Flathead Valley/Bigfork, Montana

Duane and I headed down to Montana once again for a long weekend trip. It has become a favorite place for short trips! There's a lot to see and do down there! This time we stayed at a little motel in Bigfork and did a day hike in the Jewel Basin to Birch Lake. It was hot, hot, hot!

As we arrived at our "destination" motel on Friday night, the sun was setting and Duane and I, naturally, decided to take out our cameras and grab a few quick shots.


Like I said, we stayed in a tropical destination motel...our suite was Jamaica! What fun. Jamaica in Montana...interesting :)

Our hike up to the lake was quite nice. We had stunning views of the Flathead Valley pretty much the entire way up! It was probably 32 degrees that day and we were quite low on water, unfortunately, so when we arrived at Birch Lake we both jumped in! It was refreshing, but also way too cold to go in again once I was out! Duane opted for a second swim and I just stood at the edge of the water and kept my feet cool :) We noticed some good-sized lake trout in there as well! After our cooling off, we took a walk around the lake before heading back out. It took a lot longer than expected, but it was quite nice anyways. There were no wild animal encounters, which is good, considering we were told of a bear sighting as well as a couple of mountain goats up at the lake. We were also lucky to have a hike nearly to ourselves. We met up with a few couples on our way in (and they were on their way out), and the lake was empty when we arrived. There were more people on our way out, though, and they were all on their way to camp at the lake, so we were glad to have cleared out before they all got there! We much prefer to hike without massive groups of other hikers.

After we got cleaned up at our motel, we drove into Bigfork to find a place for dinner. Well, the restaurant we ended up at was a lot nicer than we were hoping for! We looked at the menu and wanted to leave! Nothing appealed to us and it was pretty pricey. There didn't seem to be any reason to spend an arm and a leg on food you don't really want to eat! In the end we asked for the lunch menu and there were more items we would actually eat, so we ended up staying and having a nice dinner.

Our drive back to Alberta on Sunday was nice; we took the Going-To-The-Sun Road and it seemed like EVERYONE in Montana was also driving that route that day! There were crazy amounts of people on the highway! Duane didn't particularly enjoy the touristy part of it and didn't feel it was worth the $25 we had to pay to drive it. There were lots of stopping areas along the way where you could get out for pictures or to go on short hikes. I would have been interested in hiking had we had a bit more time to do so, and had there not been so many other people! As I said before, we much prefer hiking without throngs of people around...and that would have been way too much! All of my pictures from this part of the trip were taken from inside the car while we were driving/crawling/stopped along the way. There was also quite a bit of construction, which accounts for the stopping part of our drive :) We also made one last pit-stop once we were just about to meet back up with the highway that would take us back into Alberta...I was in dire need of a coffee!! Then we headed back on our way.

It was a great trip and really nice to get away from the city...oh how I can't wait until I can enjoy small-town life!

~K~