Bucket List and White Knuckle Driving

Admit it. We all have bucket lists, even if we don’t want to admit we do. Some of the items on my bucket list I’m fairly certain I’ll never do because at this point there isn’t a snow ball’s chance in a very warm place of me ever getting on a plane again, so unless Superman shows up and offers to personally fly me to Scotland, Ireland, and Great Britain, I’m not going there.

But, this summer while on vacation, I did check one item off my bucket list. The day we went to Glacier National Park was forecast as sunny in the morning, with increasing clouds by mid-morning and a one hundred percent chance of rain by afternoon. That was a pretty sure bet we were going to get rained on while in Glacier. The item on my bucket list I was hoping to check off was driving The Going to the Sun Road through Glacier.  Going to the Sun Road takes ten weeks to clear in the spring, and that’s with using several heavy snow movers capable of moving 4000 tons of snow an hour.

 

HOLY MOSES! Twists, turns, hairpin switch backs, waterfalls, wildlife, and by the time we’d reached Logan Pass, the clouds were socking the park in and the rain was beginning. Add several thousand feet drop-offs, sheer cliff walls on the other side of the road, shoulders to the road of no more than two or three feet and it was the most stunningly gorgeous white-knuckle drive I’ve ever undertaken. At several points during this drive, snow splattered the windshield with the rain. Yeah, I was white-knuckling it. And my respect for those people who drive those snow-movers in the early summer to open the road increased exponentially.

(Some of the pictures I’ve shared here I did not take—and I’ve tried to give credit where credit is due.)