Glacier National Park (July 3-18) Part 4: Arrival in East Glacier

Brownies Hostel (photo by Camo)

After leaving Chicago on the afternoon of the fifth of July, the Amtrak Empire Builder slowly began making its way west. By evening, we were following the Mississippi River. Unfortunately after sunset, a passenger in the car I was in had a sudden seizure and the train had to make an emergency stop while the EMT boarded and took the man to the hospital. It was a fairly long night on the train, but thankfully uneventful for the remaining of the ride to East Glacier. As the sun began to rise on the morning of the 6th, I walked to the lounge car and had some coffee and had a nice conversation with another passenger also spending a week in Glacier with her son and their scout troop. We watched the grasslands pass by the window while we talked. The grasslands continued until late in the afternoon, when the train finally came within view of the Rocky Mountains. We were about two hours late, Camo and his friend were in East Glacier waiting for my train.

At long last the train pulled into East Glacier around 6:00pm. The ride felt like a strange dream. Being practically immobile for that length of time made my body hurt, and the constant dozing on and off made me lose track of time. Where the hell was I?

Camo and his friends greeted me off the train. It was a warm and peaceful evening in Glacier. Camo had already booked us a night at Brownies hostel in East Glacier. His friends had other plans for the week so they unloaded Camo's pack, said goodbye, and suddenly we were in trail mode again. Since I was 24 hours late, Camo had already made our camping reservations with the ranger in Many Glacier earlier in the day. We had planned a southbound hike along the CDT through Glacier, but due to the number of people looking to camp in the back country that week, the ranger told Camo we would have to go northbound instead. We also had a couple days that were much longer than we wanted. That was the price to pay for forgoing the online reservations and doing the "walk in" reservations instead. No big deal really, as our situation began to make itself real, I was kind of looking forward to hiking through Glacier the opposite direction than I did in 2013.

Catching up and discussing the trail made us hungry so we had dinner at the Mexican restaurant in East Glacier. I ordered a giant burrito that filled my entire plate. After dinner we did a couple of chores around town that included picking up a few forgotten items, like a lighter.

Sun was setting in East Glacier around 9:30 pm. We hiked back to Brownies and had to get ready to catch some Z's. Our itinerary had us hiking about 17 miles on day 1 to Old Man Lake. 4,000 foot elevation gain. We planned to start hiking at 7:30am. We had all day to get there. We didn't anticipate just how hard it was going to be...