Rain. It started raining shortly after we went to bed and rained on and off all night. When I checked for sunrise conditions, it was still raining. What a relaxing way to start the day. We slept under our nice warm silk comforter until 10:00. We enjoyed 11 hours of sleep. I guess that hike on the Hidden Lake Overlook trail took a little more out of us than we thought.
We had a wonderful French toast breakfast, made sack lunches, and ventured off to St. Mary. We decided to shop the T-shirt stores while we waited for the skies to start clearing up. After we hit both T-shirt stores, we drove a couple miles up the road to the Visitor Center. We saw a good video about the park, checked out the osprey nest in the parking lot, talked to the ranger, and found out the ground squirrels we saw on Logan Pass are Columbian ground squirrels.
By 2:00, we were ready to start up the Going to the Sun Highway. We had lunch at Wild Goose Island
overlook and listened to 3 of the red bus tour guides give their
talks. They definitely need more training. One called limestone
one of the hardest rocks in the park and called glacial striations
fossils. Yikes! We took some images with the clouds still covering
the peaks before we continued on to Logan Pass. On Logan Pass,
we shot back down the valley toward St. Mary Lake. The lighting
was wonderful and we had photographer (cumulus) clouds to liven
up the sky.
We decided to continue down the Going to the Sun Highway to try to get some late afternoon shots of the west side of the Garden Wall area. Good idea but BAD timing. They are doing serious roadwork on the highway, so we had 3 major construction areas where we had to wait because there was only one lane available. All the major turnouts to photograph were also blocked off. We ended up driving straight through to West Glacier where we hit another T-shirt store and got gas. Then, it was time to return to our campsite. Since it was getting late, we decided to take Highway 2 around the southern end of the park and skip the Going to the Sun Highway. That turned out to be a good idea because the highway was wide and an easy drive back to camp. We got back to camp just before dark and immediately turned on the furnace. It's going to be a cold night tonight with no cloud cover.
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