Sunday, September 4. Day 8.  Only full day in East Glacier. 

Up about 7 am so we could get out the door by 9 for a Red Bus Tour on an antique "bus."

Judy will probably include a picture of the bus in her blog. We started at the east gate on To the Sun Road. Because of so much interest, it is almost impossible to get a ticket to drive your car into the park so the public tours, etc, gets you in and around the park.

These are just some of the sites we saw. Along the way the driver talked about animals we might see and why they might be in a particular place. None of them were there.

We traveled west as far as Logan Pass which marked the continental divide. Even a a little over a mile high, I could feel the difference when walking up hill.

It is hard to tell, but that is I sitting by the sign. This is the first day I've had both long pants and a sweatshirt on at the same time.

The mountain below is Clements Mountain. So tall, so handsome.

Of the shots below, the first and third are of the same mountain. The second zooms in on the reddish area half way down the mountain. The iron oxide in the Grinnell formation. George Grinnell had very early influence in conservation and saving American Buffalo. His name appears on many things in Glacier National Park.

Shots 2 and 4 are taken from a short walk up a hill. The relatively flat place on the rock formation at the edge of the bluff once held a park building that had deteriorated beyond repair so one winter when the lake was frozen, the building was pushed off onto the ice and set afire. In the spring when the lake thawed, the remains sank to the 300+ foot lake bottom.

The fourth shot is a close up of a 9" X !4" area of rock from where we stood to see where the old building had stood. It seemed unique with all of the different colors of lichen-like growths on it.

The last thing to share about the morning is the fact that even with strong winds, the smoke from the fires elsewhere clouded our views.