Summit Lake
Yesterday we met a woman on the trail who suggested we go to Summit Lake. She said there were many glacier lilies there. Today we took her advice, and hiked up to the lake. It was very beautiful.
It was slightly cloudy this morning when we started, but the clouds soon blew away, and by mid-morning it was bright and sunny. As we neared the top of the switchbacks on the trail up from Cameron Lake, we were caught up to by two female park employees. We talked to them a bit about the flowers we were seeing, and discussed our plans and theirs for the day. They were going over the Carthew Pass, and one of them was also setting up a geo-cache site at Summit Lake.
Glacier Lily
The last part of the trail was wet, as there is still the last remnant of snow in the trees. We saw many yellow glacier lilies, as well as a lot of white spring beauty flowers, and both Enid and I took many pictures. The lake was not much farther down the trail from the best flowers, and very pretty. The far south shore in the shade was still snow-covered, and there are high mountains in the background in Glacier National Park. Since it was still quite early, we continued on climbing about half way to Carthew Pass, where we stopped at a spot where we could look out over the boundary valley to the south towards the United States.
As we left the Cameron Lake parking lot we came upon some parked cars and motorcycles just a short way down the road. There was a female brown colored bear and her black cub. She was walking slowly across the road, and at first the cub was hiding in the grass, but shortly hustled across the road and disappeared into the trees.
The park interpreters we met this morning had suggested we drive the road to Red Rock Canyon to see the flowers there, so we did. The north edge of the park is where you can clearly see the sharp transition from prairie to mountain, and there are very pretty scenes where the prairie flowers and grass are backdropped by the red-stoned mountains. However we did not stay long, as a large cloud was rising over the mountains to the west. As we reached the end of the road, it started to rain, and then hailed. I was worried that it would break the windshield, but we soon drove out of the storm. Then just as we got back to town it opened up and poured rain and hailed again. We sat in the vehicle at the campsite while we were pelted by marble sized hail. Many of the campers here were out struggling to take down their awnings. After the storm we saw a number of them on the roof of one of the trailers, working on the awning.
After supper Enid sat on the shaded side of the trailer to read and discovered that we had another flat tire, on a different tire this time. It wasn’t as low as the previous one, but was obviously leaking, so I took it off, went to the tire repair shop again, and he was able to fix it. One nice thing about a small town is that you can get repairs at all hours!