Glacier National Park, WY

Glacier NP is stunning. We spent the first day driving around the park in our own car, travelling along the Going to the Sun road which had opened for the season only a week beforehand. They are upgrading the road, so our nice clean car of one day, was covered in mud. More annoying was that the side steps were muddy and wet, so we walked it back into the car every time we got in and out.

So many photo opportunities but at first most of the pull offs were on the wrong side of the road, so they would have to wait. When I got my camera out, there was no battery in it! I hadn’t used my camera since Yellowstone and I had recharged my battery and hadn’t put it back in. Lindsay said the look on my face was priceless. He lent me his camera and we used my wide lens. It took me quite a while to realize that the camera wasn’t working the way I was used to as he had his set up differently. The only wildlife we saw was a white mountain goat but couldn’t get a photo.

The next day we decided to take the shuttle bus up to Logan Pass and do the walk up there but a fellow traveller told us about the Avalanche Creek walk which was shaded and ended up at a lake, so we changed our mind. 

Avalanche Creek trail

The days were around 35C, so it sounded perfect, no wonder the glaciers are melting! It was a really nice walk, really pretty, with lots of trees, the path traversed along a creek which was often quite fast and fierce, then just before the end was an open area full of Japanese wind flowers before a lake. Along the way we spotted a deer which disappeared very quickly, but on the way back, he appeared again, or was it another? I managed to get a number of shots but because we had been photographing landscapes, the camera really wasn’t set up for wildlife. It made me realise how different you need to set your camera up. You go from something that doesn’t move, focusing on a range of things to one that does move, and you don’t want to be focusing on anything but one area. Half way through I changed the settings to freeze the action. You can understand why people have separate cameras for different requirements so that the settings are all ready to go.