Washington 2023:
Day 6 - Whitefish Lake State Park

	Friday, August 18, 2023: We woke early as many of the other campers started their pickup trucks and left the campground around dawn. We packed up and were on the road around 8 AM.
	When we passed this street sign, we had to do a U-turn and come back to photograph it.
	There's some beautiful iron grillwork on the Glacier Cinema in Cut Bank, Montana.
	More importantly, there was a beautiful rainbow effect on the malfunctioning menu board at the McDonald's that was just down the street.
	As we drove westward, we could see St. Mary Lake and Glacier National Park in the distance.
	Cows!
	It's hard to see, but there's a very faint rainbow from the middle of the photo to the upper left corner.
	We reached the eastern entrance of Glacier National Park just before 10 AM.
	We were thrilled to see that there was almost no line to get in, but very much less than thrilled to learn that timed entry tickets were currently required to enter the park.
	We pulled into the parking lot of the St. Mary Visitor Center and Debbie went online to see if we could still get tickets for today. After the reservation website wouldn't allow us to even choose today, we went inside where we learned from a Ranger that there were no more tickets available today. She suggested that we could take the shuttle into the park, but that there were often long lines to get return seats. The other option was to wait until 3 PM when timed entry was no longer required.
	We took a last look at this display showing the joint Waterton - Glacier International Peace Park, and then went back to the van to figure out what to do.
	After going through the options, we decided that we would drive around the park to the south, sightseeing along the way, and then enter the park from the western side around 3 PM. We followed this modern shuttle van out of the park, ...
	... and headed south on US Highway 89. We took a last look at St. Mary Lake in the distance as we drove away from the park.
	We took Montana Highway 49 as the shortest path to East Glacier. It was a very narrow road that immediately went straight up into the mountains. Shortly after seeing a sign warning that this was an open range, we came around corner and found these cows standing mostly on the side of the road.
	The views were amazing though, and we thoroughly enjoyed the drive.
	We stopped at Glacier Park Lodge for a quick look around. We'd stayed here on a trip to Glacier back in 2004.
	An iconic Red Jammer bus was parked out front. It's hard to believe that these vehicles from the 1930s are still in use today.
	Here's the view from the front porch looking out across the huge front lawn, ...
	... and here's the front entrance itself.
	Check out the glass in the front door. It's hard to read, but it says "Glacier Park Lodge. Constructed in 1913 by Great Northern Railroad."
	More hotels need a stuffed Rocky Mountain Goat in a glass case.
	The lobby is spectacular, with huge log posts running around the room and supporting the roof.
	We headed through the lobby toward the annex which is where our room had been back in 2004. Staff was cleaning the hallway carpet as we reached where the rooms were, so we turned around without trying to find our room. We took a quick stroll through the gift shop, and then headed back to the van.
	We took US Highway 2 west, following the Empire Builder railroad tracks out of town.
	Here's a view looking over the tracks toward Glacier National Park, along with a similar view from Amtrak's Empire Builder in 2012.
	The drive around the park was gorgeous, through gentle mountains and lush green forest.
	We got a few glimpses of the snow sheds protecting the railroad tracks from avalanches.
	A lot of the drive was along the Flathead River, which is now one of our top five favorite rivers.
	We stopped at the historic Izaak Walton Inn, which has long been on Debbie's list of places that she's wanted to visit.
	The inn was closed, with a sign near the front entrance that said it would be re-opening in 2024.
	We headed around the back on the inn to the railroad tracks that run right behind the hotel. Check out this beautifully restored locomotive from the Great Northern Railway, ...
	... and this equally beautiful caboose.
	We reached the Amtrak station in West Glacier about a half hour later, ...
	... and followed an Airstream trailer into the western entrance of Glacier National Park (this will be relevant later).
	We stopped in West Glacier Village hoping without success to find someplace with internet access. We needed to cancel a dinner reservation for later tonight that we were no longer going to be able to make. Unable to find anywhere with open wi-fi, we decided to get gas and then see how far into the park we could get without a timed entry ticket.
	We crossed the beautiful Flathead River again, ...
	... and were immediately rebuffed!
	You can't even enter the park from the western side without a timed entry reservation. We made a quick U-turn, getting out of the line, and headed away from the park.
