On the stolen land of the Blackfeet, Ktunaxa, Cayuse, Umatilla, and Walla Walla peoples.

This post is about my 2022 thru attempt. I’m not currently thru-hiking and will not be in the 2024 season. I’ll announce concrete plans when I have them.

Pulling up on Glacier National Park from the train was something out of the stories I read as a child. Glacier is beautiful in a way that commands attention, in a way that caught me off guard. I’d seen mountains from the window of a plane. I’d seen mountains in photographs, ones far larger than the ones in Glacier. It is something else entirely to roll up onto them, to stand and see them off in the distance, to descend into a valley and walk up over a pass. I will never be able to quantify that awe.

I got off the train and walked with some other hikers to Looking Glass Base Camp, a hostel in Glacier geared specifically toward CDT and PNT section and thru hikers, which I will occasionally refer to as Luna’s. Luna’s was a restaurant in it’s former life, but after COVID, its owners (Luna and Will) decided to take a different track. They removed most of the restaurant furniture and started allowing people to sleep inside on the floor and to pitch their shelters in the yard. It might be less than what most people look for in accommodations, but to all of us, it was heaven. All we really wanted and needed was a place to shower, sleep, use the wifi, and charge electronics. They provided that, with the addition of an industrial kitchen where we could cook.

I met so many hikers, and they immediately gave me the low-down on how permitting works in Glacier, ways to circumvent issues, and how to slack pack a couple of sections to save time. I pitched my tent, planning to zero the next day before starting. The permit system in Glacier is difficult to navigate. I’m not affiliated with the Parks Service so please don’t take any of this as gospel if you’re going out there yourself. What you need to know for the purposes of my posts making sense is this:

• Backcountry campgrounds are primitive and only accessible on foot. Front-county campgrounds have some amenities and are accessible on foot or by vehicle.
• You need an advance permit to stay the night at any backcountry campground in Glacier NP. You need to self-register at any front-country campground at Glacier NP as a backpacker, but there are several sites allocated just to walk up backpackers and while they are first-come first-serve, we never came close to running out of space. Granted, we were all chill with packing ourselves into them like sardines, but so it goes with thru-hiking. A lot of boundaries that exist in normal life sort of fade away out there.
• You do not need a permit to hike in Glacier NP provided that you are not staying overnight in the wilderness.
• Permits for backcountry sites could be obtained through the lottery system online. If you didn’t get one in the lottery, you could get one by walking up to the permit office in Two Medicine (~10 trail miles north of East Glacier), but you had to be present in person. Permits were first-come first serve and days would fill up quickly, but they would only give permits for up to one or two days out.
• Because of permitting, hikers generally piecemeal sections together through slackpacking, multiple permits, and hitchhiking. Sections are often done out of order or in the “wrong” direction (i.e. a SOBO hiker doing a section of the park northbound). My experience was no different.

I was eager to get going and ended up doing the hike from East Glacier to Two Medicine on my first full day in Montana. At first I was just hiking in the forest, but I stepped out of the woods into a vast meadow surrounded by mountains and it was epic in a way I was completely unprepared for. I was really floored.

Photos are all from my hike between East Glacier and Two Medicine.

The elevation gain was substantial compared to what I was used to, and by the end of it I was really struggling. I got to the top of the high point and the wind really picked up. This was my first taste of walking on a tiny path cut into the side of a mountain, and I had to do it in substantial wind. I generally don’t mind heights as long as I’m not super close to the edge, but being on the edge was disconcerting. Still, it was stunning.

On my way down on the other side, I came up on a family of bighorn sheep. There were two adults and a couple of babies, and the babies had decided they would prefer to nap in the middle of the trail. Unfortunately, due to the grade, I didn’t have a way around them. I made some noise while approaching slowly, and eventually they did move (further down the trail) to let me through. I encountered the same sheep again fifteen minutes later and repeated the process.

A rainstorm came in and really started pelting down. I stopped to put my rain coat on and hiked through it, approaching Two Medicine by road just as it was starting to get dark. My feet hurt with a fury I hadn’t known since New Mexico, and I did fear a bit for the few weeks of muscle building that would have to come. I could not believe the beauty, could not believe my own luck, and still I was weary.

The rain slowed and stopped as I got to the bottom, and I walked along the road by Two Medicine Lake, headed for the campground. The view was unreal. All of the people who told me to not be intimidated by the permits, and to make sure not to skip Glacier, were right. I love the desert, but by a standard of sheer awe, Glacier is the most beautiful place I have ever been.

The next morning I woke up and promptly tore an ankle brace. I ended up heading back to East Glacier to order replacements (Two Medicine does not have anywhere with wifi or a cell signal) and to sew my broken one with dental floss so that I could continue through the park while I waited for the new ones to arrive.