Day 10

Start with Day 1... if you dare.

Made it to Glacier National Park today and had planned to drive through the entire park, however last November it seems that they had an obscene amount of precipitation that completely removed the roadway through Logan Pass and there is no route through park. So, I'll have to be content to see the park from the east side today, and the west side tomorrow.

I spent a good portion of the evening hours hiking through bear country mostly because I hadn't had a good hike in awhile. It felt good to be going through a path where I didn't see anyone for over two hours. In fact I traveled nearly four miles total, down and back, on a trail this evening having never seen, or heard anything that sounded human, besides myself that is. I think I still classify as human, I'll have to check tomorrow.

I tried to get a couple of photos of flowers hanging over the path, but because of the canopy of the trees, I had some trouble. That and the fact that I never thought to change the ISO setting on my camera... DOH!... It's still set to 100, which is great for sunny scenery with lots of colors, but awful for the darkness of a forest, so even with an IS lens I couldn't get the photos to turn out quite right. Somebody remind me to change that setting, because I don't remember to do so. The camera can go up to 1600 ISO rating, so I know I would have been able to get the photo to turn out correctly upon hindsight.

As I was setting up my tent and filling out the campground paperwork (twenty bucks... what a ripoff!) the campground hosts drove up. I thought for sure I was in someone else's campsite and I'd have to take my tent down, and because it was quite windy and starting to rain I'd put extra effort into making sure that the tent and rain cover where properly donned. Instead Bonnie just wanted to tell me big tails of all the bear activity they had the last few nights. Something like three bears in the last four nights. I wanted to ask how they knew it wasn't the same bear every night, but thought better of it and didn't. She felt it her duty (rightly so) to inform me on food safety and whatnot. Nothing varied much from the pamphlets they gave you when you entered the park which amount to the same message as "Don't talk to strangers." Nothing in there about what happens if the stranger talks to you first. The one interesting thing she did say was not to keep toothpaste in the tent, as the smell can attract the bears. I showed her though, I didn't even brush my teeth that day.

By this time, it was basically dark, and getting quite chilly. Good thing I've got that warm sleeping bag. I zipped it all the way up for the first time ever, and slept with just my nose exposed, quite comfy really.

Day10 Distance: 286, Elevation 3579 -> 6719

Can't stop can you?