Day 14

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Flag of United States Saint Mary, Montana
Wednesday, June 30, 2010

It was cool and windy this morning so we waited until about 10:00 AM to start out on our ‘Going To The Sun Hwy’ ride. Linda and I and Dee rode the trikes and David followed in his truck. We stopped at the Visitor Center and watched a short film about Glacier and Waterton Glacier National Parks. They said that by the year 2030, and maybe even 2020, there will be no more glaciers in the park. They had a scale model where you push a button and all the glaciers were indicated by lights. In 1850 there seemed to be 50 or so. Then every 50 years it showed fewer and fewer until 2020 there were no lights. To be called a glacier the ice must cover 25 acres and be on the move.

As we rode the highway we could see lots of white tops on the mountains. It seemed to us that there were more glaciers now than there were the last time we were here, about 8 years ago

near the top

. It was in July then and very hot and we only saw one small chunk of ice near the road. Today there was ice all over. It turns out that it is snow left over from the last winter. Sections of the visitor center do not open until July 1st so it was not open today. The visitor center at the top, Logan’s pass, still had several feet of snow all around it. Some had been removed so we tourists could get around. There were lots of waterfalls from the melting snow and the weeping wall, well it was bawling, not weeping. That is a stone surface along the highway about 20 feet high. The last time we were here it was just a mist. Today it was like a hard rain.

David turned back after Logan’s Pass but the trikes continued on to Lake McDonald on the western side. We ate lunch then returned on the same road. There were two sections with only one way traffic due to Stimulus fund construction work. Both required about a 15 minute wait while the traffic passed going the opposite direction. In a year or two the road should be really nice. It was a very enjoyable day.

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