Glacier + Yellowstone : Day 2
This post is part 2 of the "glacier_yellowstone_2009" series:
- Glacier + Yellowstone : Day 1
- Glacier + Yellowstone : Day 2
- Glacier + Yellowstone : Day 3
- Glacier + Yellowstone : Day 4
- Glacier + Yellowstone : Day 5
- Glacier + Yellowstone : Day 6
- Glacier + Yellowstone : Day 7
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We awoke before sunrise with another long drive ahead of us to reach the west entrance of Glacier National Park. Road construction yet again taunted me along I-15 through Idaho, and then again later along I-90 in Montana. The worst of it, however was a 15 mile stretch on US-93, just north of Missoula, where the road degraded to mud & gravel for several stretches. We finally reached the park visitor center just after 2PM. The good news that we learned was that the Going to the Sun Road (rated by some as the best scenic drive in the US), which is the only road that goes across the park from west to east, was supposed to open for the season the next day. From the parking lot outside the Apgar visitor center, we got our first look into the park across Lake McDonald:
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The bad news is that we still had a 38 mile drive to the Kintla Lake campground, and of those 38 miles, all but the first 11 were unpaved. While the first half of the unpaved stretch of road had been recently graded, and wasn't too bad to drive (I averaged around 25MPH), the 2nd half (all 14 miles) hadn't seen the business end of a grader since last summer, and was in rather poor condition. Kintla Lake is the most remote non-backcountry campground in the park, situated about 10 miles from the Canadian border. The road was rutted, bumpy, and severely potholed. All of that combined to force me to drive at an average of about 10MPH. While the scenery was quite pretty, alternating between meadows and forest, it was still a long, long drive. The first picture from the left, at the very top is a sampling of what the road looked like. Just after 4PM, at the end of the road, we finally made it to the campground at the western shore of Kintla Lake. Somewhat surprisingly, the campground (with 13 campsites) was about 2/3 full when we arrived. So the long drive clearly didn't deter people. The campground itself was nestled amongst the trees at the shore of the lake. The views from the the shore were gorgeous. We could see all the way to the Boundary Mountains at its north east shore (as their name suggests, they sit along the US-Canadian border):
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Additional pictures are posted here and here.
This post is part 2 of the "glacier_yellowstone_2009" series: