After visiting some of our family, we headed to Glacier National Park on the east side. We did a lot of smaller hikes. Some of the the main or more popular trails still had tons of snow and required ice axes and things like that. On our first morning in the park we hiked from Sun Point to Virginia Falls, meeting Baring Falls and St. Mary Falls on the way (6.8 miles round trip). The wild flowers were exquisite! The water is turquoise due to glacial flour. The weather was gorgeous and we just enjoyed being in Glacier, with our individual cans of bear spray.
We came upon a deer who was just all relaxed, meandering down the trail, munching on whatever she liked.
We did not come upon any bears, but that's because I wore a whistle around my neck and we clapped our hands and talked loudly at times. In Alaska, I learned to say, "Here, Bear!" On this trip, I changed it to, "Hear, Bear! Hear me NOW!" I also rewrote the words to Row, Row, Row, Your Boat:
Go, go, go away,
Go away, you bear!
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,
Straight back to your lair!
Yeah, I sang that song quite a lot. There was a bear in our camp at 10:30 one morning, Ranger Michael Lambert said (he so reminded me of Royce), but that bear was very obedient, walking along the outside border of camp, not daring to cut through. We saw a lot of signs such as this:
Don't (or do? since K wants to see bears?) go to Yellowstone in the spring--partly because you can't hike anywhere as the bears are coming out of their dens, but then you'd see one.
ReplyDeleteAlso, running into everyone you know? That's because you're YOU and you're a teacher, which means you DO know everyone!