Virginia Falls

Wednesday, June 29, 2005

Our flight out of San Jose was at 7am, headed to Seattle. Once there we met Shannon & Chris and boarded a turbo prop plane for a quick flight to Kallispel Montana, the airport just outside Glacier National Park. We picked up our rental car and headed into town to get some lunch. Randy also wanted to pick up a pair of shoes for the trip; something waterproof and comfortable. We ended up eating at Subway and then heading North towards the park. We drove over the Going to the Sun Road through the middle of the park. The views were spectacular as the pavement wound up the sheer sides of the cliffs. We stopped a couple of times where they were doing road repairs along the way.

On the Eastern side of the continental divide we started our descent towards Saint Mary's. We stopped about half way down at a trailhead and hiked about a mile down to Virginia Falls. It's a powerful waterfall with a small bridge across it. We got our first look at the Montana "Ground Bears" (squirrels); one was sitting in a field chirping at us. We hiked back to the car and then drove out to Saint Mary's. A short ways North in Babb we turned back to the West and drove to the Many Glaciers lodge. It's a large lodge that sits right on a lake. Our rooms were on the second floor in the main lodge building. Unfortunately the main building has an open center area, which made the rooms a bit noisy until people went to sleep, which was around 11pm due to the long days.

We headed down to the lounge and had a drink while we watched the sun over the lake. Then we went in to the restaurant for dinner. Shannon had warned us that "park food" wasn't the best, and she wasn't wrong. Chris and Rick had mushroom duxelles (which, as far as we can tell, means "globs" in French). The food wasn't that bad, but it wasn't great, either. After dinner it was still light out (it was light out until almost 11pm, since we were so far North), so we decided to take a walk around the lake. It was 2.6 miles, which took us about an hour. We made sure to make plenty of noise and talk loudly, so as not to startle any grizzly bears along the way. After the hike we headed to our rooms, and after half a movie (The Abyss), we fell asleep.