Going to the Sun Pt II
23 June 2018
Worth the Wait
You know its going to be a good day when you start it with a slug on your tent.
Well, the rumors turned out to be right, the Going to the Sun Road opened up sometime late on Friday night. I woke up as usual and loaded the bike up planning to either make it all the way through the road, or turn around and go to Kalispell the long way. The weather was chilly but not cold with plenty of clouds and not a whole lot of hope for a sunny day.
The first stop was at the Baring Falls turnoff. I already stopped here the other day, but according to a lady I met a the visitors center, theres a whole other thing to see on the other side of the road. The stream that feeds the falls go through a small canyon of sorts, which is super neat.
After that, I wandered on up the road, and sure enough, the gate was open. Yay! As the altitude went up, the temperature kept inching down. The clouds were about the same, but they kept getting closer. At one point, I pulled over and walked around a bit, mostly to marvel at the civil engineering that went into this road. There were big tunnels for water to go through, supports for the roads, and paved sections for water to flow over to control erosion, but none of it was real obvious. It was all nicely camoflaged with local rocks and the right color of concrete so that it didn’t stick out.
While I was there, I came across a couple of ladies who were riding bicycles up the road. We got to talking, and it turns out we had talked earlier at Iceberg Lake a couple days earlier. Its kinda funny how you keep running into the same people out here.
Further on up the road they valley kept getting deeper and the clouds closer. By the time I reached Logan Pass, I was in the clouds. Aside from lots of people and vechiles, there wasn’t much to see on a cloudy day up there. There was lots of snow since it was early in the season, and various rangers giving talks. One of the rangers was the “apex predator expert” and was giving a fun talk on the various animals in the park. Some of the high points:
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The wolverine has legendary stamina. They put a tracking collar on one and it started at a lake at 4000’, ran up the side of the tallest mountain in the park, Mt Cleveland at 10,479 feet. Then it ran back down. The whole trip took 90 minutes.
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They’re concerned about their snowshoe hares. In the winter they have a white coat, in the summer they have a brown coat. The color change is triggered by the change in the length of daylight. Lately, the snow has been melting earlier, and so they’ve got white rabbits running around on brown ground, which makes them easy pickings for predators.
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They dressed up a graduate student as a human, a deer, and a grizzly bear. With each costume, he would approach goats that live on Logan Pass and spend lots of time around people. Then he would wear the same costume and approach mountain goats that lived more in the wild. What they found is that the more wild goats would get farther away for each costume than the ones that spent time around people. They think that the goats associate people with safety since we’re pretty good at keeping predators away, so they like to hang out where people are. But, since they do that, they’re worried that when the goats are back in the wild (like during the winter when the Logan Pass visitor center closes) they’ll be less wary of predators. They solved it by hiring Gracie the Bark Ranger, an Australian Shepherd that patrols the parking lots around the visitor center and scares the goats away and keepts them on their toes.
After wandering around at Logan Pass in the fog for a bit, I headed down the far side. It was a lot like the east side, I guess. I couldn’t see much due to all of the clouds.
Eventually the road wound down back out of the clouds and started following the river. To a guy who’s spend the last few years living in the desert, this seemed like quite a bit of water. Too bad they frown upon kayaking in it.
The road drops you off in Apgar Village, where they have plenty to eat and plenty to buy. I had a nice bacon chicken wrap since it was the closest thing to the breakfast burrito they weren’t serving.
This brought an end to my time at Glacier, but I’m sure I’ll be back. I really want to do some backpacking there.
After leaving Glacier, I rode to Kalispell and stopped in at the Kawasaki dealer to see about getting my fork seals replaced. They said I could get in on Wednesday or Thursday, Tuesday at the earliest. This was Saturday. I had no desire to stick around Kalispell quite that long, so I bought the seals they had and went to look for a campsite. After looking at campendium.com, I got a nice cheap campsite at the Rocky Mountain Hi RV Park. They gave me a nice spot by the creek, but more importantly they had a laundromat and a really nice shower.
The next thing for the evening was a dinner at Chik-Fil-A and a quick shopping trip to Cabelas. Whilst zipping up my tent earlier the flap around the zipper got caught in the zipper and it tore (I think its getting brittle, its only 7 years old though). The other thing I got is a Ram mounts X-mount. Initially it was just going to be so I could mount a little camera on my handlebar, but its also because my trusty Garmin 660 gps navigator has been acting up (it randomly turns off). I think that last firmware update caused some issues.
Finally, I did laundry and watched it rain. For some reason, I think my favorite place to sit and work is a laundromat.
P.S. I finally got high resolution pictures uploaded, they’re here: Photos