Hiking the Garden Wall in Glacier National Park

Today was our last chance to spend quality time in Glacier National Park.  We saved a great day-hike for the last.  We rose at 5:15 am to get to the park shuttle transit center at 7:00 am and catch the first shuttle up to Logan Pass.  Our goal:  to hike the Highline Trail along the Garden Wall, a hike with views surpassed only by the descent from Augustborg Pass down toward Zermatt in the Swiss Alps!

Here's Kathy at the trailhead.  It was a little cool as we started the hike at 9am.

The views grabbed us right away, and just kept getting better as we hiked:

Along the way, we ran into another little hoary marmot friend, peering curiously at us as we passed on the trail:

Looking back at Logan Pass, we were amazed to see the fog pouring UP over the brink of the pass!

We hiked past Haystack Butte to Haystack Pass - a roundtrip mileage of about 8 miles.  We stopped for lunch at Haystack Pass.  Here's a photo of David enjoying the view to the west from the pass:

Returning from the pass, Kathy couldn't resist playing explorer by standing on her favorite boulder with views eastward toward Logan Pass:

This is one of our favorite views, looking toward Heavens Peak in the center with McDonald Valley and McDonald Creek below it.  The creek empties into Lake McDonald, and our previous backpack up to Arrow Lake and Camas Lake was on the other side of Heaven's Peak.

Some sections of the hike featured steep drop-offs from sheer cliff walls.  Here's David standing on a particularly cliffy part of the trail --

-- and Kathy demonstrating the proper method of grasping the cable strung along the cliff face to prevent accidental falls down the mountain:

By the time we returned to Logan Pass, it was 1:00 pm.  Back in the visitor center, Kathy found and purchased a bandana printed with a topo map of Glacier National Park.  What with waiting for shuttles, changing shuttles and driving the 30 miles back to Kalispell, we didn't get back to the RV until after 4:00 pm.  We tucked into a beer and some really good crockpot pork loin, thinking that this last venture into Glacier National Park was a fitting end to our visit!