Friday, June 27, 2008
Driving to Glacier National Park
Today we drove from Big Sky (south of Bozeman) to Glacier National Park. It was another long driving day, but thankfully the last one for quite awhile. We plan to spend 3 days and 4 nights here, and then have a relatively short drive for another long stay. More on that when we get there...
We left around 8:30 and arrived around 5:00. We also managed not to spend too much time stopped, which was nice. We hadn’t reserved a campsite here (most of them aren’t reservable), but as expected, it wasn’t hard to find one. We’re staying in Apgar Campground, just inside the west entrance to the park. There are a couple of hundred campsites in this campground alone (and there are many other campgrounds in the park). We found two that are next to each other (Mom and Dad are arriving tomorrow) and set ourselves up.
Setting up for us is a little bit different here at Glacier than it is anywhere else. Bears are a real issue and there are particular rules here (that are quite different than Yosemite’s rules). Here in Glacier the basic rule is food must be stored in hard walled vehicles. It can’t be out, in tents or in tent trailers. Our problem is we have one of these relatively new hybrid trailers. It’s basically a hard walled trailer, but beds (in our case, three of them) fold out and are covered by tents when we arrive. Our trailer has worked out great in that it’s not too big (23 feet), but has relatively roomy space inside because the beds all are outside the 23 x 8 foot rectangle.
Given Glacier’s rules, we had two choices. Move all the food out of the trailer to the car (which would be a huge exercise), or stay “turtled-up” as hybrid owners call it, which means not folding out the beds. We decided to opt for the latter, with me cheerfully pointing out that it would be no worse than being in a medium size tent and it would be good for family bonding. The girls thought it sounded great (except for Patty), until it became time to set it up. Then they quickly realized how little space they’d each have and got quite miserable. They finally all went to sleep and Patty and I have just moved inside (it’s 10:30) on to our “bed”. It should be interesting to see how our whole family does sleeping in this relatively small space. Kelly is tossing and turning already.
Other than the sleeping arrangements, our first night here has been fantastic. The weather is much warmer than I expected. It was still 75 degrees at 9:00 pm. We had a great dinner, cleaned up and went to the Apgar village where we got the girls some ice cream and then stood out by Lake McDonald and skipped rocks. We came in at 10:20 because it was starting to get dark enough that it was getting a little harder to read!
I was reading the Glacier Guide that we were handed. All I could really figure out is that there is much more to do here than we have time to do. It should be great. I think tomorrow we’ll spend time near here (the Lake McDonald area) waiting for Mom & Dad to arrive, and then we’ll venture out on Sunday and Monday.
I was sorry to read that the park shuttle starts July 3, so we’ll just miss it. The Yosemite and Zion shuttles we’ve used have been so convenient.
We left around 8:30 and arrived around 5:00. We also managed not to spend too much time stopped, which was nice. We hadn’t reserved a campsite here (most of them aren’t reservable), but as expected, it wasn’t hard to find one. We’re staying in Apgar Campground, just inside the west entrance to the park. There are a couple of hundred campsites in this campground alone (and there are many other campgrounds in the park). We found two that are next to each other (Mom and Dad are arriving tomorrow) and set ourselves up.
Setting up for us is a little bit different here at Glacier than it is anywhere else. Bears are a real issue and there are particular rules here (that are quite different than Yosemite’s rules). Here in Glacier the basic rule is food must be stored in hard walled vehicles. It can’t be out, in tents or in tent trailers. Our problem is we have one of these relatively new hybrid trailers. It’s basically a hard walled trailer, but beds (in our case, three of them) fold out and are covered by tents when we arrive. Our trailer has worked out great in that it’s not too big (23 feet), but has relatively roomy space inside because the beds all are outside the 23 x 8 foot rectangle.
Given Glacier’s rules, we had two choices. Move all the food out of the trailer to the car (which would be a huge exercise), or stay “turtled-up” as hybrid owners call it, which means not folding out the beds. We decided to opt for the latter, with me cheerfully pointing out that it would be no worse than being in a medium size tent and it would be good for family bonding. The girls thought it sounded great (except for Patty), until it became time to set it up. Then they quickly realized how little space they’d each have and got quite miserable. They finally all went to sleep and Patty and I have just moved inside (it’s 10:30) on to our “bed”. It should be interesting to see how our whole family does sleeping in this relatively small space. Kelly is tossing and turning already.
Other than the sleeping arrangements, our first night here has been fantastic. The weather is much warmer than I expected. It was still 75 degrees at 9:00 pm. We had a great dinner, cleaned up and went to the Apgar village where we got the girls some ice cream and then stood out by Lake McDonald and skipped rocks. We came in at 10:20 because it was starting to get dark enough that it was getting a little harder to read!
I was reading the Glacier Guide that we were handed. All I could really figure out is that there is much more to do here than we have time to do. It should be great. I think tomorrow we’ll spend time near here (the Lake McDonald area) waiting for Mom & Dad to arrive, and then we’ll venture out on Sunday and Monday.
I was sorry to read that the park shuttle starts July 3, so we’ll just miss it. The Yosemite and Zion shuttles we’ve used have been so convenient.
# posted by Craig @ 10:00 PM 
