Bear Paw Meanderings

A couple of weeks ago I was staying at a cabin in Apgar Village which is a part of Glacier National Park.

From the cabin picture window I had a wonderful view looking up Lake McDonald to the northeast and the grand mountains that form part of Going-To-The-Sun Road. There is no more beautiful view in Glacier and maybe in North America than looking at those mountains that ring the upper McDonald valley. A few of them are Gunsight, Edwards, Brown, Cannon, Stanton, Vaught, McPartland, and the Garden Wall itself.

While at that cabin I got to see something that is rarely seen but talked about often in Glacier National Park.

That is alpenglow.

I often remember that an old jewelry store in Kalispell had captured the market of topaz gem stones and they were in three colors to immortalize Glacier National Park. The bright blue was simply called Glacier. The green was called emerald and the pink was called alpenglow.

Alpenglow should not be confused with sunrise or sunset colors although often it comes before a sunrise.

On a mostly clear day people gather on the shore of Lake McDonald just to see if there will be alpenglow to film. I have only seen it a dozen times or so in my life. Mostly the whole valley turns pink for a short time but sometimes it appears as fire above the mountains. It is as fleeting as St. Elmo’s fire but when it is there, it is also mimicked in the lake itself and is simply crazy beautiful. So it was that morning a few weeks ago. I knew people thought it to be a good day for alpenglow as before daylight they started gathering with their cameras on the lakeshore. Sure enough all of a sudden there were two bright fires in the sky on either side of the Little Matterhorn and they were reflected in the lake.

It was totally awesome.

Plan on seeing for yourself. It does take some planning. Go when there are no clouds in the weather report and take as many days as you can. Take a week and maybe you will see two days of this glorious thing called alpenglow if you are lucky. You could get skunked as well. In that case go again and again until you experience this miracle for yourself.

See it and it will make your life even more interesting than it was before!