Crown of the Continent Tour

St Mary Lake looking west

Wednesday was our Crown of the Continent Tour with the traditional Red Bus.  This tour is an all-day tour departing about 8:30 and returning about 6:00 or so in the afternoon.  The buses hold about 17 passengers and draw attention wherever they go.  At one overlook stop, we all piled out of the bus to enjoy the view while everyone at the overlook ran to the bus to get their picture taken with the bus.  Worked perfectly to clear the overlook for us.

Jackson Glacier

As we were on the west side of the park, our tour left from the Apgar Transit Center (think Disney World shuttle bus stop) and took us via the Going-to-the-Sun Road to St. Mary.  From there it was north to Many Glacier Lodge for lunch and a return trip back to Apgar.  While the stops were short, they gave us a good over view of the park and a chance to see the St Mary and Many Glacier areas. 

Many Glacier Lodge

From my perspective the west side of Glacier is more commercial while the east side gives you a better chance to see wildlife.  Part of that "less commercial" on the east side is due to the park lying against the Blackfoot Reservation.  The west side of the park (west of the continental divide) is considered a rain forest while the east side is more of a prairie/plains environment.  More RV parks on west side.  Lodges and campgrounds on the both sides are generally full with

Heaven' Gate

many posting no vacancy signs by mid-morning.  Campgrounds in the park were full, too.

There's no good time for a hard drive failure, but we were able to load most of Tuesday's pictures to Facebook before we lost the computer.  The computer booted up fine, but no software would work Wednesday morning. It died during trouble shooting. 

Bird Woman Falls

So after Wednesday's short hike into the bug infested north side of Lake McDonald, we made a hasty retreat back to the trailer, made a grocery list and a software list of those programs I had downloaded, but had no CD backup, and off shopping we went.  So after hours of loading, downloading, loud threats at the IT industry, and one mid-length online chats with a software retailer, we have most everything running.

We've lost all our contacts, a couple of music albums, confirmed once again that backups are totally useless, and hit the campground WiFi throttle point several times (yes, Verizon wireless network is useless here.)  However, we have all the important stuff and all our pictures.  And the iPod has our missing albums.  We're in business.

If all goes well tomorrow, we move to Nordman, ID to visit Donna's cousins Thom & Mary for just over a week.  While there we plan to get with Larry, Lillian, Carol and others in Spokane.  There's no Verizon coverage of any type in Nordman, so we'll probably be a little quiet while there.   If you don't hear from us, the plan after Nordman is to head back to Rapid City for a NOMADS work project at the Storm Mountain Youth Center.  At least that's the plan.  Later, David