Bigfork, Glacier & Yellowstone National parks trip (part one)

The road to Bigfork, Montana
We began our journey May 1st with only two things on our itinerary, 1 - the Montana Spartan race and 2 - to be home May 13th to pick up our mail.

We decided to head over the North Cascades hwy and try to get a campground for the night before it got too late. We stopped for the night at the Alta Lake campground. We found a high perch site with a great view of the lake. It worked fine for us in May but I bet it's a hot one in the summer as there were no shade trees in this upper loop.

The view around our loop.

Beautiful Balsam-root flowers in bloom everywhere.

We sleep in our van and set up the canopy for privacy and protection from the weather. It has drop roll up panels with plastic windows if we want a view from inside the canopy. The plastic window will come in very handy later on in the trip as you'll find out in a later post on this trip. When we woke in the morning we saw a ranger truck driving on the service road behind our loop, later a person came up and asked us if we'd seen a bear as one had been reported being seen in our loop earlier that morning. We hadn't seen one, too bad.

We drove through the Pend Oreille area hoping to find a campground. None was to be seen that allowed tenters, we aren't technically called an RV even though we sleep in our van, while we car camp. We found out that the Montana Spartan race is held just a week or so early for most of the Forest service campgrounds to be open. Anyway after a long day of driving we found a spot in Noxon, Montana on hwy 200.

What a beautiful campground, a welcome sight to travel weary folks. Since it was early season there were plenty of sites to pick from.

I loved their laundry building's art.

We had a section of road work to get through as we traveled along the Clark Fork river, but just after we went through it we spotted some Elk near the road. We stopped and enjoyed the view for awhile before our turn onto hwy 28.

A view of Flathead lake, at our hwy 93 turnoff. I always start getting excited at this point of the trip, because the race venue is near here.

Driving on hwy 82 we can see the area towards Glacier National park.

Our turn to Bigfork is at the shuttle parking area for the race, it's always fun to see the event signs!

We arrived at our camp at Outback Montana RV and camp early enough to pack our things for the event the next day and to relax abit before going to sleep.

You can read about our Montana Spartan weekend HERE.

It was a great two days!

We both earned our Trifecta for this year at this event.