This morning we met our guide Mo in the parking lot of our hotel. She was 24, adorable, and very experienced, We had decided with her to take the St. Marys Trail, going from the St. Mary’s trail head to see Baring, St. Mary’s and Virginia falls. The trail head was almost all the way to East Glacier which meant that we got to drive most of the Going to the Sun road which is really beautiful and winds through the mountains from the west to the east side of the park. Mo has been guiding here for 4 summers and knows her way around so as she drove, she explained the park to us and pointed out the viewpoints and other trails that we might like to do for the rest of our stay. Because the road is steep and crowded, and the speed limit it low, it took us about 90 minutes to reach the trailhead parking lot.
We headed off down the trail with Mo setting the pace of about 2 miles per hour which allowed us to view the scenery, take pictures and also pace ourselves to deal with the 7 miles on a trail with rocks, roots and plenty of elevation gains and losses. As we were driving into the parking lot Conrad spotted 2 moose feeding in the water and we saw them again from several viewpoints along the trail. Most of the hike bordered St. Mary’s lake and surrounding streams that feed it.
Once past St. Mary’s waterfall we headed into a shaded part of the trail that climbed fairly steeply for about .7 miles and dumped us out at Virginia waterfall where we had our lunch.
There were pit toiletrestrooms at the Virginia waterfall which was nice since we had been hiking for a couple of hours at this point. Wemade use of the facilities and rested on the rocks by the waterfall before heading back to the parking area, along the same 3+ mile route that we had hiked in on. We had some nice views of St. Mary’s kae along the way and really enjoyed talking to Mo.
St. Mary’s Lake
Once back at the parking area we had about an hourdrive back to the lodge so we talked to Mo about recommendations for the rest of our days here in Glacier. She had some great advice for other hikes and things to see. Once back at the lodge she came in and got a map and circled all of the places that we had talked about for future hikes. She asked Brian – the lodge manager to give us some bear spray in case we needed it on future days, and showed us how to use it. We were really impressed with her knowledge and willingness to share it with us.
Once we had showers we headed our to dinner at the Sunflower Cafe which was an outdoor BBQ restaurant just down the road from our lodge that is a favorite of the guides and was recommended by the Lodge manager Brian when we checked in. The restaurant wasrustic with picnic tables and we ordered our meals at a window andpaid the them and then waited for our pager to go off to pick them up. The portions were huge, the food was hearty and tasty, and we got carrot cake for dessert which was so big we will be eating it for days.
We stopped at West Glacier village just inside the entrance to the park and got a T-shirt for Baylor and a bottle of wine to enjoy on the little porch area outside of our room at the lodge
We had a long day, lots of fun. We watched a thunderstorm roll through right before we headed inside to bed. It knocked out power to the lodge but we went to sleep anyway and the power came back an hour or so later.