 |
| bye-bye beach (car-top carrier shot) |
Driving through the Yakima Valley area was interesting. They've really gone for wind power in a big way - lots of arrays of turbines. Continuing east, we saw lots of huge dust devils playing around the hills and hay fields.
We left the interstate at St. Regis (the Paradise exit!),
 |
| sign near gift shop. spelling help maybe? |
Eventually we realized we weren't making great time, so we made a bathroom stop, made up some sandwiches, and kept driving, eating in the car.
We arrived at Glacier around 8:30PST and realized we were in MST now. There wasn't anyone at the gate so we drove in and around the various campsites close to the west entrance and they were all full - as we suspected they would be.
(The National Park Service (NPS) actually has a status page for the Glacier campsites showing which are full although I'm not sure I understand the 'filled by' time. Most were filled before noon that day. How do people get to the campsites so early? Don't people exit their campsite later than the fill time?)
The page is a step in the right direction: http://home.nps.gov/applications/glac/cgstatus/cgstatus.cfm
We had decided to fall back to one of the primitive site campgrounds (which usually don't fill up) only to find that the Inside North Fork Road was closed. There wasn't any info posted anywhere about the road being closed. What now? We decided to camp at a national forest site but by now it was getting dark and finding the roads leading to the campsite didn't happen - wish we had some sort of map detailing access to the national forest campgrounds.
Tired and frustrated, we decided to go for a hotel and see about a campsite in the morning. Turns out there was some sort of horse jumping competition happening which filled all the hotels in the area - as best we could tell, for more than an hour's drive around the National Park. The search was even slower and more frustrating because we had no cell coverage, so all we could do was drive from one hotel to the next. Eventually we got word from a kind hotel clerk that they had called around to all the hotels in the area, and nothing was available.
The private campgrounds were also full and there were dozens of RVs camped out in the Wal-Mart parking lot. By this time it was close to 1am MST and our only real option for lodging was to camp unless we wanted to drive another hour south away from GNP. So we worked on finding a National Forest campsite but kept coming up short on figuring out how to actually get to one. We parked in a Holiday Inn Express parking lot for a while, letting the kids sleep in the car. I kept contemplating setting up a tent in a back corner of the lot but that action wasn't wholly endorsed by the family :).
Finally around 2:30MST we decided to try for a campsite I found that was supposed to be only 12 miles from Kalispell. Driving there was a trick and luckily this site was in google navigation. After many false stops, along lots of very dusty, washboarded gravel roads, we came upon a NPS camping sign and a small deeply rutted rock and dirt road. We tried going down the road but turned around when we started bottoming out more than I was comfortable with at 3am in the middle of a national forest. We setup the small tent by the tent sign, tossed the kids in and all quickly fell asleep.
(Note: this was by far the quietest campsite of the trip. No highway noises, no airplanes, not even any insects or frogs at 3:30 am. Four quiet hours of sleep. -Katrina)
We woke up to a sunny morning, still quiet. I hiked the small road we attempted last night to find that we would have actually ended up in a bona-fide campsite had we risked the road. As we packed up the tent, our feeling of solitude was broken as two young ladies went jogging by on the gravel road and later a DirectTV truck drove by. Oh well. It was an adventure nonetheless.
We formed a new plan to go find breakfast at a McDonalds, then drive the Going-To-The Sun road through the park to the east exit and then find a hotel early in the evening for some R&R.
(The National Park Service (NPS) actually has a status page for the Glacier campsites showing which are full although I'm not sure I understand the 'filled by' time. Most were filled before noon that day. How do people get to the campsites so early? Don't people exit their campsite later than the fill time?)
The page is a step in the right direction: http://home.nps.gov/applications/glac/cgstatus/cgstatus.cfm
We had decided to fall back to one of the primitive site campgrounds (which usually don't fill up) only to find that the Inside North Fork Road was closed. There wasn't any info posted anywhere about the road being closed. What now? We decided to camp at a national forest site but by now it was getting dark and finding the roads leading to the campsite didn't happen - wish we had some sort of map detailing access to the national forest campgrounds.
Tired and frustrated, we decided to go for a hotel and see about a campsite in the morning. Turns out there was some sort of horse jumping competition happening which filled all the hotels in the area - as best we could tell, for more than an hour's drive around the National Park. The search was even slower and more frustrating because we had no cell coverage, so all we could do was drive from one hotel to the next. Eventually we got word from a kind hotel clerk that they had called around to all the hotels in the area, and nothing was available.
The private campgrounds were also full and there were dozens of RVs camped out in the Wal-Mart parking lot. By this time it was close to 1am MST and our only real option for lodging was to camp unless we wanted to drive another hour south away from GNP. So we worked on finding a National Forest campsite but kept coming up short on figuring out how to actually get to one. We parked in a Holiday Inn Express parking lot for a while, letting the kids sleep in the car. I kept contemplating setting up a tent in a back corner of the lot but that action wasn't wholly endorsed by the family :).
 |
| super sleepy kids |
 |
| our roadside camp in the morning the one time we used the smaller tent |
(Note: this was by far the quietest campsite of the trip. No highway noises, no airplanes, not even any insects or frogs at 3:30 am. Four quiet hours of sleep. -Katrina)
 |
| view from one of the campsites we could have had if we could have made it down the road |
We formed a new plan to go find breakfast at a McDonalds, then drive the Going-To-The Sun road through the park to the east exit and then find a hotel early in the evening for some R&R.
No comments:
Post a Comment