Tuesday, June 24th
I had a pretty good sleep in my non-cabin motel bed. I was able to get ready at 10:40am like we promised, but I did not see Roesni in the lobby of Swiftcurrent, so I went and bought a postcard in the gift shop. In fact, I didn’t see Roesni until 11:10am because I was sitting in a chair away from the restaurant and facing the gift shop, and she didn’t see me sitting there.
We bought some lunch at Many Glacier snack shop and got some food from the employee’s cafetaria. I felt guilty for eating there since I’m not an employee, but nobody seems to mind. After lunch, we went kayaking for an hour on the lake in front of Many Glacier. It was pretty fun, except that some parts of the lake were pretty windy and the waves kept pushing us back. It took us 40 minutes to paddle all the way out to the middle of the lake but really only 15 minutes to paddle back because of the wind direction.
It was so tiring that we decided to rest for half an hour at the Many Glacier Hotel lobby. Then later, we decided to go hike the Grinnell Glacier. We knew that the top of the trail was considered hazardous because of the snow on June 16th. That hazardous area started about 4 miles into the 5.5 mile hike. However, we still wanted to do that hike because it was the heart of Glacier National Park.
The hike up to Grinnell Glacier started around Swiftcurrent Lake, which wasn’t too eventful. Actually, I should first say that it took us half an hour to find the trailhead for the hike. Then eventually we worked our way up the mountain, and it started to rain and became really windy >:O. Still, we persevered until about 4 miles into the hike I left Cassie, Erin, and Roesni to continue to the snow area by myself. Initially, I went up the right trail, but then I thought that I went down the wrong trail, so I went back and took the other trail, which actually was the wrong one, which I discovered after going down that it was not a trail. At the snow-filled area on top of the trail, my foot sank through packed snow, but I still went on until I saw that the very top the trails were completely covered in snow, and that’s when I turned back. So we got some pretty good pictures on the way down.
We decided to eat at Many Glacier Hotel after we got back. It wasn’t a particularly good meal. In fact, it was terrible, especially for such a fancy hotel. I really think we hit the jackpot with St Mary Lodge, and to think that we only went there because we got back too late on Monday, June 23rd to eat at Many Glacier. I had the vegetarian straganoff, and the others had trout, prime rib, and chicken. All of us had the same bland and tough sauteed vegetables, and our portions were small, and really it was just cafetaria-quality food at a fancy restaurant.
At night, we were all really tired by the time we went back to Swiftcurrent Inn to check Cassie and Erin into their cabin. They were not as lucky as I and their housecleaning person cleaned up their room. I offered to switch by cabin with them but they refused, and I wasn’t about to argue with them, because I was really tired, as well. So I just went to sleep.
luggage from ME!
But before I went to sleep, I attempted to call out using the phone card that I purchased earlier. However, since people were busy that night, and I just felt too tired, I was only able to talk over fb messenger.