The Seven Mile Hike

Back to the trip pictures and update. On Sunday morning, Joel decided that this would be our long hike day. I was thrilled--ha! Anyway, we went up to Logan Pass to start our hike. Before we started, however, we had to buy bear spray! I felt a little more at ease knowing that we had our mace with us!

We did the highline trail. Can you tell I'm freezing?!?!

The majority of the hike was alongside a mountain. It was definitely a little frightening at times. The clumsy should probably not do this hike!

We encountered many ground squirrels along the way, which were not afraid of people at all! I hated these things! This little guy's name was "Honkey." We had to keep it lively out in the woods--ha!

We were way high up in the mountains and there was snow capped mountains everywhere around us. It was hard to believe that we were in August and were seeing snow still on the ground!

These pictures show you how high up we were!

Funny story about our Auburn hats. You know we Auburn folks say that Auburn is like a family and there's several commercials out there that the jist is that you can run into an Auburn fan anywhere and feel right at home. Well, here we were on top of a mountain in Montana, and this guy comes running up to us and tells us War Eagle, and that we've made his day and he just HAD to get a picture with us! It was too funny. On a side note, when we went back to airport to get our bags the day we got there, we saw a guy with an Auburn hat on and I asked Joel if I should take a picture of him. So, we saw 2 Auburn folks out there!

The below shot is at our final destination of the hike. I'm probably saying it wrong, but it's at Butte Point or something like that. We did not prepare very well on this day. We had nothing for lunch and we were 3.5 miles away from the car at this point. We were starving to say the least! And tired...neither one of us exercised a bit before this trip. Heck, I haven't exercised in months, so my whole body was numb at this point! The only thing that drove me to keep going on the way back (and even did it more quickly!) was that food was at the end of the tunnel!

Joel loved taking pictures of waterfalls. We have about a million of them! I thought this one was really pretty though!

The below picture is where we were hiking to. we went up to the little plateau to the right of the top of the mountain.

We ran across a marmot on the way back.

And Fredericka, the mountain goat.

And this one was just plain Fred. He was a little afraid of us (and we were a little afraid of those horns!). These goats were right on the trail and we were able to walk right up to them.

We finally made it back to the car and went to a very late lunch where we stuffed our faces in pizza that was about 3 hours old and a bison burger. It really didn't matter what we ate...it all tasted so good! In hindsight, it was pretty disgusting!

We headed back to our hotel, which was the Lake McDonald Lodge for the night. We relaxed for a while before heading out on a boat cruise.

This is a picture of the Lake McDonald Lodge from the water.

The boat cruise ended up being sort of a flop, but we did see views like this, which made it worth it. I think the boat captain knew he had to take a certain amount of time and we got through the "cruise" faster than we should have and so at one point, we did donuts in one end of the lake. I think we went in a circle about five times before he decided to go somewhere else. It added some laughs to the boat cruise for sure.

After the boat cruise, we got a bottle of huckleberry wine and shared it on a bench in front of the water. It was a lot of fun! This was our view...

We had the best dinner probably of the whole trip that night at Lake McDonald Lodge. It was delicious!

Here's a picture of the front of our hotel. It looked neat from the outside, but man, the rooms were terrible! It was like dorm life. You could hear everyone and everything all night long! Oh well, we were so exhausted from our long hike that it didn't matter too much!

I felt a sense of triumph after we did the long hike that day. While hiking is really not my thing (have I said that before? ha!), it really was beautiful and we saw a lot of things that we wouldnt' have gotten to see had we not done it, so I'm glad we did it. We were still on the hunt for a bear though! We kept hearing tales of people seeing bears, but we had yet to see one yet! I was starting to wonder what all the hype was!

The rest of the trip pictures should go more quickly. We just took a ton of pictures on our long hike!