The North Circle

The Glacier Hike
Summer, 2010

Celia Knight, Jay Shelkowitz, Fred Knight, Mark Ostrom, Kyle Ostrom

First look at these pictures from Ceil and Jay's visit in 2007. These are not the backcountry; they are from day hikes.

Here is the itinerary in a google calendar.

Right now we have 4 nights and five days reserved at Cosley Lake, Mokowanis Junction, Mokowanis Junction, and Glenn's Lake Foot.

Original proposal (not used because campsites were not available and it was judged too long)

The proposed route as traveled by another hiker is a biggy for us: a total of 52 miles. As suggested, the route takes 6 days, with big mileages on most days. See this Excel file for details. General camp information is here. Backcountry info here. There are many highlights, including:

Iceberg Lake, a side excursion on the first day deemed a must by many
Ptarmigan Tunnel, blasted out to form the trail in 1931
Elizabeth Lake, Foot (ELF), the destination (one of the best) on the first night, rated 4 out of 5
Glenns Lake, Head (GLH), the second night, rated 4 out of 5
Stoney Indian Lake (STO), the third night past Stoney Indian Pass, rated 5 out of 5
Fifty Mountain (FIF), the fourth night, rates 4 out of 5
Granite Park (GRN) campsite near the Chalet, at Swiftcurrent Pass, rates 5 out of 5

There should be many views; try the links above. Wildlife as well.

Detailed planning now gives us a picture of the route in elevation. Here is the file (right-click and save, then open it) to load into Google Earth to visualize the hike. I slavishly extracted the route from Google Earth, which now has trails marked on their National Park locations. Then I downloaded the digital elevation map from usgs. Combining these with some matlab programming allowed a detailed look (pdf version) at the elevation gains and losses each day. The lefthand plot is an elevation image with the hike path overlaid and color coded by day. The same color codes are used on the righthand plots. The top one is the elevation for the hike. Note that we don't get over 7500 feet, which is 1000' below Bear Lake! The bottom one is the slope, either ascent (positive) or descent (negative). The black line is the smoothed version, which has a maximum of ~20%, which is fairly tough for me. I think that the lower altitude will be a boon.

The Glacier Hike Summer, 2010

The Glacier Hike
Summer, 2010