Glacier National Park - A Million and a Half Pictures Later

Yahoo! Back in the land of electrons.
We're on our way to Bonner's Ferry.

(Cheryl) Once again I ran out of memory on my camera! My hobby for the rest of my life is all set, editing pictures and video of Glacier National Park. The mountains here win the trip prizes for most craggy, most ice capped, most lake and river kissed and most narrow twisting roads around. The photos don’t come close to showing them to you. You gotta take this trip, somehow, someday, sometime! Rob a bank if you have to.

(Frank) Beautiful! Yadda, Yadda. Magnificent! Yadda, Yadda. Beyond belief! Yadda, Yadda. Incredible! Yadda, Yadda. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If I see much more nature my head is going to explode. The only thing keeping me going is the anticipation of seeing the Grand Coulee Dam in Washington and the Spruce Goose in Oregon. And frankly, the most beautiful things I saw in Glacier were the circa 1930 Red Busses originally built by White Coach Company. These 8-door touring cars ran continually until 1999 when they were shipped off to Ford Motor Company for complete frame-up restoration and all new drive line components. They returned to service in 2002 and they are beautiful!

The other scenic sight to catch my attention was “Goat Lick.” I figured I’d never licked a goat so I turned in, and it turned out, to be a natural salt deposit the Mountain Goats liked to lick. Of course there were no goats there. Booooorrrrrring! Another group was there and I said “Goat Lick sounds like a Mason Williams poem.” All the youngsters (less than 50) looked at me like I was crazy out of my mind but the other old fart there smiled and said “Yeah, it does.” So, in homage to Mason Williams (Google: “Mason Williams, “Toad Suckers” and “Moose Goosers”), here is my Goat Lick poem.

Goat Lickers.
By Frank (M. Williams) Del Monte
How ‘bout them goat lickers,
Ain’t they a card!
Lickin’ they Mountain Goats
In they yard.

Ya’ wanna be a Goat Licker
Well here’s the ticket!
Grab yourself a Mounty-Goat
And ‘rair back and lick it!

Love from three Montana goat lickers. (Mmmmm. And tasty too!)

8:30 a.m. – Monday, August 17, 2009 – Glacier Meadows RV Park
(Cheryl) We are currently in the technology wilderness, so we’re blogging in Word until we can get to someplace with electrons.

Both of us have been experiencing sensory overload and now understand why some people only spend 45 minutes in, say, a four-day park like Yellowstone. The vistas across miles of flowering land to the tops of craggy mountains followed by lakes and rivers of majestic proportion soon limit our ability to comprehend what we’re seeing. Such beauty must have to be processed in small doses in order for us to do it justice in filing it to our metal landscapes. All the adjectives we can muster like awesome, brilliant, majestic, out-of-sight and beyond belief don’t come close to describing what we’ve seen and continue to see of this seemingly endless array of western states. Of them all, so far, my all-time favorite is Montana. I now get the meaning of wide-open spaces. Wowzer!

We can’t even capture what we’re seeing with digital photos and videos. You just have to come here and experience it. I encourage you to somehow make the time someday to travel this broad expanse of jeweled landscape. We are thrilled to think of our children, our grandchildren and their children inheriting all this WEALTH! Thank God for those who had the foresight to put in place our national park system. By the way, we got a “senior pass” for $10 that gets us into all the national parks for free. However, don’t wait until you’re 65 to see all of this!

Speaking of God, we’ve seen all sizes and shapes of churches. A little white tent set on a hillside not too far north of Ennis, MT, caught my attention, The Cowboy Church – All are welcome. I don’t know about you “pardner, but that appeals to me in a grassroots kinda way. Stained glass may excite the Lord, but he met His flock on hillsides if I recall my childhood stories accurately.

Today we’re setting out to tour Glacier National Park on a rather wet and misty morning. The kind lady in the office of our RV Park loaned us a CD with a complete audio tour of the park. One side is East to West (the one we’ll use) and the other is West to East. We had thought we’d take the “Red Bus,” but $80 per person seemed a bit unreasonable. So KB Truck and indestructible “Frank the driver” will continue to facilitate our transportation deluxe. As I remember, the “Yellow Bus” in Yellowstone was almost as expensive at $60 a head.

Glacier Meadows RV Park is 16 miles from the East entrance of Glacier and one of the most scenic parks we’ve ever experienced. Vast meadows stretch out to woods on either side of our meadow perch and impossibly high mountains surround us in this small valley. Peanut runs around in the meadow catching little winged bugs, chomping them, depositing them on the ground and then rolling on them. Evidently they smell really delightful to doggie noses. Freedom to roam is a wonderful thing and Peanut took advantage by wandering away from me while I took a picture. He paid a visit to a Class A Coach, the home of a pretty little Sheltie. He’s such a Romeo! Man, I panicked when he disappeared so quickly.

More Later, F&C&P