Again we were unencumbered by pesky and inconvenient things we needed to do so we got to spend the day exploring. This time we chose to skirt the south boundary of Glacier National Park by taking US-2 from West Glacier to Marias Pass, the next pass south of Logan Pass along the Continental Divide. Fortunately, this road follows the middle fork of the Flathead River. It would be impossible to state which fork of the Flathead River passes through the most magnificent scenery. They are all fabulous. It is very difficult to describe the feelings of awe and serenity we get from looking at these fast-moving rivers of crystal-clear water passing through almost vertical mountains of abundantly colored rock.
All along the middle fork of the Flathead, Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway has a gradually climbing set of tracks that follow the river’s course up to a place called Goat Lick. They had to do some tunneling along the way because the terrain is very jagged and sometimes making a hole through the earth was the only way considering the maximum climb slope, long turning radius and limited traction of million pound trains. BNSF has also built quite a few trestles that skirt the nasty rock peninsulas and cross over the streams feeding the Flathead. There are long sections of snow sheds at the bottoms of some tall slopes to divert avalanches over the rails and allow trains to run year-round. The best part about all this is that BNSF did all their work without making the valley ugly.
Goat Lick is named for a section of rock along the Flathead where mountain goats, usually denizens of higher altitudes, descend to lick salt compounds occurring naturally on the steep rock surfaces. They follow this pattern each spring but are rarely seen at other times of the year. At Goat Lick the Flathead turns south but the road and the railway turn east up Bear Creek all the way to Marias Pass at about 5200′ elevation. The railway came through here because Marias Pass is the lowest in the Rockies range between the headwaters of the Mississippi River and the Pacific Northwest.
We continued up, now following Bear Creek, to the pass and pulled out at the monument they have there to a railroad engineer who built the line through here and, strangely, an obelisk dedicated to Teddy Roosevelt. Right across the road and the railroad tracks is an enormous section of upthrust earth topped with about 500 feet of strata that came here from 50 miles southwest during what must have been a whopper of an earthquake. The ridge has a big row of mountains with elevations of 7200 to 8800 feet. The top of this upthrust section is quite jagged and, so far, nobody has been able to build a road over this terrain. From the monument we could not see either end of this formation; it runs horizon to horizon.
We turned around at the pass and headed back toward home. Not being encumbered with nasty scheduling constraints, we did pull into almost all the river access roads and turnouts along US-2 so we could get out and gawk at the gorgeous mountains, dazzling turquoise and light green river, engineering marvels installed by BNSF and enormous forests. We have not found a bad road to drive here in the area of Glacier National Park. This place is stunning.
There are some pix we took during today’s drive and you can give ’em a sniff if you click here