Glacier National Park, St. Mary to Sprague Creek - Going To The Sun!

Thursday - July 25 - We are "Going to the Sun" today, something we have looked forward to with excitement and a little trepidation since we started planning this trip.

The nice thing about hikers and bikers is they go to bed pretty early and they usually rise early so we didn't have to worry too much about disturbing them since we were in such close quarters.

Andrew is from Madison, WI and is hiking this next week. Maggie is from Seattle and is solo bike touring from Jasper to Kalispell. She is taking a rest day today to "EAT". She really appreciated the "Powered by Ice Cream" sticker that Donna gave her.

Sopia (New York), Lili, and Phillip (both from Delaware) are hiking several spots in Glacier the next 2 weeks. The girls are not entirely sure that having their brother along is a good thing. If things don't go well, Sophia (the oldest) said, "We are sure to be on speaking terms again by Christmas."

Steve is from Boston. He started the Northern Tier a month ago on the Pacific Coast and is headed east back towards home. This is his first bike tour. We decided not to tell him about the Plains.

Logan Pass....just 17 miles ahead (that's miles not kilometers). After a month of seeing road signs in kilometers it takes us a little while to switch back. Rising Sun and breakfast #2 are much closer.

It is absolutely a fine day for this part of our adventure.

St. Mary Lake is almost 10 miles long.

Road construction ahead!

Guess it is going to take even a little longer than we anticipated though the rest breaks were appreciated. The flagger at the 2nd construction zone was a college student. Flagging for the summer gave him a lot of incentive for staying in school. He said he preferred doing it in the park, though, since people weren't in such a hurry and it wasn't his fault that they were late.

That vertical white line in the middle of the picture is the road that we were on earlier.

Construction of this road was certainly a challenge!

Logan Pass is in sight!! We joked that meant we only had another couple of hours of climbing to go.

Siyeh Bend

Almost there.......photo op/rest break. At an average of 5.7 miles per hour we barely needed to use our brakes to stop.

A family walking along the road clapped for us as we approached the top. We almost felt like celebrities. Logan Pass was a beehive of activity, especially compared to the relative quietness of most of the route up the east side. We ate our lunch sitting on the bench at the shuttle stop, doing some serious people-watching. An ambulance crew even took someone out of the visitor center on a stretcher while we were there.

This makes it really, really, really official. Now we can say, "Been there, done that, don't have to do it again!" In retrospect, yesterday's climbs were actually harder than coming up this side of Logan Pass.

It is literally all downhill from here.

Going down wasn't as easy as it sounds. We had to do a lot of braking to stay within the speed limit! Going up tested the legs.......going down tested the arms. 

Since we have rim friction brakes, we also had to stop periodically to let the wheel rims cool off....and take pictures, of course.

We are headed to the bottom of that canyon.

The bad thing about going east to west was we were on the inside of the road going up and the good thing about going this direction is we were on the inside of the road going down.

Finally!! One handy thing about construction zones is that the cars tend to come in bunches and then we have the road all to ourselves again until the next batch is released by the flagger. In this case we just pulled off the road until the wad had gone by since there wasn't much of a shoulder.

They had just watered the road before we came through. Donna wondered why her tires were making a funny noise. It was just a little mud between the tire and the fender.

A handy stick took care of the problem.

 We reached Sprague Creek Campground on Lake McDonald after the 11am to 4 pm restriction on west-bound bicycle traffic but we were glad we stopped anyway. The hiker/biker site was in a prime location and the rest of the campground was full already. We stood up to our knees in the lake to cool off and it also qualified as our shower. After dinner, we pedaled the mile over to Lake McDonald Lodge for ice cream. We are sure we earned it today!