Glacier National Park 2020

[BlackBart]

It snows.... a lot...up here.

Early Fall..... they board it up and remove all the railings.

Sometimes it slides and comes in! It's been repaired many times. Here's your uninsulated room with a metal cot.

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Spring

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The staff has to dig their way to the front door in June or so.

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[BlackBart]

In August of 2017, the Sprague fire blew up east of Lake McDonald. A lot of resources were spent protecting the Lake McDonald Lodge, park infrastructure, the pass, and private houses still grandfathered along the lake.

The Chalet was wrapped, but not really. A small crew was assigned to protect it with a rubber bladder pond uphill for pressure. It sits up in the rocks with thin trees, and no one expected the fire to take off and wrap around the mountain like it did. A wind and ember storm caught them off guard and sparks got into the roof overhang and it essentially burned from the inside.

It burned to the ground overnight while four guys watched helplessly.

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[BlackBart]

It was a huge shock to read about this the next day. Everyone assumed it was a total loss. No pictures getting out.


BUT!.....the rock shell did not collapse. Local structural engineers raced in there and came up with a bracing plan to keep it from being pushed over by the wind and snowdrifts. They clamped the rock walls to interior bracing. Incredible those chimneys made it. I think maybe originally it had wood burning stoves in some rooms. Talk about fire hazard!

Finished just in time for first snow.

Some of the rock face on the interior had spalled from the heat, but it was in surprisingly good condition considering. Nothing had shifted or fallen. All wood was burned away down to the foundation. So a design was whipped up based on historic drawings, bids were let, and they started the next summer rebuilding it. It was quite a logistics exercise with people and materials and helicopters. They worked 7 days a week in two shifts, with one crew hiking in a couple of days before they first one hiked out so they overlapped and didn't slow down. Cooks camped out up there and served meals to the workers. Stone masons, carpenters, finish carpenters, roofers, windows, trim, new logs cut and flown in. They carefully hid some steel within the log rafters to make it tougher for snow loads in the future. The Glacier Park Conservancy non-profit helped fund it.

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The locals did their part to help... "What are you people doing up there??" "Mom, can we go now?"

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[BlackBart]

O...kay..let's head somewhere else now.

The Swiftcurrent Chalets are long gone. They were very near the Many Glacier Hotel. You pass right by this bump as you drive up to the hotel - I never knew there was a chalet on it. Not sure when they were torn down - it might have been staff housing for some time. You can see them here stepping down the hill.

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One of the main buildings of the Two Medicine Chalet still exists, as the campground store. It's on the far left here.

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It has a coffee shop and...baked goods!

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I've read references to the Goat Haunt Chalet. Goat Haunt is at the south tip of a lake way up on the Canadian border. You can get there by boat or long hikes. I've never seen a picture of the chalet. I suspect it was a small cabin.

The last one, I think, is the Granite Park Chalet. It sits up high on a bare knob with lush bear country all around it. On the way there, one of our sons at 13 hiked out ahead against instructions and surprised a Grizzly sow and her cub - recipe for disaster. She stood up and and stared at him, 15' away. He's a goner. But she sat back down and grabbed her cub by the scruff of the neck to drag him back for her digging lesson. She seemed intent on teaching him how to dig roots. Our son slowly backed away while a clump of tourists on the far side of the clearing pointed and took pictures. The cub wandered off and mom dragged him back showing him how to dig every time. She eventually wandered uphill away from the trail and our junior made a break for it. Probably not smart! After that, the word got back up the trail quickly and all tourists like us clumped into big groups fro safety. We said, "Was this kid in a red T shirt??" "Oh gawd!" Later the rangers came and interviewed him about her behavior, to see if she was dangerous - she did nothing wrong and it was clearly his fault. Very lucky.

At the deck of the chalet they had a big spotting scope on a tripod, and we took turns watching a bear a mile of so away - digging.

At Granite Park, they used to cook for you. Now you carry your own food and use the big communal kitchen, clean up after yourself. There is a dining room / lobby, and a front desk with candy bars, funny.

It's heavy thick stone and has survived all those years. No hill above it for slides.

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You sleep in these little rooms with a view. We saw some fantastic green northern lights from here that trip. It's so completely dark, and the stars cover the sky.

