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Published: September 23rd 2007
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Obfuscator writes: We checked out of our motel in Choteau at a reasonable time in the morning. Since we knew it wasn't that much further to Glacier, we stopped in at a local restaurant for some breakfast. Onaxthiel says that the pancakes were quite splendid. The French toast was ok. I don't remember the name of the restaurant, but if you find yourself in Choteau, just look for the only family restaurant on Main Street.
After that we began our drive to Glacier. As we approached Browning Montana, the previous day's rain gave way to snow, and the vehicles we saw going the other way were surprisingly coated in it. We later found out in a ranger station that in part of the park they had got two feet of snow that night. Browning is the capitol of the Blackfeet Tribe reservation. It's also a pretty depressed looking town. We stopped for gas, but didn't see much else to do, and besides, we were getting pretty anxious to reach Glacier by this point. Somewhere in there, we must have got too anxious, since we missed the turn to go to the biggest entry point into the park on the east side,
and ended up near the Two Medicine entrance, which while pretty, had nothing open in it. After a look around Two Medicine, we decided to make the trip to the West Entrance, which seemed to be the major one, so we could talk to a Ranger. Normally we'd have just gone north a bit and shot across the park on the Going to the Sun Road, which is supposed to be one of the best sights in the Park, but both the most direct route to that road, as well as a major chunk of the road itself were both closed. I guess they closed the Going to the Sun Road as of September 16, so we were just a bit too slow to get that one in.
We had a nice drive around the entire park though, and made it to the West Entrance sometime in the afternoon, where we found a nice Ranger to advise us. The west side of the park is apparently more level, and at a lower altitude than the east, so that seemed like a decent place to start (especially since we had spent all that time getting to the west side). We
opted to go to Lake Snyder, which was off the Sperry Glacier trail. This was about four and a half miles, which we figured we would have enough time for, and not much more, since we knew we were getting a pretty late start. The hike was almost entirely uphill, though much of it wasn't terrifically steep. Still, the whole first park of the hike was definitely a bit trying. We encountered a friendly solo hiker on the path who was pretty into gear, and shared some of her experience and insights with us too.
The hike got considerably more scenic for us once we turned onto the Snyder trail. The mountain views got much closer and better. Up until that point, it had mostly been trees and slopes, but not a ton to see. We got to our site sometime after 6:00 PM, which was about as late as we could afford to get there. Our site had a nice, if little lake, in the middle of three sides of mountains. Pretty much the only side that wasn't a mountain was the way we came in, to the southeast. We started dinner fast, as we knew we were
running out of daylight. Onaxthiel went to get some lake water to boil for dishes, and as I was waiting for him, I heard some pretty crazy noises. As he came rushing back to camp about a minute and a half later, soaked, I found out that he had slipped and taken a rather cold bath. As it was cold all day to begin with, and only getting colder, this looked like it could turn bad.
Luckily, that Onaxthiel is a pretty smart fellow, and had more than enough dry clothes that he could change into after a bit of drying off. The trickier part was that he had no dry boots. After dinner we spent some time trying to dry his soaked boots out with the Sterno. I'm not really sure how much good it did, but it made them warmer, and after he had stood around with socks and ziplocks around his feet for quite a while, I guess that was a welcome change. After all that, we made it a somewhat short night, and went to bed.
Lessons Learned: Be more careful of your footing around bodies of water. The change of clothes is heavy
Mystery Critter
Onaxthiel and I only know one thing about any given animal - whether or not it looks delicious. to drag around, but it's worth having in case of problems. Ziplocks in pockets did their job of keeping pocketed items pretty dry, except of course, for items not ziplocked. Ziplocks work fairly well as improvised shoes. They keep an airspace around your feet warmer, and keep a lot of dirt and moisture off your bootless feet. They also do a good job as an improvised liner inside your damp boots. It's definitely a good thing to hike with other people, rather than solo. Always wring things out really well. It gets a lot of water off, and wet clothes weigh a lot more than dry. A spare pair of boots may be worth the weight, though in this case, was workable without, due to the shortness of the return trip. Crumpled up newspaper stuffed in the boots worked pretty well at drawing out the moisture overnight.
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