Flying by the Seat of Our Plans

I (Laura) was particularly excited about entering Idaho.  I have always wanted to visit Idaho, ever since I had made a good college friend, Lindsay Jones, who was from there.  The geology is interesting and the scenery spectacular.  We had already made a half-mile jaunt into Idaho on this trip, but it was so small that road signs did not even announce that we had changed states.  Today, however, would be the real deal. On the gravel road down from Webb Mountain to the main road, we saw many more deer and two more red foxes.   For perspective, here is John pointing to the Webb Mountain lookout from the last post.  You can also see the Koocanusa bridge (across the Kootenai, which spans the Canada-USA border), where we took some of the night photos from earlier. We drove along the Kootenai River for a while, stopping to stretch our legs at Libby Falls and the Swinging Bridge.  The hike is maybe 0.5-1 mile from the lot on the main highway ...

I had asked everyone to bring one nice outfit for portraits.  We finally had some downtime and good weather, so I took pictures of Laura and Johnny. I have enjoyed combining long-exposures with portraits.  I'm not sure if the models love holding still so long.  There are multiple takes of this shot where Laura's hair is all over the place in the wind. It was already mid-afternoon and I wasn't sure that we'd have time to drive to and hike to Mt. Henry Lakes.  The forest service roads took a lot longer to drive than I had anticipated when looking at maps back home, so we elected to go to Boulder Lakes Trail which was closer than other afternoon sights.  Also, the trail was supposed to be a good bit shorter than other options, which would be good for Uncle John.   We arrived to find a gate blocking vehicle traffic farther out from Boulder Lakes trailhead than we had thought, making the hike just as long as Mt. Henry.  I'm ...

John and Laura: We headed out early because we were gearing up for a big day, trying to see the highlights of Glacier National Park all in one day!  Our account of Glacier NP will be outlined in another post, but here are some photos from the rest of our drive between Double Arrow Lookout and Webb Mountain.  First, Johnny took some photos of some of the wildflowers below the lookout. On a wooden bridge on our route, we spotted our first goldeneye of the trip.  Momma kept diving under the water and the little ducklings just kept scooting along.  Look at the ducklings' little cheeks! This was complete happenstance.  John pulled over to look at the map to see if we could easily reroute to check out a wetland complex near the lookout.  As he was swinging a U-turn, Uncle John pointed out the sign. John just had to turn back around to get a shot of this canola field, just before we entered Glacier NP!  He didn't know that I was sp...

Laura: I helped plan our day in Glacier National Park and chose a loop route that would allow us to drive a lot of the park without seeing the same thing twice: coming into the west side of the park by Apgar Visitor Center, driving east on Going to the Sun Road, south on HW 89 and MT-49, and then west on HW 2.  We stopped at the visitor center to ask if this was doable in one day.  The ranger seemed tired of such questions and said, "sure", so we enthusiastically went ahead with our plan.  It ended up being a long, but fantastic day!  I drove the first part, on Going to the Sun Road, because John and Uncle John do not like driving in crowds and we had heard that part of the park gets wall-to-wall.  I am pretty patient with people stopping in the middle of the highway to take photos and parking with half of their cars still on the road, so it worked out.  The traffic wasn't bad for most of the drive and there was so much to look at that I was glad to not fe...