Day 17 - Fish Creek

A Hike Along The Lake.

It was another beautiful day at Glacier National Park, sunny and nearly so we decided to take another hike. It was just Ellen and I this morning. 

The McDonald Lake trail runs just behind our campsite. It is about seven miles long almost from the lake's exit point where Lower McDonald Creek runs to the Flathead River to the point where Upper McDonald Creek (home of the dippers) runs into the lake. We didn't walk the whole trail, only the first couple of miles.

Much of the trail runs through a burned out area of the forest from the large 2003 fire. It has been nearly 14 years since the fire and, although the many of the dead burned trunks remain, the trail is bordered by dense thickets of young pine no higher than about six feet. The first part of our walk was fairly high above the lake, but we almost always had a good views of it and the park beyond.

The bush contained much bird life as evidenced by nearly continuous birdsong, but they were not easy to see in all that pine. Occasionally, a bird would fly up into one of the dead snags for a view, particularly the flycatchers. We ended up seeing two life birds this way, Olive-sided Flycatcher and Western Wood-peewee.

We walked until it came back down to the lake. Shortly after that the trail disappeared into the lake. They have very high water this year and the usual trail was just slightly underwater. We probably could have skirted around it, but there were a couple of logs there where we could sit down, have a snack and look out at the water and the mountains. There were also a few Spotted Sandpipers poking around just in front of us.

We traced our path back to Speedy...not hard to do on a well-used Glacier trail. After lunch we took a short drive, first to the entry village of West Glacier for milk, then stopped by at the Apgar Visitor Center to camp on their broadband Internet connection to download maps.

We had our last dinner outside at Fish Creek. Tomorow we will be off to Canada...again.