Last day at Glacier - heading home 06-14-12

I am a day behind on posting - sorry!  I am in Idaho Falls, Idaho, tonight after a 368 mile day, which seems paltry after my years of much longer days when on a Road Trip.  I just get too tired to keep driving - it isn't safe.  The photos below were taken (mostly) yesterday when I left Kalispell and retraced the route Joan Hodgeboom drove on our Glacier tour on Monday.  Instead of turning north up the east side of Glacier I continued east until I came to I-15 and turned south for home. 

 
The only Starbuck's in Kalispell is on the north end of town where all the new stores and shopping malls are located.  This is the first time I have seen a fireplace in a Starbuck's and it is an indoor/outdoor one at that!  Classy.  I started my trip with a Grande Latte.  But no snacks.

 
Instead I drove to West Glacier and stopped at Glacier Highland Restaurant where they serve those fabulous pancakes - and I ate the pancakes again.  Fabulous might not be a strong enough word.

 

The carved bear with the eye patch isn't the only bear around.  Here on the porch is one climbing a pole.

 

And there is a bench being held up by a bear with a cub at the near end.  They are quite charming and I wish I could take one home, but it wouldn't be as charming in Placentia!

 
It was almost constant rain while I was inside the park at West Glacier, not many tourists out.

 
Lake McDonald was very misty, the far snow-covered mountain is barely visible and the boats were just gently bumping their moorings in the mist.  Not too cold though  - about 52.

I stopped at Goat Lick to see if there were any licking goats - no luck.  But across the road and high on the hillside there were these four light spots.  

 
Hardly more recognizable when I enlarge the image - my camera is just not powerful enough.

 
Here is a picture that Loretta Armstrong took two years ago when she took Ruth McDowell's class and did a tour of the park.  She says this mother and baby were quite close to the road.  Mountain goats have long white coats and sharp, black horns.  Mountain sheep have beige coats and large curly horns.

 
Continuing across Hwy 2 along the bottom of the park I noticed that the snow markers were getting taller.  These posts with the white rectangles are placed to show the snowplows where the edge of the road is.  In some places they are only a few feet tall and others they can be eight or nine feet or more - an indication of the depths of snow reached at different spots.

 
Out on the high rolling plains east of the park there are many snow fences, made of metal and placed to divert the snow drifts off the roads.

 
After I turned south on I-15 I had a terrific tail wind that really pushed the car along.  This was the highest gas mileage I have ever had, but the wind died down and my mileage went back to the mid 20s!

 
This shot was in the same area as the Wordless Wednesday I posted yesterday.  Rain is falling over on the top of the hills, but I didn't have any on the highway.

 
With that kind of wind there are, of course, wind turbines.  This was quite a large wind farm and all of them were generating electricity yesterday.

 
This is out of order - somehow I missed posting it on Monday.  But the sky was about the same last evening.  I forget how late into the evening there is daylight at these latitudes - it was 10pm and the sun was just setting.