Hiking- Glacier National Park, Highline Trail
Yesterday Kat and I flew out to Glacier National Park with Michael and Anh in Michael’s Saratoga. It was pretty amazing how
much gear we packed in his airplane. The flight was beautiful; we landed and had a nice BBQ dinner.
Today we got up very early (at least by my standards) and headed up to Logan Pass which is on the continental divide. From there
we hiked about 3-4 miles on the Highline Trail to “haystack” little peak that Michael had scoped out for climbing. This was my
first time really climbing with ropes and all outside. I’ve done it many times in the gym but outside is a very different thing. It looked
like the climb was going to be pretty easy though which is just how I like it.
The first pitch was a breeze and was good confidence building. After that though the third pitch had a really tricky first bit. I was pretty
wiped out when I got to the top. After everyone got to the top of that we were trying to figure out how far it was to the top- we could see
what looked like an easy bit, but it wasn’t clear if that was the top or whether there were going to be some other tricky spots. Part of the
appeal of this climb was that the other side was a very gentle grassy slope. So we decided to see if we could traverse out to find an easier
way up to the top.
I suspect this wasn’t a great idea. We roped for the traverses but they were still pretty difficult and slow and things weren’t getting
any better. Eventually we could see what looked like the grassy slope close ahead, but there were also two ravines in the way
and those can be really difficult to cross.
So we decided to down-climb. I found the belay-down much scarier that in the gym at first. At the gym you just get to the top of the
wall and you already have your butt hanging over nothing. I finally managed to get going and we all got down but it took a while. We were
all pretty tired and eager to get back to the car and our camp-site.
For dinner we were really roughing it- since we were car-camping we had huge steaks, asparagus, baked potatoes, butter, a couple nice
bottles of wine and to top of off chocolate fondue. Its tough but someone has to do it.
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