It’s only 3 years later and my Glacier National Park blog has finally reached its last full day – and just in time, because in 2 months I’ll be joining my family for another trip to Glacier for a week. It’ll be myself, my parents, Taylor, Kyle, and Wyatt, who at a year and half won’t be up for anything athletic. We’ll need to find some places that are baby-friendly, or at least ones that can be hiked with a baby in a backpack carrier on your back. I bet one place we’ll stop at during our visit is Hidden Lake.
Elizabeth and I almost didn’t get to visit the Hidden Lake Overlook in July of 2022. For one thing, the overlook is at 7,200 feet. That doesn’t sound like a lot until you realize that Glacier is a lower-elevation park than you think. Piegan Pass is only at 7,500 feet and many of the peaks in the park are only around 7,000-10,000. That means that the Hidden Lake Overlook is up above the treeline and in a zone where winter was only just now loosening its grip. Elizabeth and I had first visited the Logan Pass Visitor Center 5 days ago on July 13 and had made another brief stop on July 15. On the 13th, the trail (which begins right behind the Visitor Center) was still closed due to the amount of snow, but in the last 5 days the NPS had been able to open the trail all the way to the overlook, if not down to the lake below.
We also almost didn’t get to visit the Hidden Lake Overlook because of external factors. As I said in the last post, my graduate advisor had sent me an email the night before stating that the final copy of my Master’s thesis was not on track to be completed enough for me to graduate. The deadline to finish things up and start my new job in the National Weather Service was July 28. That meant that there were 10 days left to fix it all, and here I was supposed to enjoy 2 of those 10 days in a national park? This sounds like some sort of scenario in a psychology class designed to explain the phrase “cognitive dissonance”.
I don’t do cognitive dissonance. I do moping. And so when I woke up on July 18, I was moping. I moped my way through the morning routine of leaving our tent, grabbing clothes, bringing them to the campground bathroom, and changing. I moped through the drive over to St. Mary village so Elizabeth could get her morning latte at Triple Divide Coffee and then do some gift shopping. And I moped when she drove us back over to the park entrance to take our picture with the Glacier National Park sign.
It was at this point that Elizabeth had had enough of my shit. She pointed out that we only had about 24 more hours left in a bucket-list trip, and that the work would be waiting for me at home regardless of what I did with those 24 hours, so I might as well enjoy them. It was excellent advice that didn’t quite land at first, but I felt like I owed it to her to at least pretend to enjoy the day. Look at this brave attempt at looking happy:
It was a banner morning in northern Montana, though the puffy clouds in the distance made it clear that we might be in for more stormy weather:
The storm clouds took less time to gather than I would have ever guessed. Going-To-The-Sun Road felt more like Going-To-The-Clouds Road as we rolled uphill toward Logan Pass. Fortunately, the ceilings were high enough to keep a good view of the valley stretching out below us to the east. Parking was a breeze to find at Logan Pass yet again (to this day, I have no clue how much of this was pure luck and how much was a signal that the complaints about parking at Glacier are overblown). The early part of the trail’s boardwalk past the ragged treeline was mercifully free of snow. At 10:00 am, we were underway.
Unfortunately for anyone not in the mood for such a challenge, the boardwalk ended after a couple of minutes. Someone in the NPS had thought to mark the trail with stakes. That turned out to be a great idea, because no more than a couple hundred yards from the visitor center there was a giant snowfield to ascend. Big crowds, ill-marked trail – I don’t blame the rangers for being proactive.
The snow wasn’t easy to walk on, either. We weren’t postholing like crazy because the melt/refreeze cycle had compacted the snow, but that just made it a slippery slushy mess that was treacherous going uphill and promised to be nigh impossible going back down. We each had a hiking pole to work with, which was probably good. The poles bit into the snow and steadied things up for our poor hiking boots. From there it became a steady rhythm of following boot tracks, locating the next yellow pole, and straight-lining up the mountain.
Fortunately, AllTrails says the overlook is only a 2.7-mile round-trip with only 550 feet of elevation gain. After quite literally the hiking week of our lives, this was nothing, even with the brown snow. It took less than an hour for us to reach the shelf up at Hidden Lake Pass. There we huddled amid a group of piggies on a short loop boardwalk as the wind howled over the continental divide. I was in my puffy vest and short sleeves, so I bet all of the little piggies thought we were the real tourist swine. Takes one to know one.
In primo conditions, Hidden Lake is not hidden at all. In fact, it’s extremely hard not to see from the pass, framed as it is by the beautiful Bearhat Mountain just behind it. The waters are said to be so clear that if you were to be floating on the surface of the lake in a raft, you would look like you were flying. None of that was to be the case today. That stiff breeze was triggering a big upslope cloud bank that rolled up and over Bearhat Mountain and tumbled into the proglacial valley beneath it. On the plus side, it made the name “Hidden” Lake feel all the more appropriate.
