fires made CNN headlines like the Glacier NP fire with all of its fancy video footage and road closures. North Cascades is the second least visited National Park in the lower 48, so it isn’t exactly newsworthy the way the more popular parks are.

Mt. Baker National Forest is located about 40 miles west of North Cascades. During the winter of ’98-’99 Mt. Baker received a world record 95 feet of snow. It boasts a peak just under 11,000 feet and seven massive glaciers. The glaciers were the big draw for us, so after winding up 15 or so miles of dirt road we arrived at the Mt. Baker National Recreation Area Trailhead. As we pulled into the small gravel parking lot, we saw two guys hiking into the wilderness with skis. I looked at Jessie and said, “I think we might be in over our heads”. But we decided to press on, determined to get in some hiking. Up we went through alpine forests and boulder fields, across streams and waterfalls until the Easton and Squak Glaciers appeared before us. As we arrived at the fork in the trail where we had to commit to a route for the day, we came upon a lovely French-Canadian gentlemen who recommended one of the two trails we were considering. So we skipped the more popular Park Butte trail with its smoke-limited panoramas in favor of Railroad Grade, which promised an up-close-and-personal view of Mt. Baker. It did not disappoint. This hike is easily in the top ten for the year.

While at North Cascades, we learned the park is really about three things: (1) amazing, rugged, dense, unforgiving wilderness, (2) glaciers, all 300+ of them, and (3) hydroelectricity. Yep, there are three dams in the park established and maintained by Seattle City Light. These obviously predate the creation of the park. The one and only paved road, Washington Highway 20, that winds through the park follows the valley floor through most of the park where the dams and river/lakes are found. There is no road that leads to stunning vistas of glaciers or panoramas of the mountain ranges. In fact, you can see only one glacier from Highway 20, if you know where to look, the weather is perfect, and you squint real hard. Think of it as the opposite of the famous Going to the Sun Road at Glacier NP. This is the beautiful and frustrating thing about North Cascades. It is absolutely stunning, but to see it you’ve got to hike. And the hiking here is hard. Many trails start below 1,000 feet and gain 500-1,000 feet per mile. These trails will make you think your heart will pound out of your chest on the way up and your knees will shatter on the way down. We prided ourselves on being in good hiking shape before arriving at North Cascades and we were thoroughly humbled by the hiking there. It’s also the first park we felt truly disadvantaged by not having overnight backpacking gear with us. To see the best of what the park has to offer, you need a minimum of 2-4 nights in the back country. We simply can’t do that with the equipment we have with us. Next time.

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While in the park, we had the opportunity to camp in two separate campgrounds (one of them totally free and lakeside), complete one tough 10-mile hike, take in a lovely 7.5 mile hike to Cascade Pass, and enjoy several smaller hikes. We saw the strangest “park film” of the year (we’ve seen about 14 of them). We took an official tour of one of the small towns built to service the dams and took an unofficial tour of another one of these towns that is about 70% abandoned and looks like the set of the “Walking Dead”. At dusk it’s downright creepy. We also marveled at how few people were in the park. At times it felt like we had the entire park to ourselves. Having your own national park is a pretty special thing. We just wish that the smoke hadn’t driven us out earlier than expected.

*We’ve observed that hitchhikers are more common in and around the national parks than most places in the US. In fact, we had to hitch a ride ourselves while at Arches NP. While in Glacier NP, we picked up a man and his backpack. At least it appeared to be a backpack from afar. In reality it was his two year-old daughter in a child carrying contraption meant to work like a backpack. He and the rest of his family had missed the last bus back to their campground and weren’t prepared to hike seven miles back to camp with a gaggle of young children in tow, so here he was catching a ride with us back to camp to get the car and pick up the rest.

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While at North Cascades, we learned the park is really about three things: (1) amazing, rugged, dense, unforgiving wilderness, (2) glaciers, all 300+ of them, and (3) hydroelectricity. Yep, there are three dams in the park established and maintained by Seattle City Light. These obviously predate the creation of the park. The one and only paved road, Washington Highway 20, that winds through the park follows the valley floor through most of the park where the dams and river/lakes are found. There is no road that leads to stunning vistas of glaciers or panoramas of the mountain ranges. In fact, you can see only one glacier from Highway 20, if you know where to look, the weather is perfect, and you squint real hard. Think of it as the opposite of the famous Going to the Sun Road at Glacier NP. This is the beautiful and frustrating thing about North Cascades. It is absolutely stunning, but to see it you’ve got to hike. And the hiking here is hard. Many trails start below 1,000 feet and gain 500-1,000 feet per mile. These trails will make you think your heart will pound out of your chest on the way up and your knees will shatter on the way down. We prided ourselves on being in good hiking shape before arriving at North Cascades and we were thoroughly humbled by the hiking there. It’s also the first park we felt truly disadvantaged by not having overnight backpacking gear with us. To see the best of what the park has to offer, you need a minimum of 2-4 nights in the back country. We simply can’t do that with the equipment we have with us. Next time.

