The Times and Travels of Nolan
Documenting trips I've taken and places I've seen.
After most of a good, hard day, Elizabeth and I had been delivered to the end of Going-to-the-Sun Road. Apgar Village lies in the far southwestern corner of the park, where McDonald Creek exits Lake McDonald and begins its terminal sprint down toward the Flathead River along US-2. This is the commercial side of the …
Continue reading “Glacier National Park: Apgar, West Glacier”
When you are with someone long enough, you are able to interpret context clues much more easily. With that said, you don’t need to be an expert at Elizabeth Studies to know when she’s hungry. My lovely fiancee has a way of letting people know. And as we got back into our RAV4 on the …
I wasn’t super optimistic when my alarm went off on the morning of November 12. It was 6:00 a.m and I was amid a group of notoriously heavy sleepers. Come to think of it, I could barely drag myself awake coming off of a string of midnight shifts. This was basically bedtime every day prior …
Below me, Avalanche Creek boiled through its gorge. Obviously it was swollen with runoff, but I didn’t really expect there to be this much water in one of the little creeks way up in the mountains. It was quite loud. As a natural lover of creeks and rivers, I loved it with every fiber of …
When the YouTube videos said that Glacier National Park was teeming with some of the greatest biodiversity in the United States, the videos were not lying. The previous night, we had stayed in the northeast corner of the park. That area had been referred to as a “desert”, but clearly it was just like the …
Continue reading “Glacier National Park: Trail of the Cedars to Avalanche Creek Canyon”
Last year, Elizabeth put together an epic birthday weekend for me: This year, I had to return the favor. Only a few problems. First of all, where to find the money? It didn’t necessarily help that I have a brand-new auto loan and rising expenses in the face of inflation. That one solved itself in …
Holy shit. The Logan Creek valley of Glacier National Park suddenly opened up as we drove past the Logan Pass Visitor’s Center. The first thing I noticed was that this was all so *big*. The mountains were huge around us. The Garden Wall loomed on the right side of the valley. Miles and miles in …
Continue reading “Glacier National Park: Going-to-the-Sun Road, West Side”
Logan Pass is the stuff of legend. Somebody had the bold idea to take a cleft in the continental divide right at the terminus of the Garden Wall, and blast the artery of one of the world’s great national parks right into that cleft. And then someone got the idea to put an entire visitor’s …
Continue reading “Glacier National Park: Logan Pass, Part One”
There’s something about a close college football game that just is unmatched by any other sport. The tension of a one-score game with 6 minutes left to go in the middle of a regular season game with a middle-of-the-pack opponent? I live for that. At least, I do so when my team emerges victorious. From …
Continue reading “Counting Down My Undergrad OU Games: 24-21 – Close Calls”
First of all, I apologize for how long this post will inevitably be. We’re about to take a trip through one of the most magical drives in the continental United States. I took a billion pictures. When I go through the pictures, I wish I’d taken 10 billion. There’s basically no way to shorten the …
Continue reading “Glacier National Park: Going-to-the-Sun Road, East Side”
