Christa and I took a road trip this past week/weekend. Our main purpose was to make it up to Glacier National Park (in northern Montana) to do some backcountry camping and then see what we wanted to do from there. The backpacking was a bit tough, we headed over two mountain passes the second day and walked for 14 miles. After some annoying rain, we headed back towards home with an eye for stopping in Yellowstone National Park. I have been to Yellowstone before (see here) in the winter and it was completely different. In the summer months, it seems to be overrun. We arrived around noon and were unable to find anywhere to camp. In fact, it was hard for us to even get out of the park! We made our way down towards Grand Teton National Park and were able to find a simply beautiful place to stay, right along Lake Jackson. The trip was a wonderfully beautiful and tiring.

Read on for a bit of a pictographic recount of what we did. You can also find the whole gallery for the trip here.

We left from Colorado on Friday afternoon and drove for a few hours. We ended up staying in some small town ‘RV Park’. It was really just someone’s glorified driveway, but it had a bathroom and space for our tent so it worked. We were up early and continued on to Glacier. The total driving time to Glacier NP is something around 16 hours.

We got to Glacier, checked into our campsite then started doing what all good tourists do, we drove around the park. The main road in Glacier is the ‘going to the sun road’. Not sure why it’s called that. The picture above was nearish our campsite, Lake St. Mary.

We drove to the spot where we’d be starting our hike the next morning then on our way back, we ran into a cute little bear. Bear!!! We were very excited and Christa snapped some pictures from the car. It was a black bear, not a grizzly, but still fun to see just driving along the road. I think he was trying to get some dinner.

Dinner sounded like a good idea so we headed back towards the camp. We used our ‘car camping’ cooking stuff and made a dinner of bratwurst and onions along with a bottle of wine (drank from the bottle, we are classy). I started a fire and Christa set up the tent. Everything was going great but then it started raining (a theme throughout the week).

Above you can see our campsite the next morning after it had rained for awhile. I was really worried that all our stuff was going to be wet before we even started backpacking, but it wasn’t so bad.

We took our time getting up the next morning. We only had 6 miles to hike, so it wasn’t urgent we get started right away. We stopped by the backcountry offices and got all our permits in order. Above is a picture of the very beginning of our trail. We actually started on the Continental Divide Trail, but we were only on this for a small amount of time.

We stopped pretty quickly to eat our lunch when we found this great spot along the water. The water was so clear, you could see deep into it. The rock formations made some nice little pools that would’ve been great to swim in had the water not been freezing. It is, after all, glacial melt and is a little cold. I decided to walk out on a fallen tree that was laying over the water. Christa was nervous but took some pictures anyways. It really was a lot higher than it looks in the pictures.

The park was very green and we passed a lot of wildflowers along the way.

We hiked 6 miles or so and then came upon our campsite which was nestled up against Gunsight Lake. The lake was one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen. There were many waterfalls that flowed into it and the color of the lake was a lovely shade of greenish/blue.

That night it rained heavily and for a long time. We were able to get our dinner in, but then we were forced into the tent. I don’t think either of us slept well that night and when we woke up, a lot of our stuff was wet. The tent itself was wet and it would’ve been a big pain to try and sleep in it that night. So we decided that we’d try and push through the next leg of the backcountry trip and make it to the car that night. That meant about 14 miles of hiking heading over two passes.

So up we headed the next morning to top Gunsight Pass. We passed some hikers and exchanged the opportunity to take a couples’ photo with them.

Above is a view of the length of the lake from near Gunsight Pass. We camped the night before near where the stream lets out at the right of the picture. That was a couple of thousand feet below.

We had to cross some water hazards.

We made some friends along the way.

We eventually made it back to the car very sore and tired. We changed clothes, hopped in the car and headed out of the park. We were a day ahead of our schedule now, having skipped the last night of camping and decided to head to Yellowstone NP. Christa had never been there before.

Unfortunately, this is all we saw of Yellowstone. There was so much congestion and traffic in the park it was ridiculous. We arrived before noon and were unable to find any place to stay. Any time we got out of the car, we were swarmed around by people. We got stuck in traffic the whole time we were in the park. It took us 3 hours to get from the west entrance to the south entrance. Yellowstone is big, but it’s not that big. We decided to get out the park as quickly as we could and to come back when it was colder (less people). Luckily, Christa did get to see some of the geysers from the car.

We drove on down into Grand Teton National Park which is south of Yellowstone NP. You can see from the pictures that it’s a very picturesque lake set against the mountains. It also seemed so much more the lovely because there weren’t people running around everywhere! The area was also great because it had a very nice restaurant nearby. Christa and I both had steak for dinner, yum! The next morning, I made some bacon and eggs on the camp stove and we packed up the car to head home.

We ran into a lot more construction through Wyoming on the way home. I really do not understand how they’re doing so much construction in Wyoming, seriosuly, it’s a mystery to me. We made it home safe and sound and have some great memories to hold on to!

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