Elizabeth was either more persistent or more lucky than me and got a shot that featured a little break in the clouds. You could see the full extent of the lake with view of the snow-capped mountains beyond, as well as the big valley leading down toward Avalanche Creek and the west side of the park.
You did have to work a little bit to appreciate the view; the wind was blowing pretty fiercely. It was pretty tough to maintain a good hair day under the circumstances.
After a couple of minutes, Elizabeth and I noticed that the crowd of little piggies at the overlook were abandoning the boardwalk views in favor of looking at something just off trail to the left. I hopped over to a rock outcropping as nimbly as a mountain goat to see what the commotion was. Ok, maybe I wasn’t as nimble as a mountain goat, because this guy looked a lot more agile than me.
You may or may not recall that Elizabeth and I had run into a small cluster of bighorn sheep in Waterton Lakes National Park 2 days ago. In our suburban ignorance, we’d gotten excited to see those “mountain goats”. Seeing an actual mountain goat in the wild two days later was humbling; you city slickers don’t know jack shit about what REAL goats look like. But it was also another notch in my belt when it came to finding the northern Rockies’ big mammals. In fact, along with the bighorns, the bears, and the moose, we had pretty much checked everything off. Maybe Elizabeth was right and I shouldn’t just give up on the rest of vacation!
It turned out that the Hidden Lake overlook wasn’t going to use the rest of our day after all – in fact, it was still only a little after 11:00 am. Maybe we could have loitered if it were warmer and less windy, but alas, mountain weather is frequently inhospitable.
As if to drive that lesson home, we hadn’t gotten far into our walk back down the mountainside when there was a rolling reverberation back to the southwest. Elizabeth and I gave each other looks that mingled quizzical and apprehension. “Was that…”
Another rumble of thunder echoed like a gunshot among the peaks.
Ok, yep, it was time to quicken the pace before lightning arrived above the treeline.
Ominous curtains of heavy rain appeared to our east, where the first storm seemed to head toward. More thunder reverberated behind us. To gain some precious time, I figured I’d join in on an activity that people had been doing pretty much all morning, presumably just for fun. There were a couple of people who only hiked up to the top of the first hill that was visible from the visitor center (where Elizabeth and I had seen the rainbow 5 days prior). Those people were either sledding or glissading their way back down the mountainside once they were done climbing. Although neither of us had the name for the phenomenon, the approaching storm was the only argument I needed to go for a glissade. To my chagrin, though everyone else off-trail on the steep part of the slope made it look easy, my glissade near the trail to try and cut off some of the walk was unglamorous. The boot tracks left a rutted, half-melted snowfield that succeeded in nothing so much as getting my butt wet. Not that my poor rear end was alone in that, because in the last few minutes of the hike, the heavens opened up on us with a mountain downpour. We scurried back to the rental car as fast as our little legs would take us.
Rain lashed the windshield for a couple of minutes while we sat in the heat and tried to warm up. Soon the rain had come to a stop and the car was rapidly turning into a private sauna just in time for us to eat a smorgasbord lunch of whatever was left in the car (anything can work for a lunch when you’ve hiked enough and are broke enough). The rain clearing up gave us a chance to get a picture with the Logan Pass sign.
Continental divide pictures are always fun.
It’s been long enough since our trip that I don’t really remember why we decided to continue down Going-To-The-Sun Road for a few hundred more yards, but we did. Just past the continental divide sign the road curves through a miniature hairpin bridging the Garden Wall and Logan Pass below it. There’s a little parking lot at this turn, which is called Oberlin Bend. The views opposite Going-To-The-Sun Road and the Highline Trail are obviously insane, but that’s not why I’m including Oberlin Bend in this post. For whatever reason, we ended up here just in time to see another mountain goat. This time I actually had my camera bag (not bringing it up to the Hidden Lake Overlook to get soaked was a smart decision, even if I’m pretty sure I only did it to try to preserve a dying camera battery) to get pictures of the goat.
It reminded me of nothing quite so much as a weird unicorn of the Rockies.
And with that, Elizabeth and my time among the high sierra of Glacier National Park was over. We still had all afternoon, but we’d pretty much filled out every hike that we’d set out to do. Given the physical toll of the previous week and the emotional toll of early mornings, late nights on sleeping pads, and life-changing career news, we were entitled to relax a bit and enjoy a quiet afternoon and an evening by the tent. We would certainly miss these views, though.
Somewhere back in Norman, the high temperature had “cooled” off to 101 today. Apart from Scipio and his friends at Fetch and Stay, I couldn’t care less. Glacier National Park is true heaven.