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While in the park, we had the opportunity to camp in two separate campgrounds (one of them totally free and lakeside), complete one tough 10-mile hike, take in a lovely 7.5 mile hike to Cascade Pass, and enjoy several smaller hikes. We saw the strangest “park film” of the year (we’ve seen about 14 of them). We took an official tour of one of the small towns built to service the dams and took an unofficial tour of another one of these towns that is about 70% abandoned and looks like the set of the “Walking Dead”. At dusk it’s downright creepy. We also marveled at how few people were in the park. At times it felt like we had the entire park to ourselves. Having your own national park is a pretty special thing. We just wish that the smoke hadn’t driven us out earlier than expected.

*We’ve observed that hitchhikers are more common in and around the national parks than most places in the US. In fact, we had to hitch a ride ourselves while at Arches NP. While in Glacier NP, we picked up a man and his backpack. At least it appeared to be a backpack from afar. In reality it was his two year-old daughter in a child carrying contraption meant to work like a backpack. He and the rest of his family had missed the last bus back to their campground and weren’t prepared to hike seven miles back to camp with a gaggle of young children in tow, so here he was catching a ride with us back to camp to get the car and pick up the rest.

 

Fire and Ice: Glacier National Park

15/08/14 at 7.54pm   /   by Jessie   /   0 Comment

Just a couple of days before we planned to arrive in Glacier National Park, we read the news (a fairly rare occurrence these days) that a wildfire had just started in the eastern side of the park near the town of St. Mary. Initially small, the wildfire grew exponentially over the next 36-ish hours as we continued to monitor the news updates from beautiful Lolo National Forest well south of the park. Fortunately, we loved Lolo and were happy to stay an extra day or two until the fire stabilized (we hoped).

In the meantime, we developed alternative plans. We figured that, at best, our initial plan of spending two-ish weeks in the Glacier area simply wouldn’t be realistic due to the fire resulting in the closure of a significant portion of the infamous and scenic Going-to-the-Sun Road (GTTSR), which bisects the park and connects the West Glacier area with the eastern side of the park where much of the best hiking and best glacier views are found in the Many Glacier and Two Medicine areas of the park. We decided to spend our “leftover” time in North Cascades National Park in Washington. We read in one of our guidebooks that North Cascades NP is home to approximately 300 glaciers (Glacier NP has about 25), so it seemed like a good and suitable alternative. (Coincidentally, a fire would start in North Cascades prior to our arrival and continue to grow, but more on that in a separate post.)

As predicted, the fire in Glacier slowed down after a few days. It became apparent that at least the western side of the park would be perfectly safe. We were situated to enter the park from the west anyway, so we decided to head into the area determined to do whatever we could and to make the most of it. Of course, though, we were disappointed, as Glacier was one of our top priorities from the beginning of this trip and a place where, as aforementioned, we’d planned to spend a significant (for us) amount of time.

Initially, we were worried about smoke, but it turned out to be a nonfactor everywhere we went in and around the park except for the St. Mary area itself, which we traveled through on our way to and from Many Glacier. Despite the smoke, we stopped for a meal at Park Café in St. Mary, recommended to us as a worthy spot for a belated anniversary celebration dinner. The food and service didn’t disappoint, and we essentially had the normally line-out-the-door popular place to ourselves, which made us sad for the business owner and staff who rely heavily on summer park visitors for business.

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Our other worry was how we’d be impacted by the GTTSR closure. Do you want the good news or the bad news first? Let’s start with the good.

With a little creativity, we figured out how to access the hikes we wanted to do from the road even though the “best” trailheads weren’t always accessible. We drove up the open section of road twice and thoroughly enjoyed its scenic rewards both times (we took a second drive when the weather was nicer and the road was opened a little further to allow access to its highest point along the Continental Divide at Logan Pass). We don’t know what the road looks like east of Logan Pass, but I can’t imagine that it’s as beautiful as the area west of the pass.

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Now, the bad news: Glacier is a big park with relatively few roads. Without the benefit of the GTTSR bisecting the park, the only way to travel between the western and eastern sides is to drive around the park’s southern boundary on roads outside the park itself. From West Glacier, that meant a roundtrip of 3-5 hours to Two Medicine or Many Glacier on the eastern side and of at least 8 hours to Waterton Lakes, the Canadian national park that borders Glacier, as there isn’t a good western route between the parks.