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[BlackBart]

This is part of the main hiking route to Granite Park. Mmm, my favorite, especially with kids! It's called the Highline Trail, and it is carved into a cliff straight up above the highway at the top off the pass. A steel cable in a garden hose is your only help. This always makes me nervous.

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Animals are not stupid, and they like to take the easy trails somebody built to get around on. A group of goats or bighorn sheep might come down your way, and you are instructed to move off the trail and give them right of way - it's their park. Don't bother the animals.

One time in the newspaper was this pic of a poor sap on the Highline Trail at the cliff (alone, doh! Never hike alone!). A Grizzly was using the trail. So was he. Where to go, where to go? So he climbed down off the trail, along the edge of the cliff, hid, and waited. Apparently he was not seen or smelled, or the bear just didn't really care. They're not monsters you know, like those Great White Sharks you have! They don't go hunting for people - they eat berries, and salmon, but if you surprise or threaten one, maybe you!

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ENHANCE!!

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The rest of this trail is nice, as you go up and down a lot, around boulders the size of houses, and pass in and out of timberline, so many great vistas.

[BlackBart]

Breathtaking hotel lobby! I noticed the 5th column on the right (counting from the back wall) in the modern photo has a log horizontal beam between the 4th and 6th columns. This beam does not appear in the early photo.
volvougnut

I wonder if we're beyond that point, and looking the opposite way. That would be a major structural change in how the roof is held up. Good eye!

[BlackBart]

How to Get to the Sperry Glacier:

(not my pictures)


One of my favorite trips ever. You leave Sperry Chalet at about 6400 feet. You climb that bowl to 8000' in about 3 miles, then it's maybe a mile across the top to the glacier proper.

This is a series of cirques or bowls and shelves that curve around above you. You can see the chalet in the right foreground with the green roof. The dining building is below it to the left. That bowl goes way back in there at the top, much of it is hidden from view.

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The hike is fairly steep, and you switchback back and forth across the bowl. It's a wonderland. You cross wooden plank bridges over streams, you cross snowfields, there are waterfalls and waterfalls, you hike around shallow turquoise-colored ponds, moss everywhere, through fields of garage-sized boulders, up and up. There are marmots sitting on rocks looking at you, or squeaking, or running for their den. There are mountain goats.

Every time you get to a new amazing shelf of rock with ponds and rock gardens, you think wow, you can't top this!

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At the top of the climb, but at the foot of the cliff, is a giant snowbank wrapping around. How are we getting up all that, you think. You discover that the snowbank isn't up against the rock, it melts back in the summer, and you can get behind it. You wiggle your way along between the rock face and the snowbank until you discover the stairs - a slot cut into the cliff with man-made stone steps and a cable railing. When we were there, a family of goats decided they were coming down, so we hauled back down the stairs and got out of their way!

When you pop out on top of this plateau, it doesn't seem real. It's a vast vast space with no trees and no sense of scale. You can't tell how far away all the shapes and peaks are. It's very quiet because of the snow field. Any people up there are specks in the distance.

The snow goes for miles. It's pink with algae on the surface. It's summer corn snow, kind of crunchy. After you've hiked a ways, you hear water running...a stream, rapids.....UNDER you! There are meltwater ponds and streams under the snow, running downhill towards the cliffs. You pick up the pace and make it to a long rock island sticking out of the snow. Have a drink, have a snack, try to guess how far to the next rock island. In this first pic, you arrive at the top of the cliff in the saddle on the center right. You walk across the picture to the left across a snowfield and rock ridges. The glacier is on the far left of the pic.

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Downhill, beyond the edge of the snowfield, are very long, very straight ribs and grooves in the rock plateau, and bright turquoise ponds and lakes. This is where the glacier had scraped along cutting the rock in a straight line, before it dropped off a sharp cliff where a larger glacier had carved the valley.

"Let's hike to that cool pond!"

"I don't know... it might be 5 miles over there, and there's a cliff before you get there."

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Above you on the snowfield, as it gets steeper up the face of the mountain, are some distinct blue cracks in the snow. It turns out they're very large blue cracks, at the base of the glacier itself. We were told DO NOT go out on the ice! So of course some tourist is out there like a tiny ant, staring down into a crevasse. We assume she made it home.