We decided to take the Avalanche Lake trail, and it was well worth it. The picture unforunately doesn't really capture the way the mountains circle around this lake. The trail leads through a wooded area, up the slope of part of a mountain and you come out of thick trees and things into this huge openning surrounded by mountains with the lake in the middle. It was quite impressive and I highly recommend the trail.
This was a neat waterfall that we went past on our way back from the Avalanche Lake trail. The Avalanche Lake trail broke of this loop trail called Trail of the Cedars, and that's where this waterfall was. Neat, huh?
We stayed the night at Lake McDonald, in the western half of the park, then went further east on Going-To-The-Sun Road to get to the Hidden Lake trail. On the way up we ran into some mountain goats.
After an unexpected trip through some rather snowy regions, we reached the end of the Hidden Lake overlook trail. If you're curious, that white peak in the far back of the picture is a glacier. Glacier National Park has around 50 of them, but they're all melting.
From this trail we also got a great view of Mt. Clements which was carved out by glaciers. We walked a little ways down the continuation of the Hidden Lake trail to see how the trail was and we ran into someone who knew a lot about geology, and he told us how a lot of Glacier National Park was formed.
"Sir, you've got a marmet on your foot!" Right before we decided not to continue on the trail down to the lake, we ran into a marmet with a foot fetish. When we found it, it was chewing on somebody's shoe. It also chewed on this person's son's shoes. We wanted a picture of it, but we had to take one quickly because it kept running at us trying to chew on our feet too.
We came back from that trail and ate lunch and were ready to move on. Since we didn't spend as much as we thought we might hiking in the morning, we decided to drive all the way to Helena before quitting for the night. We got a room in a Super 8 Motel and in the parking lot there was this great license plate.