Glacier N.P. Continued

The Two Medicine area was a new area to visit for the both of us. We camped at Two Medicine Lake for two nights. While there we did a 17 mile day hike that included 2,500 ft of climbing the Continental Divide, around Flinsch Pk, Mt. Morgan and Rising Wolf Mtn before ending back at Two Medicine Lake. This was our epic hike for the weekend and to encourage ourselves to do the entire loop we told ourselves that is may be our last epic hike for awhile since we may have adopted a little baby by next summer.

The first photo is Erik stretching and reading the topo map before our hike. We started hiking at 9:00 AM. Then a photo of the start of our hike looking from the east end of Pray lake (more like a large pond) west to Medicine Lake and the Contential Divide in the distance. Dawson Pass (6.7 miles into our hike) is to the right of the furthest mountain and can't be seen.

The next two photos are on the hike up to Dawson Pass; Tonya with the western half of Two Medicine Lake in the background and then further up the trail pointing to Dawson Pass.

On the way up to Dawson Pass we stopped to wait for a mama moose to eat her way off the trail and passed by some big horn sheep (ewes) also eating. The moose was pretty docile. Other hikers told us there were some very large bulls in the area, but we didn't see them and wouldn't have gotten as close if we had.

We made it to Dawson Pass and the top of the Contential Divide in pretty good shape. We ate lunch at the pass with two other hikers we met on the trail, enjoying the view down into Nyack Creek valley on the other side of the Divide (photo below on lt). After our hike we walked north, along and below the Divide which was fairly steep and exposed (photo below on rt). We had perfect weather for the hike. This part of the hike wouldn't have been a good place to be during a storm of any kind.

About 8.5 miles into our hike we came to a point where we could see down into the valley (Dry Fork) we would eventually take to hike back down to our campsite. In the photo below we are standing on the Contential Divide, looking east, down to Oldman Lake and the Dry Fork Valley. We didn't desend here, but still needed to walk around Mt. Morgan (off the photo to the left) and then hike down the ridge you can see to the left above the lake, the ridge is actually a pass (Pitamakan Pass).

We were both still feeling good at this point, not to tired and we knew we were going to finish the day in good shape. The photo of Tonya was taken from the same viewpoint, but looking to our immediate right an Flinsch Peak.

Well when we finally made is around to Pitamakan Pass to drop down to Oldman Lake we had a good view of where we had been when we took the photos above (the saddle at the base of Flinsch Peak). The trail down was steep, but not as steep as the photos may appear to show it.

Once we got down to the bottom near Oldman Lake all we had left to do was hike the ~ 7 miles to our campsite. We didn't take the short detour to see the lake, although it looked pretty, because we were getting tired and didn't want to add any more distance to our hike that day. The hike out was pretty, particularly the upper part of the valley. The photo to the left is looking up the valley after a little less than 30 minues down the valley and the phot to the right is looking down the valley after maybe an hour down the valley.

Finally we made it back to our campsite. The last two miles seemed to take a lot longer to walk than the first two miles of our hike. It didn't feel like we were walking that much slower, but either we were slower of the mileage markers are off. The last photo is Tonya resting at our campsite.