Taking the Highline

7/19/2017

Hello! Today I’ve got a special feature for the blog that I’m more than a little bit proud of: a video! More specifically, a video of me driving up Glacier’s most spectacular road, Going-to-the-Sun!

My plan for the day was to hike the Highline Trail, one of Glacier’s most popular hikes. It starts at the crest of Going-to-the-Sun at Logan Pass, and only heads further upwards from there. The trail skirts the mountains and culminates at a pass overlooking the Many Glaciers area – if you can make it.

But first, the video! I had the idea to take it as I was leaving St. Mary, and hastily jury-rigged a setup to hold the camera on the dash using my speaker, auxiliary cord, and bandana to position it. I know, I know, this would be better with a GoPro mounted on the windshield, but hey, I used what I had. Anyways, there’s no music (since I needed my aux cord to hold the camera), but it still does a pretty decent job of showing some of the extraordinary vistas that greet you around every corner of this extraordinary road. So here it is!

I reached Logan Pass with my heart full of the beauty of this place. The haze had been mostly swept away with the arrival of a cool, fresh breeze, and the newly unveiled mountains called. I made my way up the Highline Trail on a truly perfect day. Wildflowers were in full bloom, carpeting the flanks of the mountains with splashes of purple and red and gold. My favorite was the beargrass, tall white flowery stalks that thrust up through the meadow grasses to sway in the breeze.

Plenty of wildlife was out and about, enjoying the nice day. I mostly saw ground squirrels, chipmunks, and marmots.

 

This guy looks particularly offended.

One marmot cheekily jaunted down the path, circumventing hikers as they exclaimed with delight. He stopped and licked my boot. I hope it tasted nice.

But the wildlife and flowers were not the most spectacular aspect of this particular trail. No, that distinction was – is – reserved for the geology. It is seriously impressive. In Glacier National Park, the mountains are composed of a really odd assemblage of rocks that are odd mostly because of their progression. More basal rocks are Cretaceous in age (roughly 70-100 million years old), and sitting on top of them are Precambrian rocks (roughly 1.6 billion to 800 million years old). Now, how the heck did the older rocks get to be on top of the younger rocks? Faulting and tectonic processes during mountain building! Essentially, a giant sheet of these Precambrian rocks was thrust up and over the younger rocks during the building of the Rockies. The Precambrian rocks are harder and more difficult to weather than the younger rocks, which produced the tall cliffy mountains and gently rounded valleys we see today over time due to erosion.

If you look closely, you can still find clues to the original setting of these rocks before they were lithified. Ripples, just the same as you would see in shallow quiet waters of a bay today, are visible on the top surfaces of some rocks. Or you might see mud cracks – the remains of a body of water that dried up, just as you’d see in a dried up mud puddle.  The clues reveal that the rocks found here today at the top of the Rockies were once deposited in a shallow ocean environment, millions of years ago. Fascinating!

 

Check out those awesome ripples!

A bunch of fossilized mudcracks.

Crossbedding generated by currents and waves in a swash zone.

I admit that I tripped and almost went sprawling more than once, as I was so busy looking at everything that it was hard to keep an eye out for the trail! Not a bad problem to have, I guess. I finally reached the turn-off for the Glacier Overlook Trail, a little side trail that takes you to a notch in the top of the mountain to overlook Grinnell Glacier.

Unfortunately, this “little side trail” is not even a little bit “little”. It’s short, sure, clocking in at just over a half mile in length. But it makes up for the distance with elevation gain. This little, rocky path gains almost 1000 feet in elevation! And my god, is it BRUTAL. I tackled it before lunch – a huge mistake – and found myself wondering if this would be the first trail to ever break me. The grade is just incredibly steep.

 

Ok, it doesn't look that steep, but that's because I took this picture where it started leveling out...

Well, it didn’t break me, though it nearly did, and I reached the top all in one piece to be rewarded with a spectacular top-down view of the much-visited Grinnell Glacier! Totally worth it. I ate my lunch there at the top of the world, looking down on the glacier and the giant ice floes and all of the meltwater and the tiny specks that were hikers below. Awe-inspiring doesn’t even begin to cover it.

Less awe-inspiring was the realization that now I would have to hike the whole way down the mountain. The Highline Trail can be merged with the Loop trail for a change of scenery, provided that you’re willing to go further down the mountain to meet up with the shuttle to take you back up to Logan Pass. A little less than five miles of hiking down a ~3000 foot elevation drop gets you to the base of the trail. Let me tell you, that elevation drop is no joke on the knees, especially when you’re coming down from that overlook. I guess I must be getting old or something, because my lead knee started hollering about halfway down the Loop Trail. Mostly I ignored it, which turned out to maybe be a mistake later.

The Loop Trail hikes you through a heavily vegetated area that feels a lot wilder, for lack of a better word. Skeletal trees, long-dead from some fire, are festooned with vines and bushes that strive to erase their memory. Flowers sprout everywhere, weaving together haphazardly, seemingly less interested in stretching towards the sun than in creating as much visual chaos as possible. In places the trail narrows to a single track and the flowers press close, bathing you in perfume and almost succeeding in erasing from your mind the singular thought that probably will preoccupy you the whole way down: “This would be a great place for a bear to jump out and take a swipe at me.”

I jingle-jangled my way down the path, making as much noise as possible (much to my own irritation) and made it out to the bottom with no close bear encounters. In the distance, the glaciers of another mountain glistened wetly, sweating just as I was. The Highline Trail proved one of the greats – a little strenuous in spots, but overall an incredible hike. I'd highly recommend it to anyone visiting Glacier. 

Thoroughly exhausted and feeling great about it, I headed back down towards St. Mary with Jane. I'm the kind of person who likes being tired, you see. Being tired tells me that I've lived the most that I could in my day. Today, I sure did a lot of living. And I can't wait for more!

Til then, Kelly signing out.