More Highlights from Glacier National Park

By Wesley Fryer On August 7, 2011 · · Add Comment

Yesterday was another spectacular day for my Dad and I as we continued to explore Glacier National Park in Montana. Since our hotel last night in Kalispell had a much faster Internet connection, I was able to upload all our photos from day 1 and day 2 of our GNP explorations to Flickr and organize them in a collection of sets. I shared a few highlight photos from day 1 in yesterday morning’s post. Here are some highlights from yesterday.

Yesterday morning we went north from St Mary (on the east side of the park) and entered through the third entrance by Many Glacier Hotel. Wow want a place and a view! The hotel was built by the Great Northern Railroad in 1915, along with others in a “Swiss chalet style,” to encourage tourism to Glacier National Park and other points west of St Louis. This is a photo from the parking lot above the hotel.

This is a panoramic photo from the same location, taken with the iPhone application Pano.

Here is another panorama, which I took from the porch of the hotel.

In addition to enjoying the mountain views and seeing a grizzly bear from the porch, my dad and I had lunch in the hotel restaurant. This reminded us both of Old Faithful Inn and Lake Hotel in Yellowstone.

This is one of my favorite photos from yesterday, it’s a “Prevent Resource Damage” sign at Logan’s Pass atop the “Going to the Sun Road.” The impressive backdrop makes this sign much more persuasive, IMHO!

Some people actually brought sleds and snow saucers and went sledding in the snow fields above Logan’s Pass. This is a photo of a deer grazing near the Visitor’s Center. Note the snowfields in the background.

These folks had finished sledding and were packing their snow saucers home.

Glacier NP is a perfect destination for HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography. HDR software takes a brightly exposed version of a scene and combines it with a darkly exposed version to render a digital image with greater color depth. One disadvantage of my favorite iPhone HDR app, Pro HDR, is it does not automatically include location EXIF (geo-location) data with photos. The HDR photo below looking up at Jackson Glacier, on the east side of the continental divide on “Going to the Sun Road,” shows one of the twenty-six rapidly disappearing glaciers in the park. (My favorite iPhoneography capture apps are included in this Appolicious list from July.)

Here’s another HDR image looking up toward Jackson glacier.

This screenshot of HDR processing shows the two original images which were combined to form the one above. (This was created with the built-in HDR feature of the iPhone4’s camera.)

Glacier National Park had 150 glaciers in 1850, now there are just 25 or 26 left. Climate models predict all the glaciers will be melted away by 2030. If you haven’t made a visit to Glacier NP yet, it’s time to go.

This is my favorite photograph from yesterday. It shows waterfalls flowing down from the snowfields above Logan’s Pass, just on the east side of the continental divide. I used this for my Photo 365 image yesterday and titled it, “An Eden of Waterfalls.”

I’ll close with a photo of a Glacier National Park animal icon. The fleet of red “jammer” buses in GNP have a mountain goat on the side of them.

These are refurbished buses from the early part of the 20th century.

We did see quite a few mountain goats in our two days in Glacier, but yesterday just below Logan’s Pass we saw a herd of big horn sheep! This was more big horn sheep in one place than my dad or I had ever seen. This was very exciting for us, as players of “the game game.”

If you have not already, make plans to visit Glacier National Park someday soon. It’s an incredible place that will take your breath away.

My hotel bandwidth isn’t fast enough to let me upload HD videos from the past two days, so I’ll save sharing those for another day.

Remember you can also explore my Glacier National Part photos from yesterday via this Flickr map of saved geo-locations. Not all the photos have locations saved, and some are guestimates, but most are there. I REALLY like this feature of digital photography! (More details on this post from last night)