Just a follow-up to say thanks for the trip advice about Glacier.
Like I said, we took my mom with us, so the adventure factor was fairly low. The drive was long and brutal. We did not climb a "proper" mountain, but did do some fun stuff:
These guys had special telescopes set up at the visitor's center where you could look directly at the sun and see the arcs coming off them in real time (well, 8 minutes delayed of course). Very cool. There was also an astronomy program that night.
We kayaked in St Mary Lake several times, made it to both Wild Goose Island and another un-named island further west. I jumped into the lake and it was cold, but not as cold as I expected.
We hiked to Avalanche lake and jumped in (colder than St. Mary) Parking was insane for this hike so we had to park about a mile down the road.
Hiked to Hidden Lake Overlook at sunset, awesome views.
Road biked Going-to-Sun road from the east and dropped down the west side about 4 miles ? Rode back up and met the wife and went back down the west side with here about 2 miles and road back up to Logan Pass.
Drove to Two Medicine and crossed a creek and hiked along the lake for about a mile (seemed like perfect Grizzly territory)
Drove to Waterton for a day and attempted to Mountain-bike the legal trail there (but it was closed
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Instead we hiked south along Waterton Lake and made it to Bertha Falls. On the way back to USA, stopped and did a short MT bike ride on the other legal trail, but was seriously freaked about Grizzlies (the vegetation cover was perfect for them and the berries were out, so they said chances of an encounter were greater, also more likely to encounter them mountain-biking than hiking).
We hiked 19 miles in one day, starting from Many Glacier went up over Swiftcurrent Pass and made side-trip to summit of Swiftcurrent Mountain (saw moose in a lake below with binoculars) and then visited Granite Chalet (as a geologist, I saw only limestone around there and no granite) and hiked to Logan Pass via the awesome Highline Trail. Started our hike at about 8:00 AM and reached Logan Pass at about 6:00 PM, took free shuttle buss back to campground.
On return trip, we spent a night in Yellowstone and kayaked out to Stevinson Island (about 8.5 miles round trip per GPS). Total driving on the trip, including side trips was a bit under 2,500 miles
There was haze from many fires in the northwest that did cut the clarity of the views, but they were still great. This was a LOT of driving, and not something I will do again anytime soon. I wish I could go back and climb some of these peaks besides Swiftcurrent (although Swiftcurrent was great). We drove to West Glacier and along Flathead lake on the way home in order to avoid some roadwork, but this probably added hundreds (?) of miles to our trip.
We did see one Grizzly, but it was from the car on our way to Many Glacier. It was eating bushes along the road. Saw a few Black Bears also from car near Two Medicine. saw the moose from summit of Swiftcurrent via binoculars, maybe saw a few deer in various places, saw a fox in the campground, otherwise no wildlife.
They are doing a LOT of road work on "the sun road" and there are several long delays.
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