We’d initially planned to celebrate our anniversary with a daytrip to Waterton (we had no desire to deal with the logistics of taking the RV into Canada for a night), and we quickly scratched those plans. Though we really wanted to spend more time in Many Glacier and Two Medicine, we ended up making just one daytrip to each area. The trips were totally worth it in terms of great hiking and breathtakingly beautiful scenery, but we simply didn’t want to spend a bulk of our time in the park driving. All week, we debated moving to a campground on the eastern side of the park, but it was too far to reasonably drive the RV without having a guaranteed campsite (Two Medicine and Many Glacier are first-come, first-served and have very few sites large enough to accommodate us, and St. Mary was closed during most of our visit and then was booked solid with prior reservations. Additionally, the eastern side of the park is bordered by a Native American reservation, so there aren’t good nearby camping options outside the park.).

Although we had a great week in Glacier, we definitely left feeling like it was “undone”, as we wanted to spend more time in the eastern part of the park. We certainly have a longer than usual “next time” list, mostly full of hikes we’d like to do in Many Glacier.

So, what did we do and enjoy during our week in Glacier?

We spent our first few days in a national forest near the park where camping was slightly less expensive, which allowed us to restock on groceries, get a cheap haircut at a cosmetology school in a nearby town, and enjoy a “down-day” of laundry, cleaning, and rest during one of several cool, rainy days. We also visited Hammer Nutrition’s headquarters in nearby Whitefish, MT where we showed up unannounced and ended up getting a personal 40-minute tour of the facilities by the company’s president, who filled up a bag with all kinds of goodies as we walked through the warehouse. Hammer Nutrition makes our favorite sports nutrition (drink mixes, bars, gels, supplements, etc.) and cycling gear. They also make delicious fair-trade organic coffee, which isn’t cheap, but which was included in our “goody bag” nonetheless, along with a pour-over coffee brewer, a simple but genius invention that means no more instant coffee for me! It was a true highlight of our trip.

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Like Grand Teton National Park, parts of Glacier feel like a resort. There are lakes with overpriced boat rides, gorgeous historic lodges and inns with restaurants, bars, and expansive back porches/decks, at least one reading room with a gas-log fireplace (I know because I enjoyed warming myself there on a chilly day), and guided tours in antique red cars called “jammers”.

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In an extended belated celebration of our anniversary, we treated ourselves to a ranger-guided historic boat ride on Lake McDonald after enjoying a tasty microbrew with a lakeside picnic (nothing says class like PB&J and beer). While we thoroughly enjoyed our afternoon of “luxury” (for us), it’s hard to believe, and quite sad, that some 50% of visitors to Glacier National Park never take a hike in the park.

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True to our MO, we went on some great hikes. Our favorites were Granite Park Chalet (we started at the Loop trailhead because Logan Pass was still closed at this point), Grinnell Glacier, and Scenic Point.

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The 360-degree vista from Scenic Point was a true highlight of this trip for me. Situated on the eastern edge of the Rockies, the point provides a high-altitude view of expansive prairieland to the east (which would have been enough for me to fall in love with on its own), and in a quarter turn, a view of prairie-meeting-mountains, and in another quarter turn, breathtaking views of glaciated mountains and lakes. It was simply spectacular.

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I also fell in love with Avalanche Gorge on the way to Avalanche Lake. The whole scene left me spellbound – something about the clarity and color of the water, the forest scenery, the slot-like canyon formation and shape of the gorge, and the moss- and lichen-covered rocks was simply captivating. This was the silver lining of the fire and subsequent road closure: it forced us to spend more time in the western part of the park where we went on some shorter hikes that we otherwise may have passed by, which led us to fantastic and unexpected places like Avalanche Gorge.

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Finally, the real highlight of our week was spending time with my sister’s best friend and her boyfriend/partner, who happened to arrive in the park toward the end of our stay (completely unplanned on both our parts). In addition to enjoying hugs sent from home, we loved having travel buddies, which hasn’t happened since Zion NP in Utah. They joined us for a hike and for a magical evening drive up the GTTSR after the road was opened to Logan Pass; we took way too many pictures in the beautiful fading light, marveled at the spectacular beauty of it all, and stood awe-struck at the pass as a nearly full moon rose above the mountains.

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The next night, we enjoyed classic camping fun: a big campfire with roasted hotdogs and marshmallows, good beer, and wonderful company with lots of laughter. It was the perfect ending to a not-so-perfect but still very good week.

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