Dear friends and family,

You may be asking, “hey wait Evan, you verbose and insufferable maple seed twisting in the wind, how did you get to stay in Glacier if you lost your reservation while getting your car repaired?”

Good question, friend of mine!

Evan, literally who let you have this blog. What are you talking about.

None of these sights and experiences would have been enjoyed without the help of my dear friend, Cat:

If I am a maple seed spinning in the wind, then Cat is an Albatross; she is an expert traveler and gave me many, many suggestions for places to see in my travels (@Cat I finally made it to Bandolier National Monument, by the way! More to come later on this blog 😁 ). Cat got to Glacier a few days after I did as part of her own road trip across America, and because she forwarded me her campground reservation and let me camp at her site, I was able to get into Glacier and enjoy all of those wonderful places.

Cat: thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you!!!!!!!

And what a grand old time we had! We spent a couple days hiking together and shooting the breeze and catching up on travels. Our first (attempted) hike was up in Many Glacier:

We got up just early enough to see some mirror-still lakes, early enough to beat the other hikers to the trail, and early enough to see this a mile into the hike:

The sign reads “all area beyond this sign is closed because of bear danger”.

When you see a “beware of bears” sign in Glacier National Park, capital of Bear Country, you listen to that sign! We were not going one step past it:

Deep sorrow.

But we got over it 🙂

We turned around and went back to Going-to-the-Sun-Road. We did, however, get to see the cool, grand, hotel of Many Glacier:

And all was not lost. When we got back to the main corridor through the park, we enjoyed a magnificent hike up from St. Mary’s Lake:

It was a platted but unnamed hike, with unknown mileage and undetermined endpoint. We stopped at one of many bends in the river and broke for a lunch that I don’t remember. It was totally spur of the moment, totally aimless except for the trail itself, and it was one of the most enjoyable hikes I have done on this trip, because I got to share it with a friend 💙.

Multiple friends, actually 🙂

Pontificating aside, the area had been burned over several years before, and we got to see some new stages of growth and remnants of the old forest all over:

I wish I knew what caused these trees to petrify, instead of being scorched over like the ones I’d seen at Lassen. Maybe only the bark was burnt off before the fire was extinguished by rain? And then knocked off later? No idea, but it made the trees look so ghostly and cool.

Towards the end of our adventures, Cat and I were driving around the east side of Glacier. Now for context, whenever I have crossed a 1000-mile mark on this trip, I’ve made a short video about the area and my experiences getting to it. My first thousand miles came and went way back in North Carolina somewhere east of Asheville, and my latest thousand miles (the 23rd such marker) was in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula somewhere north of Escanaba. So it was by pure luck that the 15,000 mile mark was in Glacier National Park!

Aaaaaaalmost there (my tripodometer rolls over at 10,000 miles, which is why it only says “4999.9 miles” here).

Scenery, stills from the video.

Cat says hi!

In the middle of the video, right as we crossed the 15,000 mile mark and were celebrating and such, we saw a crowd of cars parked on the side of the road:

I said “do you think there’s been an accident?”

Cat expertly responded, “no, they’ve got cameras out, it must be wildlife!”

We swiftly pulled over. And Cat was right!

Right at 15,000 miles, just as we were making the video about it, a black bear was wandering around at the edge of the woods 🙂

That’s all for now everyone,

Stay well,

Evan 💙