Glacier 2016 - Part 1 - Arrival and McDonald Lake

In July we took a family vacation up to a cooler place - Glacier National Park in Montana.  Instead of being shy of the Mexican border at home, we were just shy of the Canadian border.  Temperatures were beautiful - highs in the low 80s (or cooler on some days), much preferable to the hell that is Phoenix in July.  This is the first part of a few to discuss the trip and share some pictures.

We picked up the boys at summer camp on July 16 - they had already been camping for a week with the Boy Scouts - and started driving north.  The route was scenic through northern Arizona, Utah (stopping for the night in Beaver Utah), Idaho and Montana (stopping a second night in Butte).  Monday saw us driving from Butte to Glacier, going up a scenic valley between mountain ranges, arriving at our campsite around 1 PM to have lunch and setup.

On arriving, we quickly could see some deficiency in our campsite - namely that we had a relatively small (at least for our tent) flat area, with the tent vestibule basically over part of the fire pit.  If we setup the screen-room over the picnic table, that also was over part of the fire pit, and colliding with the tent.

Glacier has a number of campgrounds, but only 2.5 take reservations.  The rest are first-come-first-served, and fill up around 9-10 AM at peak times (like July!).  We had reservations in Fish Creek, since I didn't expect to be able to arrive in time to get a spot otherwise.  Useful information - two of the reservable campgrounds (Fish Creek on the West side and St. Mary on the East side) are also the only campgrounds with showers).  The reservation site shows little pictures of the sites, but it is hard to judge how much space is really available.  We use an 8-man tent to hold the family, so need a good amount of space.   In this site, we decided to move the screen-room down to the parking area (about 5 feet lower than the tent-pad and picnic table area) and put the camp-chairs in that, since there was no way to put the chairs around the fire-pit anyway (and with the tent that close, there wasn't going to be a fire.  This would be our home for three nights, then a move to the East side of the park.

Once all setup, and everybody had eaten, we headed to the visitor center and Glacier Village on the other side of McDonald Lake.

Kids skipping to the village

A little bit of looking at the lake, awe-ing over the mountains, getting souvenirs and ice-cream and we headed back to the campsite to get ready for dinner.

Near the campground is a point that extends out into the lake, I headed there to get a few more pictures and a panorama of the lake.

Many of our meals were pre-made and dehydrated at home, to take up less space and weight in the car and for quick preparation.  We've been drying leftovers from large meals (like chili and fried-rice) and made a few specially for drying.  We also brought along a dutch-oven to make sides and dessert (like corn-bread to go with our chili).   The first night had a ranger-program on the Native Americans who are in the area and the history of the area, and a discovery that the showers have no warm water in the evening.