Two Medicine Lake

Two Medicine Lake

I had hoped to camp at Rising Sun campground, but the ranger at the gate told me that our trailer wouldn't fit there, but we might enjoy Two Medicine Campground in the Southeast corner of the park. We've never visited that area of the park and decided to try it. We found a beautiful campsite along the lake where a family was just leaving. I had planned on going up to Many Glacier for the day, but given that we’d never been here, we explored this region instead. We took the short hike to Running Eagle Falls and its nature trail. This was a unique falls. When it’s flowing in the spring it flows straight off the rocks and also underneath a natural bridge that is starting to form there. We just was the falls, look like it’s coming out of the rocks. The flowers along the roadside are in profusion with red, yellow, white, and purple everywhere. And the berries are also starting to form on the bushes. In the afternoon, we took a boat ride along the 2 ½ mile long Two Medicine lake. Cost only $12.25/person, much cheaper than the $64 in Canada for an equivalent ride. The mountains above the lake were somewhat covered from the haze from smoke, but still beautiful.

Running Eagle Falls

In the evening, we listened to Ernie Running Eagle, an elder of the Blackfeet tribe. He gave a talk on the importance of animals to the Native American. He was long-winded, but interesting. He pointed out how animals can detect events before they happen: earthquakes in California, Tsunami’s in Thailand. That they naturally know what plants to eat, to cure their illness. How they are more in-tune with nature than humans. People need to learn from animals, because they have unique powers. We also learned that he was a hero – he was driving a bus of firefighters down the mountain when he lost his brakes. Much as he tried, he couldn't get into a lower gear. He was going faster and faster around the hairpin curves and wasn't expecting to make it. He radioed the bus driver ahead of him that he was in trouble. Then he saw a steep narrow slope up ahead and told the bus driver ahead that he was going to take and try to lay the bus on its side, injuring some, but hopefully no one would die. The other bus driver put his bus underneath that slope and when he laid the bus down, it was on top of the other bus. Almost as interesting as the original story was his story of working with the Hollywood people a couple of years later when they recreated the incident for a show called “911”. He played himself driving the bus (it wasn't moving) trying to get the bus into a lower gear, but, of course, when he was it on TV it looked like he was driving a run-away bus.
After the talk, we could see a bear on the hillside above our campground. He was a long way off, but it still was exciting to see. 

Roadside Flowers