We woke before sunrise this morning and got some pictures as the sun started to fall across the mountains in the distance beyond the lake. It was really beautiful.
The hotel has an early buffet breakfast which was perfect for us because we wanted to be on a 9 AM boat across to the start of our hike. There are a number of hikes that can be started from the hotel, but three of the longer ones can also be shortened by taking a set of 2 boats across 2 lakes, instead of walking around them, and then starting the hikes from the far boat dock.
We headed out on the first boat to cross Swift Current Lake and almost immediately saw a Mama bear with her cubs walkingalong the lake shore.
Once the boat crosses Swift Current Lake you get off, walk a short half mile trail and get on a second boat to cross Lake Josephine to the final boat dock. As we started out on Lake Josephine the captain pointed out a Bull Moose along the shore of that lake.
Once we reached the final dock we had a few choices of which hike to take. We could just do a short flat 1.9 mile hike around Grinnell Lake, we could head up the Grinnell Glacier trail to an overlook above Grinnell Lake which had a lot of elevation and was about 3 miles, or we could go all the way to the Grinnell Glacier which was a full day 7 mile hike. We knew that we were not going all the way to the glacier, we didn’t have food or enough water for that. We had intended to just do the shortest hike but decided to hike up to the overlook instead. The trail was steep and rocky with lots of tree roots but really beautiful and we did pretty well on it.
We made it up to the overlook that we could find, and then hurried back down to try to catch the 11:45 boat so that we didn’t have to wait until 1:45. It was just shy of 3 miles with a lot of elevation so we were pretty happy with our endeavors.
We made the 11:45 boat and travelled back over the two lakes to the hotel.
Once back at the hotel we had lunch and spent the afternoon lazing around the room, editing pictures in the hotel lobby and having huckleberry lemonades just enjoying the historic lobby.
We eventually had dinner and headed back to the room.
We have one more day here tomorrow but our original plan to kayak on the lake is probably not going to be possible due to cold rainy and windy weather. We’ll see what tomorrow brings.