Wednesday, August 28, 2013

Camping at Glacier National Park

We got to our beautiful camping spot with a view of Lake McDonald at Glacier National Park about noon today.  We're at Fish Creek, a big (168 spaces) and quiet (at least tonight) campground   No electric hook ups here, but we have solar so that's OK with us. The park only lets people run generators for two hours around each meal time, which helps keep down the noise in places without electric hook ups. 

It rained most of the morning and during our entire drive here from the private RV park where we stayed for the last two days.  But within an hour of arriving at Glacier it was sunny and warm. 

We took a short walk on the the pebbly beach of Lake McDonald, found a spot where we could put in the kayaks, and then paddled for a couple of hours. 


Jim taking a photo of the mountains at the north end of Lake McDonald, Glacier Park's largest lake. The mountains look a little foggy because of the rain from earlier in the day.
Our camping spot at Glacier's Fish Creek Campground.  Lake McDonald is down a hill to the right of our rig.
Our previous camping spot at Glacier Meadows Campground, a private RV park,  was about 40 miles from Glacier National Park.  We had a good spot at the far end of a line of about 40 RVs. 
The first day at the private campground, we drove to Glacier to check things out and discovered we needed to give our kayaks a thorough washing before we could use them at Glacier -- so we did just that.   Of special concern is the quagga mussel, an invasive fresh water mussel that severely damages native species.  Quagga mussels also clog what they touch (harbors,  beaches, boats, water pipes, etc.) wherever they colonize. The ranger we talked with told us we were in a "gray area" because even though we clean our boats after each use and met the park's other boating requirements, we'd kayaked in some quagga-mussel-infected states and the kayaks each had a small amount of sand in them.  

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