Our first night we shared the campground with a couple from Washington State and two graduate students from Washington. There were quite a few groups at Glacier who were from the state of Washington. Supper time was a good chance to get to visit with the others who were on the trail. For our meals, we only bought one dehydrated meal, everything else we ate we bought at a grocery store. While the ease of convenience of the dehydrated meals really is nice, Wendy and I are both fairly well burned out on those kinds of meals from our days of being Mountain Trek Rangers. It was interesting to see how all of the other groups we encountered had much smaller bear bags than we did. Our food was really the biggest and heaviest of our load.
We slept in the next morning to about 8AM. We didn’t have a real difficult hike ahead of us, so we just took our time. We eventually left camp around 10AM. Again most of our hiking was through burned out forest, but this time the trail managed to go into regularly forested areas as well. One nice thing about hiking in a burn area is that you get to see quite a bit of a view that would normally be obstructed by the vegetation. This was our easiest day of hiking. It had us going 6.4 miles with elevation changes of 945 ft up and 565 ft down.
The view from this camp was much better. It allowed us to see the Highline Trail that we would be taking in a couple of days from now. Wendy and I also decided that since we would be back here in another day, that we would only take the food we would need to get back to this camp and leave the rest up on a bear pole. There were more folks in camp that night at the eating area. We got to talk to the others about where they had been, what they had seen, and what they thought about our plans for the last day, hiking to Logan Pass. For the most part everyone recommended we take the long way in.
The deer at the camps in Glacier were fairly aggressive. They seemed to be more of a problem than the bears. They were very interested in getting our salt. If you peed somewhere, a deer would show up to get the salt from your urine. We had heard stories that deer were taking socks, boots, hiking sticks, and anything else not tied down to try to get the salt out of them. This was a first for me. That night, a bandanna that Wendy had tied on to her pack that had sweat on it was chewed on by a deer.