	We decided to visit Hungry Horse Dam, which is about 15 miles west of the park. We passed the Ranger Station for Flathead National Forest on the way there, ...
	... and arrived at the downstream side of the dam about 20 minutes later. At 564 feet tall, it is one of the tallest concrete arch dams in the country, and it certainly looked impressive from this side.
	We drove back to the top of the road and parked on a dead end street to wait until we could return to the park. As we waited (with internet service this time!), we watched a helicopter with a huge bucket come into hover near the ranger station. We couldn't tell what it was doing, but it hovered in the area for about ten minutes and then departed. We suspect that it was picking up materials for firefighting efforts.
	We returned to the western entrance a few minutes before 3 PM, following a different Airstream in this time.
	Score! We passed an Escape campervan parked at the shops in the village, ...
	... and another one parked on the other side of the road.
	At 2:59 PM, we re-entered the park, ...
	... and entered the long line of people who were doing the exact same thing as us. At exactly 3 PM, we could see the rangers at the checkpoint stop asking for reservations and start waving vehicles toward the entrance stations.
	It took about ten minutes to get through the entrance, and then we were driving past Lake McDonald on our way to Logan Pass. They were doing road work, and the first nine miles after the entrance station had been reduced to an extremely rough dirt road.
	Oh sweet fancy Moses, it's paved again!
	Check out the cool ridges on the mountains ahead.
	Debbie got a blurry photo of the same rock as we saw in 2004. These cool swirly things are fossilized algae according to a 1963 guide we have.
	Tunnel!
	We started the long climb up to Logan Pass, and the views of the valley below were spectacular.
	This is Paradise Meadow, ...
	... and Weeping Wall.
	It's hard to believe that they carved this road out of the rock in the 1920s and 1930s.
	The road does show its age, especially in how narrow it is. The big red buses were scary to pass as they often were over the centerline, and there is absolutely no shoulder on this part of the Going-to-the-Sun Road.
	Here's another spectacular view looking down into the valley below.
	The views looking at the surrounding mountains were also beautiful.
	At last! We reached Logan Pass at 6,646 feet a little more than an hour after we entered the park.
	We were here to see the Mather plaque, which is just to the right of the stairs leading to the Logan Pass Visitor Center. There wasn't much parking available, so Debbie hopped out of the van right at the base of the stairs while Tom loitered nearby in the van.
	Here's a close-up of the plaque. It is one of the original 1930 casting series, and was dedicated in Glacier National Park in July 1933. It's showing a little bit of wear, which is to be expected in an area that gets such an extreme amount of snow.
	Three minutes later, Debbie returned to the waiting van, and we started the drive back down the mountain.
	Here's the view looking back to the east side of the park.
	Another Escape campervan! Oh, wait, this is just the opposite side of the one we had seen earlier in West Glacier. That's the cool thing about these - each one is unique, so you'll know if you see the same one again.
	We left the park by the western entrance at 5:20 PM, where the line was much shorter than it had been two hours before.
	Here's the Flathead River again.
	We drove to Whitefish, Montana, ...
	... to the Last Chair restaurant, which is owned by a fellow Macalester College alum. We had cancelled our reservation earlier, but we were hoping that they'd be able to fit us in.
	When we approached the hostess and asked for a table, she said that we were in luck because they'd had a cancellation. We didn't have the heart to tell her that it was likely us who had cancelled, especially since our original reservation was for an hour before we arrived.
	We ordered two craft sodas from Red Jammer soda: a root beer for Debbie and the huckleberry soda for Tom.
	Debbie ordered the walleye sandwich with a side of tater tots, ...
	... and Tom ordered the yak burrito. Both were very delicious. We'd asked our server if the owner was at the restaurant so that we could say hello, but unfortunately he wasn't there. She promised to tell him that a fellow Mac grad had stopped by.
	We drove from the restaurant to the other side of Whitefish Lake to the aptly named Whitefish Lake State Park, which was our destination for today. We quickly set up the tent and got situated, leaving the rainfly off so that we'd have gorgeous views like this one.
	Don't you just want to sleep there?
	There were railroad tracks at the top of a hill that bordered one side of the campground, and we enjoyed hearing the trains as they ran by the park. If you look through the trees here, you can see one passing by. Day 7 >