Montana Vacation Day 4

Well today was a busy day. We started off early again and headed East towards West Glacier. We went through Columbia Falls and Hungry Horse again. We stopped in Hungry Horse to do a geocache at a large 4 tonne silver ball. The logging crews would place several of these balls, chained together at the top of an area and drag them down the hill with tractors. This would create a handy clear cut area where the crews could move in and pick up the fallen trees. The process was much faster and oddly safer than the usual method of having the crews go in and saw the trees down one at a time. The ball weighs 4.5 tons and measures 8 feet in diameter. It was first used in 1950 and eventually helped clear about 6,207 acres in the reservoir area.

We then proceeded to West Glacier and into Glacier National Park. The entrance fee is $25, which is good for 7 days or you can pay $35 for a yearly pass. We ended up buying the yearly pass because we decided that we would come back this way for our two week vacation in August. The Road to the Sun was only open up to 11 miles on the west end and 16 miles on the east end. The Logan Pass was still snowed in. We did manage to get some great pictures of the rivers and the mountains for this time of year. The rivers were very high because of the run off and were moving very fast. It will be interesting to see what they look like later on in the summer. After we went as far as we could on the west end we drove all the way around to East Glacier and up to St. Mary's and started up the other side. We got up about 16 miles on the east side, saw some great views of St. Mary's lake and some very interesting Red Rock.
Also got some great pictues of the Jackson Glacier.

On the way back to the east enterence we stopped at the world's largest woodspoon store and saw the world's largest purple spoon. Very cool. We made the trek home just before it got too dark to cook Lenny burgers and call it a night.