Glacier National Park - Highline Trail

Great mountains in Glacier

After a week in Olympic it was back on a plane and across to Montana. I was a bit worried about whether this part of the trip would actually go ahead. There had been crazy bush fires in the weeks leading up to the hike, roads were closed, towns were being evacuated, it did not look good. When we land in West Glacier it seemed even worse, the smoke was so thick you couldn't see any of the mountains. I was not looking forward to 6 days of walking through that haze, bring on the lung damage!

We were super lucky though, in that when we woke up the next morning it had all blown away, I have no idea how that worked, the fires were still burning, and I don't think they were close to being under control, but somehow there was no smoke. Even without the smoke we did not have great weather for this hike, though I guess it was good weather for fighting bushfires so you couldn't complain too much. It wasn't like Olympic, were it didn't even rain in the rainforest. It was nearly every day that it rained. Pretty heavy too.

When the weather was still nice

I don't think I would recommend the guiding company we used for this trip. The main reason we used guides was because we didn't want to have to deal with the bears. We have no idea what is bear safe and what isn't, we wouldn't have known how to set up the food away from bears or where to get bear spray or anything really. And this park didn't just have brown bears, there were grizzly bears in this one, they are much more aggressive than the brown bears. So we thought we would play it safe and get a guide. The problem was they had way too many people on the trip. It was meant to be two trips going out, but then 2 people had pulled out, so they combined the rest of the groups into one and sent them out together.

There ended up being too many people to fit in our allotted camp sites, which meant it was really hard to get the flys tight. And we could never take the bigger camp sites, since they were the ones that the rangers checked, and we always had too many tents per site. It was a pretty poor showing by this company, given that they are the only ones allowed into the park.

Remnants of snow fields

The route we had was a pretty good one though, the company had managed to get some good permits. The first day was probably the best in terms of views, along the Highline trail, which is this trail blasted into a cliff face. It was about 11-12km the first day, and fairly flat, which was nice to get used to the pack again. The weather got pretty bad by the end of the day though, I think maybe we were going too late in the season, it being early September by the time we were off the trail. I think our trip was the last of the season, and that first night certainly felt cold. I think the first night is always the worst though, I had all my clothes on and was cursing my sleeping bag for being too light-weight. And yet by the end of the week I was too hot in the same bag, and the weather hadn't noticeably improved. I think it just takes a night or two for the body to get used to sleeping outside.

Great views, though the weather is closing in

The weather was so bad that night, luckily we have an awesome tent, so all our stuff was fine. Other people were not so lucky, that is never pleasant, to start the week's walking with a wet sleeping bag. It started to really rain about 2km from camp, which I think is one of the worst times for it to rain, just long enough to get wet, then you are cold trying to set up your tent. What was even more disheartening is that you have to pass a chalet to get to the campground. This was the only chalet we saw all week, and it was just at the worst spot for us. You are all cold and wet and tired after the first day, and you can see that there is a place where you could instead be warm and dry with a cup of hot chocolate. But that is not what we had signed up for!