Greetings all,
I’ll be making a trip up to Glacier National Park, and I’d love to hear some suggestions from others who have visited before. I’ve made some similar posts before for some other National Parks, and gotten a few good tips. Do you have a favorite spot or any advice for new visitors? Any good stories from your visits? I’ll be sure to share some highlights when I return.
I’ll be going up to Missoula, MT for work on two separate weeks in the next couple of months and plan to extend both trips a little so I can spend the weekends in the Park. Beyond driving and making stops along the Going to the Sun Road, I don’t have any solid plans yet. I’d love to see some mountain goats and bighorn sheep. The pikas and marmots are also on my must-see list. There don’t seem to be very many observations at all of reptiles and amphibians. I see a pond called Johns Lake that has the only salamander observations in the park. There’s a whole 4 observations so my chances seem pretty slim, but I’ll take a look anyway. If anyone knows if there’s anywhere else I might have some luck finding them, please feel free to share.
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I saw Hoary Marmots hanging out on Going to the Sun Road. Mountain goats on Siyeh pass trail which was an amazing hike and definitely worth it.
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The Ian Frazier reading and the books below made Glacier Park an even more thought-provoking place for me by connecting the Glacier Park country to the people, history and ecology of the Great Plains. As a grad student at the University of Montana, I fell in love with the park. Over a lifetime, the whole region where the great plains run up against the mountains became important to me and my family. You won’t have time to take it all in this fall. But your explorations may form a connection to “The Backbone of the World” that lasts a lifetime.
August 23, 1997 rebroadcast with Ian Frazier, Wallace McRae, and the Jo Miller/Laura Love Connection Ian Frazier “Great Plains” Reading starts at 53:48.
Blackfeet and Buffalo: Memories of Life among the Indians Chapter 22 “Bison Skulls on Chief Mountain” is incredible
Fools Crow
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If the marmots in Glacier are anything like the Rocky Mountain or Olympic, they won’t be hard to find. Completely unbothered by people. It looks like there’s plenty of sightings near the Logan Pass Visitor Center. The mountain goats might be another story. Did you have to go very far to spot them (I don’t think I’ll be able to make it way out into the backcountry or anything)?
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The ones I saw were definitely well back there on Siyeh pass - I think we were maybe 2 hours on the trail to them? But who knows if they’d be in the same spot. The trail is not terribly difficult but reasonably challenging. I think we did also see some goats way in the distance in a spotting scope but no idea of the location. So if you have a scope to bring, that might be worth a shot too.
Pika like rock slides. Listen to some recordings/video of their calls. When you hear it out hiking, pause and watch for movement on the rocks.
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I listened to a couple of episodes of a podcast that the National Park Service made for Glacier (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q364-Se1oxI) and found some interesting info on a rare flower in Glacier. Apparently, there is an area around one small pond in the Logan pass area that is home to Gentiana glauca, a flower found primarily from the Canadian Rockies up through Alaska. This location is the only place in the American Rockies where the flower is found, according to the podcast. There is currently no observation of this plant in the park on iNaturalist, however, so I now have a new sidequest!
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I hope they obscured the location? And that you will, too?
Logan Pass had lots of Goats in late June/early July the year we visited.
The ranger said Fishercap Lake (just past Swiftcurrent Motor Inn—huckleberry ice cream) is renowned for Moose. We did not see any.
Sheep were visible from Many Glaciers lodge and occasionally strolled through the parking lot.
Trail of Cedars to Avalanche Lake Trail might be our favorite spot, especially for birds (swifts, varied thrush, stellers jay)
They do not give the location away in the podcast directly, if that’s what you mean, though based on the description of the area, it’s not too hard to identify the most likely spots. It’s not endangered, but it is an important population, so I will most likely obscure the exact location if I find one; however, this may not do too much to deter impacts to its habitat. The Logan Pass area is already a relatively high-traffic area of the park. Frankly, since the podcast episode is already a couple years old, there is a possibility that they’re already gone and I’m already too late to see the flower in Glacier.
Well, I’ve made it back, and I’ll share some photographic highlights from my trip below. Unfortunately, I didn’t have much luck with my wishlist: No pikas, no marmots, no bighorn sheep, no mountain goats. But I did find the salamander I was looking for, which I was not expecting to find given the small number of observations in the Park. I also had a pretty wild encounter with a mountain lion! Pretty sure it was stalking me. I heard the leaves rustle and a twig snap behind me, and it froze when I turned around. I shouted at it, waved my walking stick and pointed bear spray at it and it just stopped there staring at me for a while before slinking off in the other direction. Definitely a little tense, especially considering I was alone and hadn’t seen any other people on the trail the whole time. I’m not really sure if it was male or female, but I decided I’d call him/her Freddie Cougar (You know, because of the great big claws).
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