Piegan Pass, Glacier National Park, Montana
Submitted by HG on August 19, 2008 - 11:26pm.
Saint Mary Lake
Heading out
View looking towards Going-to-the-Sun road. You can see the trail head.
Climbing towards Piegan Pass. Siyeh mountain in the background.
Traversing snow fields on the climb towards Piegan pass
View on the other side of Piegan pass
Looks so innocent ;-)
Jul 2004
Day 2 of the trip dawned bright and sunny. Our plan was to hike to Piegan Pass. You can do a longer hike from Going-to-the-Sun road to Many Glacier, but we were only going till the pass. From what we had read, it looked like an easy hike with some great views and a good way to acclimatize ourselves for the rest of the trip. After grabbing a quick breakfast at the restaurant at the Red Eagle Motel, we headed to the Saint Mary Lake visitor center. While the previous day had been overcast, that day the view from the Saint Mark Lake viewpoint was much better.
Saint Mary Lake
The Piegan pass trail begins from the Siyeh Bend parking area on the Going-to-the-Sun road. There were just a handful of cars and we had no problem finding a spot. The trail climbs gradually and after about 45 minutes, we reached a trail junction where we took the north fork. It was pretty quiet in the forest – we didn’t see other hikers till later in the day.
Heading out
Wildflowers along the trail
The trail is pretty easy as it climbs towards the second trail junction at about 3 miles. It took us about 2 hours to reach this point. The right fork goes to Siyeh Pass. We stuck to the left heading towards Piegan Pass. The trail passes along the base of Siyeh Mountain and then climbs out of the tree line around the base of Cataract Mountain.
View looking towards Going-to-the-Sun road. You can see the trail head.
Climbing towards Piegan Pass. Siyeh mountain in the background.
Traversing snow fields on the climb towards Piegan pass
The last part towards Piegan Pass is a bit uphill but it is not that strenuous.Finally, after about 3.5 hours, we reached Piegan pass. As mentioned earlier, you can continue this hike all the way to Many Glacier. There are good views from Piegan Pass. Beyond the pass, you get a view of the valley that leads to Grinnell Lake and Lake Joesphine. Looking the other way from the pass, you get a view of the mountains on the other side of Going-to-the-Sun road.
View on the other side of Piegan pass
Another view from Piegan pass
View looking towards Going-to-the-Sun road
It had a nice and easy hike to the pass. We sat down to have lunch and out of the rocks gleefully bounded this monstrously monstrous marmot. This guy was scary – to borrow a phrase, he took a couple of years’ growth out of me. He was after our food and he wasn’t scared a bit. He probably figured that these two desis weren’t going to do anything to him.
The bad guy of the mountain
Looks so innocent ;-)
We managed to scare him off eventually. If we had this much trouble with a marmot, I can only wonder if we came across a bear. That would be freaky. The hike back was uneventful. This was a good choice for our first hike and we felt ready to take on the other hikes that we had planned to do in this trip. You can look at some more photos in the Glacier National Park photo album.
some marmot!
some marmot!
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