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| US, Blackfeet and Canadian flags |
Started my three-day stopover in Glacier National Park with a bus tour. Sun Tours is a bus tour company operated by members of the Blackfeet tribe. Known as Blackfoot in Canada and Blackfeet in the USA, their territory once extended over much of Alberta and Saskatchewan as well as Montana and North Dakota. Now the reservation here is home to 16,000 people, most of whom make a living raising cattle and horses, as the land that was left to them as their reservation is not fit for planting crops. The cattle and horses roam freely on the open range. Every once in a while one of them gets picked off by a grizzly bear - but their owners take out grizzly insurance to cover that! The Blackfeet are also raising three herds of buffalo or bison on their reservation, and we were lucky enough to get a view of one of these herds from the road - probably the same herd as we saw yesterday from the train, through the freight cars.
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| Oh give me a home.... where the buffalo roam! |
Our tour guide and driver Dan took us through the town of Browning on the Blackfeet reservation and into Glacier National Park, as high up as we could go, until we couldn't go any further: the road was closed about five miles before Logan's Pass because there is still too much ice and snow! So we headed back down, stopped at St Mary Lodge for lunch and returned home by a different route, stopping to take photos at several viewpoints along the way. Dan also pointed out the bridge Forrest Gump runs across, the road where a scene at the beginning of The Shining was filmed, and the spot where the Marlboro Man posed for ads in the '70s. And in addition to the herd of bison, we also spotted a beaver dam and a mother grizzly bear with two cubs!
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| Heading out of the Great Plains and toward the Rocky Mountains |
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| Our tour bus and our tour guide, Dan |
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| The bus at the highest spot on the tour - at the snow line |
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The other tour bus company: Red Jammer buses.
They have been operating in the national park since 1939 |
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| Rainbow over the Rockies |
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| Beaver dam |
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You may not be able to see them, but somewhere in this picture are a mother grizzly bear and two cubs!
At a safe distance!
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Beautiful country and photos. I especially love the ones with the scraggly bare trees in the foreground against the bacjdrop of the majestic mountains.
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