Day 6: July 7, 2012 by Geoff

Yet another beautiful day.  Today we went down to Two Medicine area of the park.  It's in the Southeast corner of the park and not nearly as many people visit this part of the park.  After talking with the ranger yesterday, we decided to hike to Scenic Point.  It's 3.1 miles each way with 2,300 ft of elevation gain so we knew it was going to be difficult.  But man, was it difficult!  The first half mile was in the trees but everything after that was pretty exposed.  It was a hot day with very little clouds so the heat just reflected off of the rocks, making the climb that much harder.  On our way up, we saw a big horn sheep and a marmot.  Both were friendly and posed for a long time to have their photos taken.

The trees were bare through the hike - a disease killed them off years ago and left a graveyard of wood.
Beautiful sight, though!

Big Horn Sheep

Marmot posing for the camera

There were countless switchbacks to the top of "the dome" where we could see for about 50 miles or more!  It's really hard to describe in words what it was like.

View to the Southeast

View to the North and Two Medicine Lake 

On the way back down Jenn got "a little" sun burned and we decided to get better hats for hiking.  In all, it took 5.25 hours for the 6.2 mile round trip.  To celebrate making it to Scenic Point, we both had a beer and ice cream sandwich at Two Medicine General Store.  It was so tasty!  

From there, we made the 1.5 hour drive back to our campsite and made creamy broccoli tuna helper.  It's amazing how good pasta and fish taste even when it's made at the campsite.  It's about 8:30pm now and we're hunkered down in the tent waiting for a mountain thunderstorm to pass.  The wind sounds really cool coming down the mountains before it gets to us.  Luckily, it's not raining too hard...yet.  That's it for now.  Tomorrow we hike to Grinell Lake.  

Big hats to cover our ears, neck and faces better.  Or maybe to just  fit in. :)

Sunset at our campsite before the thunderstorm rolled in.

Oh, I forgot to mention the best line ever!  The ranger at Logan Pass, who had suggested Scenic Point, said to "take two pairs of socks because the views will knock your socks off."  He wasn't kidding!