Trail of the Cedars, GNP

When you get to Glacier, you should do more than just ride through the park. Take time to stop along the way at the overlooks and many pullouts. There are so many interesting areas waiting for you!

Can you see how excited Don is as we start our hike on Trail of the Cedars? You can almost hear him say, "Do we have to do this?" as we start out. Reminds me of our children when they were young. He has the same exact stance as they did, only he is more vocal. Too bad, you can go with us or go back to the truck and pout....

We passed plants with large green leaves and brilliant red berries. Sandy picked one, but didn't bite into it. It's a good thing she didn't try it. After researching it on the internet, I found out it is a Red Baneberry, which is highly poisonous. A healthy adult will experience poisoning from as few as 6 berries. Two berries can kill a child! Glad we both resisted tasting one of those.
Trail of the Cedars leads you into a dense cedar-hemlock forest. I stopped to take a picture of this huge cedar tree trunk, wondering what made the huge "knot" in the bottom.
Jerry was looking at all the roots around the trees. There were a lot of huge trees along the path that were downed. Information signs along the way said this was because the roots on these gigantic trees were very shallow since they don't have to go very far down to find water.
Farther down the path we came across the Avalanche Falls, not very big at all but still worthy of a picture. This was where we decided to hike further towards Avalanche Lake
and were greeted with this sign! Okay, more bears. At least there were a lot of hikers here, so the bear would have lots of choices! I'm hoping no one in our group would be that appealing.
We trudge up the hill, Don leading the way. We hope to get to Avalanche Lake at the end of the trail, but it will depend on how his knee holds up.
The path intersected quite often with Avalanche Creek, giving us many views of different water falls along the way.
Don and Sandy are still smiles as we continue on our way.
Don found a large walking stick. If it doesn't help him with hiking, maybe it will at least come in handy if we come across a bear. In both Yellowstone and Glacier, they advise you to wear bells and carry bear spray while you are hiking. We saw a funny t-shirt in the store here about how to tell black bear scat from grizzly scat: black bear scat contains berries. Grizzly bear scat contains jingle bells and smells like bear spray!
Okay, it's official.....I'm a tree hugger!
Here we are, heading back down the trail. Didn't make it all the way to the lake. But that's okay. We still got our exercise and enjoyed hiking in the woods under the huge cedar tree canopy.