Wednesday, September 5, 2007

Glacier National Park by Helicopter – and Iraq

The Continental Divide at about 8,000 feet. The pilot said it takes about 100 inches of snow to make a foot of glacier icepack.
Beautiful mountains and lakes

Today we took a half-hour helicopter ride of Glacier National Park. It was just so beautiful! The pictures don’t do it justice. I sat up front and Kim, KC and Nathan (another couple we met) sat in the back. I think I was put there because I was the heaviest. It sometimes pays to be overweight. Our pilot stays in the same RV Park that we are in. It’s hard to believe that the continental divide for the northern USA is here in western Montana. The continental divide is the place where some of the water flows west to the Pacific and some to the east to the Atlantic Ocean. We flew at 90 to 100 knots (about 80 MPH) and topped out at about 10,000 feet. There was one point where the pilot was heading towards a mountain and turned away when we seemed very close. It was fun! Our pilot pointed out a lot of interesting glacier formations and history. He showed us a chalet that was 13 miles up in the mountains and was only accessible by horses or on foot. He showed us where he once spent a summer building a lodge that was later wiped out by an avalanche.

Nathan who rode with us said he is in the US Army and going back to Iraq for his second tour. He said the heat is usually about 130 degrees for 9 months of the year. He said when you go outside it is like when you open the oven door. There is usually wind and there is virtually no humidity. After his last tour he came back to the US and it was 87 and high humidity and he struggled more with that than the heat in Iraq. He said the Iraqi troops we are trying to train are not military as we know it. He said they are volunteers – like militia. The US soldiers take them out for a five day patrol and after a few days they announce they are going home to family. I asked if many people rested in the afternoon heat and he said they have become so dependent on their oil sales that many of the people just don’t work at all. He said they are not a working type people.

We moved the RV today in the park to a much bigger and nicer site. We plan to stay here till this Sunday and then we are off for Washington. We hope to spend 3 weeks in Washington, 3 in Oregon and then 5 in California. That should put us into Arizona a few weeks before Christmas.


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hey Guys great pictures and happy anniversary!

Joe & Carol