Jenn gave us some good hiking and camping recommendations in the Whitefish Range so we dropped the trailer at their house and then headed back north for our first car/ tent camping of the trip.
The Whitefish range is west of glacier and runs up to Canada. We made our way on gravel roads through the Kootenai National Forest and soon saw signs warning that logging trucks were working in the area. The road we were on was passable for cars but trailers are not recommended. It was pretty tight when the double log trucks were barrelling around corners. The trees and plants all around the logging roads were coated in road dust.
We passed one lakeside campground that was fairly full to make our way over the ridge to Red Meadow Campground. There was one other car parked there and we got a beautiful campsite right by the lake. Once we got there, we started looking at the map and possible hikes and again realized that everything was pretty far away except a very long, pretty difficult hike that we decided we were not ready to do. The site was so beautiful though, that we decided to paddle a little and spend the night there, heading out early the next morning to make it to a trailhead for a hike on the eastern side of the range. We made dinner and our night’s entertainment consisted of trying to take pictures of bee butts as the bees feasted on fireweed nectar, listening to a couple from LA serenade the night in on instruments as they took our boards out on the lake and listening to a man yell at his dogs to come back. Then everything quieted down and we headed to bed.
The next morning, we packed up in the cold to make our way to the trailhead for Mount Hefty and Thoma Lookout.
We headed up and up and up, through woods and next to a creek for the first part. About 45 minutes in, Mike was in the lead and saw a grizzly bear up ahead on the path. We retreated a little while I pulled out the bear spray and luckily the bear retreated up the hill away from us. From then on I was a little paranoid and tried to keep a lookout for bears until I got too tired to worry about bears. We climbed up as the forest receded, huckleberry and blueberry plants abounded and the view opened up to the mountains around us. We looked ahead and thought we saw Hefty, but then we climbed to that peak and realized that Hefty was quite a bit further with a big ravine between us and it and the trail seemed to go missing. We decided that we had gone far enough. We admired the Canadian Rockies to the north, the peaks of Glacier to the east and the Whitefish Range to the west and south. We sat among the wildflowers and enjoyed the breeze while we ate our lunch before we headed back down the trail. We thought we might make it to Thoma too, but when we got back to the split, we both decided that we had no more “up” in us and headed back to the car.
There was a campground just down the road a bit, but we are always on the lookout for private spots to camp alone and we found a beauty. Just off the road we found a wide open spot surrounded by trees and just down from the site were springs that were the headwater of Trail Creek. In the space of 20 feet, the river went from a dry creek bed to significant pool of rushing water. You could see the water burst up through cracks in the rock underneath.
The next morning we bundled up to drink our coffee in whatever sun we could find until the temperature warmed up enough to make us want to move. We headed down the North Fork Road, stopping in Polebridge to try to grab some lunch at the Northern Lights Saloon, but they were closed early in the week, so we made due with sandwiches from our cooler once we got to the trailhead for the hike to Cyclone Lookout. This was a two mile hike up to a fire tower and there were some great views of Glacier. We soaked up some sun, watched a chipmunk try to get into our pack and headed back down, eating blueberries along the way.
