 When
I woke up that morning I went for a stroll around the Apgar area, around
the parking lots and stores, while my sister and mom went through
the slow process of getting ready for the day. I saw this robin pulling
worms from the ground. It reminded me of cartoons on Saturday morning
when I was a kid. It made me laugh. Poor kids nowadays, they
have cartoons about mutants and robots and monsters, poor deprived alienated
little things. Robins are much more life affirming than mutants. |
 Our
first adventure was a hike to Avalanche Lake. Near the start of the
trail was this bench, about to fall into the river. Looks like Glacier
needs a bit of maintenance. |
 Most
of the trail was through lush forests. There were wildflowers like
this Yellow Violet. |
 We
got to walk past the narrow gorge that Avalanche Creek is cutting in the
broader glacier cut valley. |
 We
saw some waterfalls in Avalanche Gorge. |
 Like
I said, it was a lush forest and there was plenty to look at before we
got to Avalanche Lake. For instance, there was this decaying stump
that looked kind of interesting. |
 A
little farther and I saw this bee all fuzzy and orange and white. |
 The
sides of the trail were covered in moss. It reminded me of trails
in western Oregon that way. Like Oregon, the west side of Glacier
tends to be wetter where the mountains catch the rain coming in from the
Pacific, while the eastern part of the park tends to be drier. Some
of the moisture loving plants of the west coast, like the cedars, reach
their eastern limit in the moister parts of Glacier. This is a close-up
of the moss. In spots it looks a lot like cedar boughs. |
 To
the best of my botanical abilities, these are some Corn Lilies growing
their flower shoots. Well, I was going to call them Corn Lilies,
because the sheath around the flowers looks about like something I had
seen in Tennessee, and I was going to say:
"The Corn Lily has tall clusters of kind of small greenish whitish flowers.
I think they are called "corn" lilies because of the leaves of the plant
look a bit like corn plant leaves. Sort of. They are poisonous.
The Audobon Guide says of the California Corn Lily that if pregnant sheep
eat the plant they can have deformed babies, and that the flowers can kill
bees. This would be a great plant for a goth garden."
But, now that I have thought about it, maybe they aren't Corn Lilies.
The Corn Lilies I am familiar with have a fairly tall stalk with many leaves,
and these guys look like they aren't going to have that, unless there are
some folded up leaves inside those sheaths. Maybe another kind of
Corn Lily, or some kind of Swamp Cabbage, or who knows what. So,
basically without waiting for the plant to flower, which I wouldn't have
minded being able to do, I can't be sure what they are. It's much
easier to identify plants with actual flowers. They just struck me
as Corn Lily on first sight. And, I didn't want to remove what I
had already written about deformed lambs. Whatever they are they
look pretty cool.
These were in kind of a swampy area. By this point the valley
was opening up into the bowl like cirque that holds Avalanche Lake.
A cirque is like a steep sided bowl that forms at the head of a big active
glacier, at the start of the glacier cut valley. We knew we were
getting close. |
 Finally
we came to Avalanche lake. If you look closely there are several
waterfalls coming from the snow fields down the nearly vertical mountain
face. It was kind of a hazy day, and some were obscured by the snow,
but at least one is plainly visible. They're some pretty darn tall
waterfalls. I don't know exactly how tall. I do know the height
of the tallest peak in the immediate area, Gunsight Peak (just to the right
of this photo), is 9258 ft. I also know that Avalanche Lake is 3905 foot elevation. I bet they might be pushing a 1000 ft drop. Many
hundreds of feet at least. |
 Just
a little to the right of the last shot we have the aforementioned Gunsight
Peak and the Sperry Glacier. Glacier National Park does have a few
kind of small glaciers, hence it's name. It has less than it used
to when it was established, and the experts say that they should all be
gone by say 2030 or so because of global warming. So get to Glacier
Park soon if you want to see them. Even without active glaciers it
would still have an appropriate name because it was glaciers that gave
the park it's spectacular landscape of long U-shaped valleys separated
by sharp pointy mountains.
For the geologically ignorant, glaciers are sort of like slow moving
rivers of ice. Imagine that! If enough snow builds up the weight
of the overlying snow compresses the deeper layers into ice. Then,
if the weight gets great enough the ice slowly starts to flow. As
it does it picks up bits of rock and gravel and grinds along the bedrock
like the giant slow motion belt sander of the gods. Then, when the
ice gets to a place where it melts all the silt and gravel and boulders
get dumped into piles of stuff called moraines. |
There were quite a few of these lilies growing along the trail. I
am going to call them Avalanche Lilies, although you could call them Glacier
Lilies or Fawn Lilies. I always called them Avalanche Lilies or Glacier
Lilies, I think I got that from a park ranger actually, but what my Audobon
Guide calls Avalanche Lilies ( Erythronium montanum) are quite
a bit different, with more flowers and more white on the petals than yellow.
That's the trouble with common names. That's why scientists came
up with unwieldy names like Erythronium grandiflorum, which is what
I think this guy is. They have these in Yellowstone too, in
the spring. |
 Here
is a white Trillium. I'm not even going to pull out the books on
this one, that's it, end of story. Except, I will mention it is also
in the lily family. |
 Those
pesky yellow Avalanche/Fawn Lilies were everywhere, including in this hollow
log. My mom wanted to take this one home. Seriously, she wanted
to STEAL PLANTS FROM A NATIONAL PARK!!!
We wouldn't let her. I took a picture of it. My sister
thought this was weird. When we were walking back there was this
guy taking a picture of the exact same thing - so I guess I am not so weird. |
 This
tree shows off well how everything was all mossy, except I figure this
stuff isn't actually moss, but some sort of lichen. Again, it was
very much like stuff you can see in western Oregon.
On the hike out there was enough snow left on the trail side to make
some snowballs for target practice on my sister. Then we returned
to the motel for a nap. Then mom and Jennifer had to do some gift
shopping. Then we had a nice dinner in West Glacier. We took
an after dinner drive up the Camas Road. There was a boggy area with
a sign telling about some sort of Arctic Bog Lemmings that lived there,
but I didn't see any. Then we went to.... |
 ...the
Huckleberry Mountain Nature Trail. This is a short self guided trail
through a recently burned area. The sun was getting low in the sky
so we had to kind of go fast. |
 Because
it was a burned area, there were plenty of little wildflower type things
growing on the ground, things that maybe don't appreciate the dense shade
of the forest so much. This is called Oregon grape. Why grape,
I don't know, it doesn't look a bit like a grape plant to me. Perhaps
because it or a close relative has edible berries. One of the several
species of plants referred to as Oregon Grape does. It was a little
short plant, and all over the place. |
 We
also saw a more traditional color of violet than we say earlier in the
day. Then it got dark. |
We went back to the room. I slept very soundly, but the dreams
were even weirder than the first night. Very vivid too, a year later
I still remember big parts of it. From my notes:
Hawaii, the ongum, many kids, returned the "pool", 2 are kidnapped
by Gobbels, 1 cannot be killed.
Evidently I had like a dozen 10-20 year old kids in some real cool house
in Hawaii, but no idea where they came from though. A lot of them
seemed kind of troubled, one had just returned home from jail. They
went to some weird stone fort called the Ongum, had disagreements with
some teacher or preacher there, but eventually won him over (I had some
sharp kids), but they had to give back money they got in some sort
of "pool", then some old Nazi grabs a couple of them from the house, but
they fight him off. I was wondering what the hell was going on for
most of the dream. |