Piegan Pass Loop

The next day we drove over Logan Pass to hike the Piegan Pass trail in order to get right into the heart of GNP, hiking up to the continental divide and the feature called the "Garden Wall", a massive face of rock carved razor thin by glaciers eons ago. The morning started clear with a little bit of humid haze.

There are plenty of large burn areas in Glacier, and this one appeared to be more recent.

Looking at the back side of the Garden Wall / continental divide.

All the scenery is so vast and expansive, I felt dwarfed by my surroundings. Even the cedar trees are so large that you feel like an ant!

This is the start of our hike to Piegan Pass, the saddle in the center of the image below.

There were lots of ground squirrels, and their chirping was a constant sound throughout the hike.

Looking back down the valley we hiked up

Arriving at the crest of the pass and suddenly being face to face with so much rock!

We did some boot skiing on our exit from the pass. Much to his chagrin I have no pictures of Dash's descent because it was too scary for me to think about documenting it - I was just hoping he wouldn't fall and tumble into infinity.

 We felt that the hike to the pass wasn't enough, so we decided to loop back by taking another trail down a different canyon and picking up a shuttle to return to our car.

At the top of the next pass - red rocks!

We saw a peregrine zooming around up here, and it was nice and breezy for cooling off after a sweaty ascent.

The valley we descended into was filled with plenty of wildflowers and streams, a pleasant place!

We splashed around in the stream to revive our feet, which were hurting after hiking for about 15 miles on rocky ground. The icy glacial water felt incredible, and we were urged to leave by gathering storm clouds.

We made it back to the road just as we started to hear thunder. The shuttle arrived as the rain began to fall, and just in time too, because the storm turned out to have fierce winds that downed trees on the road and dropped some small hail! We were lucky to escape (mostly) dry after a long day.