Glacier
July 2017 | Park 5
Part + Park 3 (of 3) from our summer road trip.
Glacier National Park + special mention of Waterton National Park in Alberta, Canada. J & I kicked off the final leg of this trip by crossing the border to spend two nights in Alberta. I was wildly surprised on the first night to find out my best friend had secretly collaborated with J to meet up with us, a surprise which entailed her driving 12 hours from British Columbia to meet up with us.
I still look back on this as one of the most memorable and treasured travel memories I have. We camped. We ate pizza and soup and played card games and stayed up late talking and found a cute local coffee shop. We completed a gorgeous nine-mile hike through the International Peace Park, a trail that begins in Waterton NP, crosses the borders between the two countries (and parks), and ends at Goat Haunt in Glacier National Park. It was on this fateful hike that we also encountered a curious black bear who maybe inspired us to eventually break the cardinal bear rule (don’t run) and wade through the lake for part of the hike to give him a wide berth. By the end of the day, we’d named him Percy the Peace Park Bear and planned an entire children’s book series based on his life, as we imagined it.
Once we made it to Goat Haunt, we boarded a boat that took us back to Waterton, just in time to grab drinks at the historic Prince of Wales hotel at sunset. All in all, a perfect day.
After saying goodbye to my bestie the next morning, we drove south back across the border and entered Glacier National Park, where we stayed the following two nights. This park is so beautiful that it almost hurts to look at the pictures from our drives on the iconic Going-to-the-Sun Road. The mountains were comprised of a stunning combination of emerald green grasses and trees, yellow and white wildflowers sprinkled everywhere like pixie dust, cascading waterfalls, and striated grey rock — visible scars from when heavy glacial ice scraped against bedrock. The geology of this place is astonishing and I felt like everywhere I looked was more magnificent and breathtaking than the last viewpoint.
On our last night, we explored Going-to-the-Sun Road until sunset, watching the light shift to a warm yellow glow, sunbeams stretching from one peak to the next and the U-shaped valleys eventually growing dim as night came closer. We knew we had a 16-hour drive back to Denver the next day, and I felt an ache within me that the trip was about to come to a close. Glacier was an otherworldly denouement to what had been our most memorable trip together thus far. It lives up to every bit of its hype.
Pictured below:
International Peace Park Hike — Alberta, Canada and Montana, USA.
Going-to-the-Sun Road + St. Mary’s Lake. Glacier National Park, Montana.
