Glacier N.P. - Many Glacier & Cracker Lake Hike

Thursday, August 01, 2019

Cracker Lake, Montana, United States

Despite not being on the Going-to-the-Sun Road, the Many Glacier area is sort of the heart of Glacier National Park. The road to it enters the park from the east side north of the Saint Mary entrance to the road across the park. The rather long drive in is partly on a very bumpy road on the Blackfeet Reservation. The road follows Sherburne Lake into increasingly vertical mountains before arriving at the spectacular Many Glacier Hotel on the shore of Swiftcurrent Lake, which must me one of the most impressive historic inns in the national park system. Many Glacier is the gateway to some of the most popular hiking trails in the park with access to some glaciers.

I drove in to Many Glacier for a day on my 2001 trip, had breakfast buffet at the hotel, and then did the hike to Grinnell Glacier. This time I decided to make it home for three days and do multiple hikes in the area. I decided to stay at what I like to call “Camp Buick” in the hotel’s huge parking lot, to save a few hundred dollars a night (not that I could just pull up and get a room without a reservation).

Cracker Lake

The glorious historic hotel that I know charges a lot (to sleep in a room rather than sleep illegally in your car in the parking lot) has no cellphone reception and effectively no working WiFi (despite its claims). It’s like the modern version of roughing it. I can live without cell phone reception and WiFi for three days, but from the angry behavior of some people in the hotel lobby, apparently many people can’t.

This was supposedly on of the “darkest nights” of the year. I’m really not an astronomy geek, but the place is so remote the Milky Way seemed especially bright and the few things I know in the sky like the Big Dipper were very prominent.

I decided for my first day hike to go to Cracker Lake. One reason was that the trail starts in the parking lot a few feet from where I was car camping. I also chose the hike partly for the day after my squats/deadlifts workout because it is somewhat less strenuous than the other hikes I planned to do in the area at 12 miles round trip and only about 1,400 feet elevation gain.

Many Glacier Hotel

The trail is actually relatively easy with no significant steep parts and a long gradual ascent. The trail backtracks a bit toward Sherburne Lake and then climbs through forest into a valley along a creek. You see the wall of rock ahead as the forest gives way to flower-filled meadows in a glacial cirque and realize the end of the trail can be no farther.

And then, as if the scenery is not gorgeous enough already, suddenly there’s a stunning knock-your-socks-off view as Cracker Lake appears. It seems like there are only very small glaciers on the rock face, but they are somehow enough to produce glacial silt to make the lake a stunning turquoise color similar to Peyto Lake and many others in Banff and Jasper in Canadian Rockies. The colors are absolutely amazing.

So why is it named Cracker Lake? It remains a mystery to me. On my walk back down the trail I kept thinking about that NPR quiz show “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me” when three famous people on their panel give outlandish-sounding stories and the contestant must guess which one of the three is the true one.

Black Bear

Well I don’t have the answer, but the stories I came up with for the naming of Cracker Lake are:

1) It was discovered by former Confederate soldiers from Florida who were known as “Crackers” for the Florida cowboys who cracked the whips on the cattle.

2) The milky colored appearance of the lake makes it look like there are crackers dissolved in it.

3) The cracking sound of ice breaking off the glaciers above the lake echoing through the valley back when those glaciers were bigger.

It is probably none of the above, but it gave me something to think about on my return hike. And then I encountered a bear. Well, that’s also a bit of an exaggeration. I looked into the large grassy area along the shore of the Sherburne Lake are realized a black rock was moving and probably wasn’t a rock. I don’t carry binoculars, but the zoom on my camera is strong enough that I got quite a good view of it as it moved around. I should have stayed put longer rather than continuing back because the bear moved in the direction from where I first spotted it and I could have gotten a much better view. There was no sign of cubs and it was clearly a black bear rather than a grizzly so nothing to be too concerned about. After all, some of my favorite people are bears.