Day 7 Glacier to St. Maries, ID

We got up the next morning and had coffee.  Since this was a primitive campground, there was no potable water onsite.  There was, however, a creek running by our site.  Chuck suggested we could just use that water to make coffee, and I expressed concern about there being cows wading in it and such.  He made coffee with it anyway, and assured me that he'd let the water boil for at least 5 minutes beforehand.  It was all good, as it turned out, my digestive tract was unharmed--that is to say, nothing was any worse than usual.

It was now Thursday, and we wanted to be back home by Saturday so we could have a couple days to recoup before going back to work (Monday was Labor Day).  That meant we had 3 days to make it from Glacier to Seattle.  Not an impossible task at all, but we had an unspoken pact to avoid major highways unless it was necessary.  So we mentally prepared for the power trek we had ahead of us.

We really wanted to see the scenery of the Going-to-the-Sun road again, but we really did not want to deal with the crazy work zones and traffic, so we instead went around the long way, from East Glacier to West Glacier, which turned out to be a lot longer and more desolate than we'd anticipated.

Heading away from our campsite

There was still fantastic scenery to be had and we pulled off at a scenic overlook for a pit stop.  Chuck also had a task to perform.  I don't want to delve too much into Chuck's personal life here, but he'd recently gone through a divorce. Obviously, it's not an easy thing for anyone, and this being about the easternmost point of the trip, we had a ceremony of letting go of the past, and getting it as far away as possible. I can't speak for him, but I think it did him well.

I think Going-to-the-Sun Road is on the other side of that ridge.

The only picture where I managed to get both of us in frame

We left from there and made our way towards West Glacier, what would be the next bastion of civilization.  As we were making our way, my gas light came on, which is never a comforting sign.  We kept going, looking for gas at any point.  After a little while longer, my gas light went solid.  I had never let it get to that point before, but from what I'd read on the forums, blinking means "Yeah, you'd better think about getting gas some time soon" whereas solid means "Why are you still riding, you fool? Stop and fill up NOW!"  But, being as there was no option but to keep going, we did exactly that.  I did manage to make it to West Glacier with 180+ miles on the trip odometer (the light usually comes on around 150 or so). It was the happiest I've been to buy overpriced gas to date.

We both filled up, and decided to get lunch at the cafe attached to the store.  I had a bison burger, and Chuck had some other sort of burger.  We both felt that the meal was worthy of a "meh."  It wasn't horrible, but it wasn't much more than sustenance.  There was a souvenir shop attached, and I got a couple coasters, one for myself and one for a friend.  I had wanted to get shot glasses, but the Glacier glasses were lame...just a silhouette of a bear that said Glacier National Park underneath.  So I went for slightly less lame stone coasters with pictures of animals on them.

From then on out, we had some steady riding ahead of us as we made our way into Idaho.  We hit a lot of really cool roads along the way, though most of it is a blur

A break somewhere along the way. Is that a pile of mud in front of my bike?

No, no it's not.

We made it to St. Marie, ID where we would camp at Heyburn State Park.  Before going to the park though, we stopped at the local grocery store and got some supplies for hobo packs.  As we pulled up, a couple guys pulled up next to us and asked questions about our bikes and such.  Chuck was particularly impressed that the guy recognized that his bike was an FZ6R and was asking specific questions about it.  He was also somewhat familiar with the SV, though it was more along the lines of "Oh yeah, I think that's what my buddy's girlfriend rides."  Sigh.

While shopping, Chuck got hit on by a nasty girl--his words, not mine, though I saw the woman he was talking about and I can't really disagree.  Ahh well, its still nice to be noticed, right?

We rode to Heyburn on what would be a great twisty road, but it was late in the day so we had the sun right in our eyes.   A lot of turns we had to take slowly, and even then, had to just hope that we weren't about to run into a pothole or deer.

We didn't know what the camping situation would be like at Heyburn, so followed signs to the park HQ to find out what the deal was.  As it turned out, there were campsites right behind the HQ.  As we rode through the sites, I noticed that most, if not all of them, had reservation tags on their signposts.  I was getting a little dismayed, being tired and not in the mood to hunt for camping elsewhere. But then Chuck took a closer look and saw that most of the reservations were for future dates. This place was apparently a pretty popular campground, especially with Labor Day right around the corner. We got a nice somewhat private site on a hill and set up camp.

The fees were weird, amounting to something like $16.97.  We only had 20s, so went to the camp hosts to ask about change.  They were confused about what we were asking, but eventually we found out that we could pay at the HQ in the morning.  We got a couple bundles of firewood from the hosts for $10 and headed back to camp.

Dinner that night was to be hobo packs, similar to what we had at Farragut but without me spilling boiling sauce all over my feet.  The good news was that this time around, my feet remained unburnt and the sauce stayed in its container.  The bad part was that after Chuck had wrapped up the food in the foil packets, he had four lumps of aluminum foil that were more or less indistinguishable from each other.  When it came time to eat, we realized that the packs had gotten mixed up and had gotten either undercooked or overcooked.  I think I found the situation a lot more humorous than Chuck did.  

We'd done a lot of riding that day so were pretty beat and went to bed somewhat early.  As it turned out, we really would have been fine with only one bundle of wood and had four good pieces left over.