Can I grumble just a little? No! Well, it’s just frustrating to be in a beautiful place and shoot through a smokey haze. In fact, Richard has been unable to star or sun gaze. There, I grumbled! Now, let’s continue with our Montana experience.

In this post, I’m showing you three of our day journeys. The fires and smoke made it almost impossible to shoot in Glacier National Park (GNP), and we went wherever a truck could take us.

Again, unless you can hike miles, the Going To The Sun Road is the main attraction. So, one day we took off to Kalispell, a city larger than we’ve experienced in the region. We found a State Park and, at the overlook, saw the valley below. We also found Foy Lake. Lunch was at a small Italian place, and we enjoyed great pizza. Here are some images from Kaliispell.

The overlook view.

Another view of Foy Lake

Foy Lake.

The Flathead County building.

 Bigfork was the following evening. It’s a small community on Flathead Lake–the largest fresh water lake west of the Mississippi. Cute is the word to describe the town. We found a Forest Service picnic area and went down to the lake. You can see the smoke almost covers the horizon on the lake.

Fun on the lake.

You can see how bad the smoke is.

Boat rental closed for the evening.

Also more towards evening was our visit to Swan Lake. Another quaint community, not far from Bigfork. Here we surprised a doe feeding locally. What a trip that was for me. She allowed me to get close, and was only scared away when Richard started the truck engine. Families were packing their picnic supplies and rafts, etc. We talked to a fireman who said the fires will end about October. This was the worst of the smoke. The featured image is from Swan Lake.

Swan Lake is beautiful, but that day it was also dramatic.

The sky was mean. We left when the wind started and the rain began.

This doe was enjoying a meal in the front grass area of a business.

She let me get close to her.

At the boat dock.

That night, we had a storm and heavy rain. The next morning, the sky was beautiful. Fortunately, we we had arranged for a boat ride at Two Medicine Lake and hike to Twin Falls in GNP that day. You’ll find out about that in another post.

Thanks for letting me grumble for a little bit!