Summer Vacation Continued...

DAY SIX: (Which wins the prize for my absolute favorite day on this vacation!!)

We did another long hike on this day.  It was supposed to be a 12 mile round trip hike. I think we managed to do about 5 miles and then had to turn around because the snow completely obscured the trail, so we did about 10 of the 12 total miles.  This was a hike to Grinnell Glacier which we never managed to find because of all that snow.

Here is Lake Josephine.  It's pure glacial and snow melt so even though I kept looking at it longingly as it was 80 degrees outside and I was very hot, I wasn't hot enough to try to jump in the water!!

There were waterfalls running down the mountain everywhere since all of the snow in the park is melting.  We probably crossed one every few hundred yards there were so many of them!

Here is Grinnell Lake, which we didn't actually hike to as we were trying to get to the glacier.  

Below is where the hike really started to get interesting.  We reached a point where there was a chain across the trail with a sign warning us of snow hazards and snow blocking the trail.  We came across a family who said their kids had managed to crawl under the snow on the trail right here so we crawled under it too!  I got pretty muddy since Antje was reluctant to go under and I carried our packs through.  It was very muddy and dripping snow under there but not too bad.  Yes, believe it or not we went UNDER that.  We would have gone around it but there was a very narrow spot that looked like we would fall right off the mountain and I wasn't brave enough for that.

Here I am on the other side of the snow I crawled under:

Right around the corner we stopped for lunch and found a bighorn sheep who was showing off for us for a long time.  He was quite photogenic!  He was still there when we came back down a couple hours later too.

Then we came to a point where we had to cross snowfields without actually knowing where the trail was.  Antje was pretty nervous about crossing this too but I reasoned that obviously there were enough other people who had done this as evidenced by the number of footprints in the snow.  So we continued on.

We didn't make it much farther than the spot below.  Unfortunately, if we had wanted to actually go past this point we would have had to have some major ice equipment as to go any farther you would have either fallen off the mountain or fallen through the snow pack.  It was a ton of fun if not the brightest thing we've ever done!  (It was totally me also, as if left to herself Antje would have turned back at the first sign I think.)

And we saw an osprey and its nest on the way back to our campsite at the end of the day...Or at least Antje told me it's an osprey and in my ignorance about kinds of birds I choose to believe her.  

All in all this was a great day!! We had the most fabulous views of mountains, lakes, waterfalls, and tons of snow even if we never did find the glacier.  There were enough people that I wasn't really nervous about coming across a bear but not so many people that you felt the trail was too busy.  Awesome!!!!  I highly recommend this trail.