so our last blog left us somewhere in idaho, post falls if memory serves me correctly. after we posted from post falls, we drove all the way to montana. its really not that far because we drove across the skinny part of idaho. this is actually two ish days worth of posting because we have been in glacier national park the past couple of days and as i write this i dont currently have
internet.


some time after we drove into montana we found two trains that were facing each other. yes two trains on the same tracks aimed at each other! who knows how close they had gotten to hitting each other! looking at the cars we noticed they were all full of coal and so we decided to get some. while Austin was climbing the train it started backing up! he managed to grab two lumps of coal before he had to bail.

after the train indecent we found this: yes a cop car parked on the side of the road with a dummy in it. it was a good photo op ...


we got to the park and bought an 80 dollar national park pass that should get us into every national park there is! the lady at the gate gave us some maps and other good info. here is our first good view of glacier national park! sadly we did not get a picture of the sign that lables all the mountains...

after this we drove way out into the middle of nowhere on some gravel road and set up camp. it was totally dead silent, not even wind in the trees. its kinda weird, its almost like wearing ear plugs except that when there is noise it seems really loud. the next morning we woke up and all our gear was kinda wet from dew. we drove back to "civilization" such as it is and cooked some pancakes.

after the pancakes we went and talked to this old ranger dude with a cool hat. he told us all about different hikes and used a highlighter to show us where to go. we followed his advice and set out to do some day hikes. on our way we saw a turnout and decided to stop. we found an awesome water fall!

this picture was taken literally seconds before i fell in ...

anyway we started up this trail and quickly ended up following the river instead because it was more fun. after a little while we found this awesome canyon full of water!

we got kinda separated at this point as each of us took different routes through the canyon. i ended up going ahead because i thought Thomas was still up ahead of me. i ran way up the trail only to decide that he wasnt up there and run back. on my way back i found Thomas and Austin talking to this guy they met named Chuck. Chuck is from Kentucky. we were about to turn back and go to our next hiking trail but Chuck convinced us to go up to the lake instead.

totally worth it - no idea what we were thinking when we wanted to go back without seeing the lake ... wont do that again!

and we saw black bears!


on the way up Austin found a place to sit and so on the way back i sat in it :)


so tomorrow we have a 22 mile round trip hike with 7,000 ft elevation gain lined up. its going to be a lot of work and we are likely going to come back in the dark - we will see :)