2011 Wyoming/Montana Trip – Day 5

Wednesday got a little messed up. When walking out of the diner from breakfast, I noticed that the front wheels weren’t sitting ‘right’. I knew that one side had the ball joints going on it, but the other side should have been fine.

So I jacked it up and yup, both sides need Ball joints. This puts a wrinkle in things as I don’t really have a good way to swap those joints out, save for beating it with a hammer. Not to mention, I don’t really want to do that involved of a job on vacation.

This lead to a bummer of a realization that no wheeling will happen on this trip. While that is sad, it’s not as bad as having a knuckle come off while hanging out on the side of a mountain. When I left IL, these joints were used, but tight, so I don’t know why they’d decided to let go at this point in life.

So since I haven’t had the opportunity to lock in the front hubs (and looking like its not going to happen this trip). We decided to make a loop of this portion of the park by going up the “Going to the Sun” road.

Travel:

Lower elevation parts of the road:

It didn’t take long for us to run into road construction, which was the tune for the day:

Soon though, we were at Logans Pass, so we hiked the trail up there:

We caught this dude happily sunning himself on the way back down:

After Logans Pass, we hiked part of the Highline Trail:

It was a bit of a drop off:

Had to walk over an avalanche spot:

Looking down the slide:

Heading back up:

After we were done with that, it was time to sit in more traffic to make our way back down the other side of the mountain:

We stopped by Avalanche Creek and Falls, that’s some blue water there:

Our last stop for the day was Two Medicine. This area has a trick falls (When flowing at capacity, there is an upper and lower falls). Since its so dry here, only the lower fall was flowing.

Path to the falls: