Big Sky

So back on the 14th I went to Montana for HSLDA. The people were all very kind, and the weather was nice, but the real story was the beautiful mountains surrounding the town. The conference was in Kalispell, and this was the view from the hotel parking lot.

A couple of the folks at the conference suggested that I head over and look at Glacier Park, which was about half an hour away. So after I packed up on Saturday afternoon, I packed up some bottled water and some trusty peanuts and drove off. I snapped a few from the car on the way there.



The river is the Flathead river, which runs out of the park. The highway pretty much followed the river up to the park, and the park road came back to it when it had shrunk down to a little stream flowing out of the mountains. There's apparently a road that goes right up to the higher parts of the park, but it's closed still as it gets avalanche'd over each winter and they have to spend a few months each spring clearing off the snow and logs. I stopped at the last parking area, and asked some kindly local-looking folks where I should head for a good view. They directed me to hike up to Avalanche Lake, which is the lake that feeds the stream, and is itself fed by lots of little streams coming down off the mountains. The path up pretty much follows the stream. Here's some pictures from the way up.


So then you get to the lake, and the view opens up to a really cool panorama of snow-capped mountains surrounding the lake, with some trees around the edge.


I saw how it looked like the cliffs pretty much come down to the lake's edge on the other side, so I decided to run over to the other side of the lake to get a close-up view. Turns out the don't get right down to the lake edge, but there's a hundred yards or so of woods and pretty deep snow between the base of the cliffs and the shore. I was in my running shoes, and it was getting plenty annoying to sink knee-deep in snow every step, so I didn't go any further.
But here's where my story gets silly; I didn't know what time it was getting dark, and it was a bit overcast, so I started to worry that I couldn't get back in time. I decided to run back around the other side of the lake. I had started around on the cold side, the one on the right facing forward. I came back on the sunny side, since I could tell there wasn't any snow on the sunny shore.
Thing is, I had noticed earlier that the "left" side of the lake had a whole bunch of knocked-down trees pushed down on the shore from an avalanche on the side where the trail came in, but I forgot about that when I came back around from the other side.

So, as I came back to the part where the trees where, I realized I was going to have to climb through a pretty big tangle of downed trees. I would have gone back the long way at this point, but again, worried about daylight.

SO... the first tree I come up to, as I'm climbing over it, I bump a bough, and out boils this dense cloud of mosquitos. I scrambled over the tree and ran on, and slapped a few off, but pretty soon I was scrambling over piles of logs continually, and every pine bough I bumped or stepped on would belch out this huge cloud of mosquitos. I'd heard that mosquitos could come in dense clouds like that up north, but I'd thought it was artistic license. I've never seen anything like it! Frankly, I got a bit panicky scrambling through that tangle of trees. Fortunately, it was only about 150 yards long, and not as many mosquitos actually landed on me as could have, although I was constantly brushing them off and spitting them out.

Here's me on the other side :)


Once I got back on the trail, the hike back down was uneventful. I was pretty tired out by the time I got back home. I did have one lonely little mosquito fly out of my backpack when I opened it up back at the hotel.