Our first hike in Glacier National Park was to Iceberg Lake. We loved the drive through the park on Going-to-the-Sun Road the night before, so today we were looking forward to exploring another part of the park, Many Glacier.
We’d camped overnight in St. Mary Campground, which requires a reservation. Only a few campgrounds in the park take reservations, and the rest are first come, first served. We knew from our experience camping in the Tetons that these campsites fill up fast, and you have to arrive early in the morning to get one. Since I knew we were going to be driving across Montana and getting to Glacier in the evening, I’d made sure to grab a reservation at St. Mary so we’d have a place to stay. However, the sites fill up so fast in the summer that we were only able to get one night there, meaning we’d need to find another campground for the next two nights of our stay.
Luckily Rising Sun campground is not too far from St. Mary, so we packed up early and drove over to claim a spot. After setting our tent up again, we headed over to Many Glacier. It’s about thirty miles, and you have to exit the park and then enter again further north. Here’s a map showing the area:
We drove past Lake Sherberne in order to get to Many Glacier, and were just completely in awe of how beautiful this place is.
We set off on our hike to Iceberg Lake, which was about ten miles roundtrip. This was one of my favorite hikes of the trip, and we had a beautiful day for it.
The trail was fairly crowded, but we were able to find a spot to ourselves to sit and enjoy the view!
We saw some crazy people actually jump in the lake, which we definitely did not want to do. But I decided we could probably wade out long enough to take a picture! (J was really excited about this idea) I set up my camera to be on a 10 second timer, then take 10 pictures every 2 seconds. That would give us some time to get out into the lake and then hopefully get at least one good one of us! It made for a pretty hilarious slideshow 🙂
It was fun to say we’d been in a lake with icebergs! After taking a break to eat some lunch, we headed back to our car. Shortly after leaving the lake, we saw a moose walk across the trail directly in front of us!
On our drive back to the campsite, we saw a bear above us on the mountain.
After a short break at camp, we headed over to hike to St. Mary Falls and Virginia Falls. It was a short 3 mile hike, and even though we’d already hiked a lot that day, I really just can’t resist seeing more waterfalls! St. Mary Falls was beautiful!
There were a couple bonus waterfalls on the way to Virginia Falls – I love when that happens!
We never actually made it to Virginia Falls because this buck was on the trail ahead of us and we didn’t want to bother him. Also we were just tired from lots of hiking!
There was a lot of construction on Going-to-the-Sun Road, so some of the viewpoints were closed. We technically weren’t supposed to park here, but J stopped for a second so I could hop out and get this picture – I couldn’t resist this shot over St. Mary Lake! It was a great first day in Glacier National Park.
Our Day 11 map is basically the map I posted at the beginning, so I won’t copy it again here. We drove about 70 miles.
Road Trip Recap:
Day 1: Indiana to South Dakota
Day 2: Across South Dakota: Badlands National Park, Mount Rushmore, Iron Mountain Road, Needles Highway, and Crazy Horse
Day 3: Wind Cave National Park, Devils Tower, and across Wyoming
Day 4: Grand Teton National Park
Day 5: Cascade Canyon
Day 6: Jackson Hole
Day 7: Amphitheater Lake
Day 8: Yellowstone National Park: West Thumb Geyser Basin, Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, Tower Falls
Day 9: More Yellowstone: Old Faithful, Grand Prismatic Spring, and Mammoth Hot Springs
Day 10: Lewis and Clark Caverns State Park, across Montana, and Going-to-the-Sun Road in Glacier National Park
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