A Quiet Day

Today was a day of recovery for yesterday's hike and a day of chores, pretty quiet in all.

We have been out two weeks now and needed a laundry, so it was off to Many Glacier this morning to the laundromat there. It is a bit of a drive and we got there about 9:30 and the Many Glacier campground was already filled, not that we were looking for a site. We're happy at Rising Sun for another night.

A couple of hours and three loads of laundry later we had a van full of clean clothes and sheets. Watching those washing machines and driers makes one hungry, so it was off to the Two Sisters restaurant for lunch. It is on the way back to Rising Sun and we had dinner there last year (actually, we ate there twice). It hadn't changed (except the prices seemed a little higher) and the food was still good. A couple of buffalo burgers with blue cheese and a piece of homemade huckleberry pie with ice cream later, we waddled out to Speedy and headed back to Rising Sun.

We stopped at the St. Mary visitor center for a bit. They have a decent cellular signal there and we hadn't uploaded photos or journal entries in a while. I also got the answer to the question of why there is a 250 foot tunnel (the Ptarmigan Tunnel) at the top of the Ptarmigan Wall at about 7000 feet elevation.

It turns out that it was actually dug by the Park Service in the early part of the 20th century to provide a way to get past the Ptarmigan Wall to the other side of the park without climbing over it. This was the time when folks visited the park by train and traveled in the park on horseback and it allowed horse travel on the Ptarmigan Trail so the dudes wouldn't have to walk. I can't imagine the Park Service doing such a thing today.

After our Internet fix, it was back to the campsite to sit and read. It was a pleasant but breezy day, with a warm westerly until about 6:30 PM when the wind shifted abruptly to a northeasterly and the temperature dropped about 20 degrees in about a minute The wind was strong enough set up good size waves on St.Mary lake that we could see from the campground, complete with whitecaps and spray blowing off the tops of them.

This went on for about a half hour, then it started to rain, which still continues as of 9:45 PM, with an occasional flash of lightning and peal of thunder.

Now that we have clean clothes, all we need is fresh food, so tomorrow is a provisioning day. It will be a trip over the Going-To-The-Sun Road. We will try to get a site at Fish Creek campground, but it usually fills early since it is one of the reservable campgrounds and most sites are pre-reserved. Failing that we will try to get a site at Apgar, which is bigger, but not as picturesque.

Then it will be off to the big city, Whitefish or Kalispell, where there are actually supermarkets.