It ain't heavy, it's my bike: Glacier National Park, Day 6

We checked out of our hotel in East Glacier, and headed westward on US Highway 2 toward West Glacier. We saw two fires burning south of Highway 2, and we could smell smoke when we pulled into the trailhead in Flathead National Forest near Stanton Lake. We hiked trail 146 back to Stanton Lake, which took us along the lakeshore.

Molly came up with the cheer "Bear Elsewhere," which we used to good effect on the trail. We saw fishermen with an inflatable standup paddleboard, and we hiked past an island with a cairn in the middle of the lake.

Loungin'

These two are by Reed Thompson

We skipped rocks from the beach, and hiked past a Montana guy who razzed us for our bear avoidance techniques.

The road to West Glacier was much better than what we'd experienced on the east side of the park, and we ate up the miles. We checked in at the Apgar Village Lodge, and we discovered there were no doors between the rooms in our room, so Molly repurposed the shower curtain as a room divider.

We went west to Whitefish in search of Indian food at Kandahar, which turned into a bit of a Kipling-esque runaround. We debated popping the blister on Reed's little toe, which he has named Little Richard. In Whitefish, we stopped at the Spotted Bear Distillery, which was nice. Busse got a huckleberry sour. We went to a Mexican joint for dinner, got wet burritos and drank Rainier.

Whitefish is a yuppie ski town, and surprisingly affluent. There was a sign for a realtor named Dick Idol. The staff was surprisingly racially diverse at the sandwich shop that Reed and Busse snacked at when we first got to town. We went to Palace Bar for a post-dinner drink, which at one point was the home of mouse races.

The Yelp reviews said the bathrooms were either great or possibly terrible, depending on which you read, and I'd have to go with somewhere in between. The men's room just had a commode with no stall next to the urinals, which was weird.