Monday, August 15, 2005

Day Four - The Highline Trail

Saturday, August 13th
We all woke on Saturday hoping to see Owen and Kim's busted up minivan parked in the campsite that we had reserved for them. Unfortunately they were still nowhere to be found. Since we couldn't get cell phone reception anywhere in the park, Chris drove out to a pay phone where he could call them and see what was up.

We figured that they had just gotten tired and decided to drive the rest of the way in the morning. We had planned a long hike for the day that required that we get an early start on the trail. If they didn't show up soon we were going to have to either leave without them or cancel the hike. Chris returned from the pay phone unsuccessful. Apparently Kim had turned her cellphone off. Just as we were about to give up on them and go hiking, the campground host stopped by and let us know that Kim and Owen had called park headquarters. They had experienced car trouble the night before and had stayed the night Kalispell.

We decided that we should at least head back into town to give them a call, even though it meant that we lose even more time from our hike. We discovered that the car was in the shop and that Owen was waiting to find out how bad the damage was. When we discovered that there was little to be done about the situation other than to wait for the verdict from the mechanic, we decided to head out on our hike. We all felt a little bad about leaving Owen stranded in Kalispell but a) there was nothing that we could at the moment, b) Owen was a big boy and could handle his own problems, and c) we didn't see any reason to ruin all of our vacation plans just because Owen had run into a stroke of bad luck (if you can call car trouble on a busted up old minivan bad luck rather than just plain inevitable).

So, temporarily putting Owen's troubles out of our mind we embarked upon the Highline Trail. There are several ways to hike the trail with varying lengths. We chose a path than ran 12 miles from Logan pass down to “The Loop” trailhead on the Going to the Sun Road. The hike was gorgeous. We started out by walking on a ledge carved into the mountain side a couple of hundred feet above the Going to the Sun Road. Along this path we ran into a mountain goat who decided that it wanted to share the trail with us. After a couple of minutes we were finally able to scare the goat back off the trail and got this picture which we dubbed, “The Holy Goat”.

We actually saw quite a bit of wildlife over the course of the trail. We saw some bighorn sheep, deer, more mountain goats, squirrels, a rabbit (dead and being eaten by the squirrels) and even a ptarmigan (which is apparently something like a wild chicken). Equally spectacular were the wildflowers. Someday I hope to be able to name them all but for now we just have the pictures.

The first leg of the trail terminated at an old Chalet. The Chalet is currently used for hikers that are hiking into the back country and want a place to stay overnight. We stopped there for lunch (turkey, bacon and cheese sandwiches) and to rest up for a bit before heading down the final 4 miles of descent back to “The Loop”. The return trail descended 2000+ feet over 4 miles; nearly a 10% grade. I think that each of our knees were about to explode by the time that we finally made it back to the parking lot.

We had a surprise visitor when we got back to the campsite. No, it wasn't Kim and Owen. One of my co-workers, Rand, coincidentally happened to be staying in the park this weekend. Apparently Owen knew that Rand was going to be here and let him know where we were going to be staying. Rand stayed for dinner (beer, brats, burgers) and for some of the campfire.

We learned later that night that Owen had gotten his car repaired earlier that afternoon and had already started back to Utah. By the time that he gets home he will have driven 1400 miles just to say that he made it 30 miles from the park without bothering to venture in or meet up with his friends. I'll never understand Owen. On top of missing out on an incredible weekend of camping and hiking, he kind of screwed us over by not bringing up some camping gear that we were expecting and because we had already bought food to cook for 5 people.

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