Day 5: Craters of the Moon NM to Glacier NP
July 11th, 2007
This morning we found ourselves up and breaking down camp at 6:30. We were heading out to the Cave Trail by 7:40. We decided to skip some of the “caves” and focused on Indian Tunnel, which is a lava tube tunnel. At the end point of the tunnel, we had to climb out through a small hole. Kim was not to keen about this, mainly because it was painful to use your knees as leverage because the lava is so sharp. But we both made it and enjoyed the little excursion. We opted to forgo anything else on the trail and instead used the extra time to stop into the visitor center, which had been closed yesterday by the time we had arrived. We got our necessary passport stamp as well as paid for a park patch, which was currently out of stock. We provided a self-addressed, stamped envelope so hopefully they actually mail the patch to us seeing as we paid for it.
We headed north on 93 toward Missoula and we saw our first Arizona plate on the trip. It was nice to see others venturing far away from home. Not too far into Montana, we stopped at Big Hole National Battlefield. We arrived just in time to join up with a ranger led hike on the Siege Trail. This was a great opportunity as we learned a lot about the battle and had a pleasant ranger as our guide. We were both very impressed with the park and look forward to coming back to take in one of the other hikes. Scott stated that Big Hole was the “best place I’ve seen so far.” We had a few minutes to spare in the visitor center but had to pass on the orientation video as we are trying to get to Glacier NP tonight. It is a LONG drive from here. Because of the distance we had to cover, Scott decline Kim’s offer to drive because she drives too slow.
We had to make a stop in Missoula to take care of some unexpected errands. First we stopped at Staples to purchase the correct size labels to use for our NPS Passport stamps. We had purchased a package of labels prior to leaving but today at Big Hole NB we realized the package had been mislabeled. Once that was taken care of we stopped at REI to see if there were different sleeping bag pads we cold purchase as we realized last night that the sleeping bag pads we had with us make a very annoying noise against the tent fabric. An REI employee recommended that we buy a blanket from Target, so that was our next purchase. Scott had to check his work email to ensure that things were going OK so we spent some time at a Kinko’s before eating dinner at Arby’s.
After gassing up at Costco, we headed on to Whitefish, MT. On the way we crossed over the 2000 mile mark on our trip. We were getting so tired that we decided to just sleep in a rest area near Whitefish instead of trying to find a campsite at midnight. The rest area we made our “bed” in was basically a parking lot in front of tennis courts. Very strange location. It is very late and we are very tired. We hope that we can get some sleep.