2021 Hike 22: Ptarmigan Falls - Glacier

Our next hike in Glacier took us to Ptarmigan Falls. This hike is in the Many Glacier area of East Glacier Park. In my opinion, the Many Glacier area, and some of the more secluded areas in East Glacier, are much better to visit than the famous Going to the Sun Road. You don’t need a permit to come here, the hikes are better, and there are fewer people.

This hike starts off at a campground next to the Glacier Hotel, and has a pretty steep elevation gain right off the bat. The gain to the falls is about 700 feet, but it starts at 5000 feet above sea level, and most of the gain is in the first half mile.

Getting to the falls was beautiful, minus a couple panic attacks regarding the possibility of seeing Grizzly bears. One of the things I assured Brook though, is that you can spot a Bear from a distance, by finding the huge crowd of people with giant cameras trying to take a picture of it. Given that we didn’t see this, we were good. We did, however, come prepared with bear spray just in case.

blue and red rocks at in the pools of the falls

When we got to the falls, they were beautiful, and the stones that you see below were quite unique, but we hightailed it out of there, because the bugs were so incredible, that not even repeated applications of repellent could keep them away. It was truly reminiscent of Dad and my trip to Copper Lake…I have not seen so many bugs in one place since then.