I remember our first day driving through the entrance of Glacier watching the Rangers direct those without the coveted pre-bought entrance tickets into a side lot to get more information and turn around and thought, How horrible it would be to come however many miles to Glacier National Park to be turned away. Today…that was us! We thought we had one more day on our pass but…we didn’t. And today we were part of those who were turned away.
Thankfully the Rangers had the Junior Ranger badges at the rejection outpost and the girls were still able to fulfill their junior Ranger oath in the car. After this, we were kind of thrown for a loop and started driving toward other lakes. First, we tried Lake Five and then headed to Flathead Lake south of Kalispell, but both were busts. Thankfully we found a little outcrop where we could picnic and swim because we drove 30 miles out before we found out Flathead Lake State Park was full (we chose the West Shore because we had Goat Dog with us today).
The girls had fun playing in the water (it’s pretty cold so no one lasts long) and standing on and throwing rocks. We had our picnic and laid on the rock/dirt shore for a little while before heading to Walmart and then back to camp. It was still an adventurous and beautiful day and we saw some smoke-covered mountains and Flathead lake with islands you could boat to.
We were fortunate to have the days we did in the park as I know others had to wake up before 6 am or come in around 5 pm to get into the park without a pass and that would have been really rough on all of us.
Things we did:
- Bought the girls some toys from the general store. Elsa picked bike lights and Anna picked a little pony playset (good thing, because they played with this for the rest of the day in the car!)
- Got rejected from Glacier National Park
- The girls got their Junior Ranger Badges (phew!)
- Drove around Lake Five (couldn’t find entry)
- Drove to Flathead Lake State Park West Short (it was full)
- Picnicked and swam at Somer’s Beach (phew!)
- Went to Walmart (primarily for a heating pad because either the murphy bed squished the previous one or it overheated in the camper because it drew too many amps). My neck is still cricked.
- Walmart had plain yogurt and kid yogurt! The car rejoiced!
- Drove by a huge junkyard…like really big
- “I saw sprinklers out my window!“ Anna exclaimed! We are excited by the little things!
- Drove by the “Ten Commandment Welcome Center” which looked like a large collection of billboards. Discussed this further as we left wondering if the motivation was historical (a collection of billboards over time showing the difference in how people propheted the word of God?)
- Went swimming for about 10 minutes
- Made a fire and roasted hot dogs and smores
- Went on a night walk and “dirt bike” nature walk and met some foragers who worked at the campground (I tried some St. John’s Wort, purple clover, and something else with lots of vitamin C)
I thought you were in Glacier park the last couple of days. Are there many different parks within the park? Or do you go on different trails within the park?
Glacier National Park has tons of hikes – so Avalanche Lake, Johns Lake, McDonald Lake and beach, and the horse trail and The Going to the Sun Road are all inside/part of Glacier National Park. You enter (if you have a entry-ticket this year) and park off Going to the Sun Road and do various hikes. We checked in with the Rangers to find shorter hikes for the girls but there are hikes up to 15 miles or muli-day hikes like Welch family did when they were boys through the north part of the park. The longest we did was 4.6 miles with the girls and I think that is a good max for little legs right now. We took side trips to some towns around Glacier Nationa Park though to Whitefish, MT for a change of scenery/urban change and then to Flathead Lake State Park because our entry-ticket expired one day before we thought. They really should put a time-stamped date on expiration (it could mean anything).