Weekend wandering

Hiking through a burn near St.
Mary on the west side of the park

Great Bear Wilderness, south of the park.

Looking across Two Medicine Lake
from the north shore trail

No Name lake

We've been working four 10 hour days when we aren't based in the backcountry on a hitch.  This leaves three days for exploring if we can muster the energy.  This weekend we took a short hike into the Great Bear Wilderness on a Forest Service Trail south of Highway 2 (just south of the park).  There's lot of beautiful scenery over here but the Forest Service Trails are notoriously hard to hike with overgrown areas, downed trees and incorrect maps.  The flowers are starting to really come out though and the open areas are beautiful.  We also drove over to the west side of the park to take a hike along Saint Mary Lake.  The east and west sides of the park have pretty different climates and often if it's raining on one side, it's sunny on the other.

A pond in Great Bear Wilderness