MOST BEAUTIFUL PLACE IN MONTANA? Exploring & TRUCK CAMPING in East Glacier National Park

Good morning from Glacier National Park where we are going to try to find camping at a pretty awesome campsite. They just opened today. Fingers crossed we get the site. I think we've found our site here at the Rising Sun Campground. We were the first ones in. We're just taking a walk around to look at some of the other sites to make sure that we want the one that we're at. We have pretty much our own yard to ourselves. Just a quick chat here in the car because it's very windy outside. If you watched my last video you saw that we did an overnight backpacking trip in the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex. That was not our original plan. We had originally planned to backpack here in Glacier National Park. However, we were unable to get permits at the time. It was a real cluster. I won't get into all the details, but suffice it to say we did not get those permits. We went ahead and did that trip with Lacey and Andrew and that was fun. It was a fun overnight, but we decided to come back here and try for a redemption to get permits. So the plan is to go bright and early tomorrow morning to the visitor center to the backcountry office and try to get permits for a multi-night backpacking trip here on the east side of Glacier National Park. If you watched two videos ago, I was on the west side. I camped at Bowman Lake Campground. Now I'm on the east side and to me the east side is a little bit more dramatic, a little more beautiful, although the entire park is beautiful. Last night we camped at St. Mary's Camp. We came into a awesome thunderstorm. It was beautiful. We saw a rainbow. It was an absolutely gorgeous time there. I wanted to camp here at the Rising Sun Campground for quite some time, but I could not come in here with my trailer. It cannot be longer than 21 feet bumper to bumper, meaning bumper of the trailer to the bumper of the front of your truck and my trailer alone is 21 feet. So this is my first chance ever to get to camp here in the Rising Sun Campground and I'm very excited about that. Now that we've secured our camp for the next two nights, we are going exploring and I'm going to make sure that I have this bad boy at the ready in case we see any wildlife. Many Glacier is surrounded by the high peaks of the Lewis Range and many hiking trails can be accessed from the area. The region is noted for numerous lakes, waterfalls, and dense coniferous forests interspersed with alpine meadows. Major sites in the immediate vicinity that can be accessed by trails include Lake Josephine, Grinnell Lake, Grinnell Glacier, Cracker Lake, Granite Peak Chalet, Iceberg Cirque, and the Ptarmigan Tunnel, a hiking tunnel carved through the mountainside during the 1930s. Unfortunately, during our visit in 2025, most of Many Glacier was closed due to renovations and would be closed the entire year. The hotel was scheduled to open but not for another couple of weeks. We are here at Many Glacier. It's a windy day so I haven't been talking much on camera as we've been walking but everything is closed here. The hotel, the Swift Current area is closed for renovations, the general store there. So really all you can do is access the trails from here right now and just walk around the hotel but it's beautiful. We are here in the St. Mary's grocery store grabbing a couple items that we need before we head to an awesome place to eat. Hopefully it's not too crowded. Johnson's of St. Mary is a restaurant and campground which was established in about 1957. I believe most everything here is homemade. It definitely has a charming atmosphere, very western feeling with many old artifacts around the restaurant. The food is down home, home cooking, and is really awesome. Even out here in the mountains of Montana while traveling, I make sure that I take my AG1 every day. And now with the AG1 Next Gen, this new design has made it even easier for pouring. 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You wouldn't hear it coming out of my mouth if I didn't 100% support it. So if you'd like to try AG1 for yourself, go ahead and click that link below or scan the QR code here to get started with AG1 for less than three dollars a day when you subscribe. And on top of that, you get your welcome kit with five free travel packs and a bottle of D3K2. Thank you once again to AG1 for sponsoring this video. Now let's get back to exploring East Glacier. Just got back here to camp and I am stuffed. So stuffed. The food was amazing. Joey made the right call with the special. It was a pork loin with like a huckleberry gravy, mashed potatoes. It came with soup and bread and it was delicious. I tasted his. I just got a burger and I regretted not getting the special. But I'm a little funny about pork sometimes so I was leery about that but I definitely didn't make the wrong choice. I did enjoy my burger but I would have enjoyed his dish better. The pie was amazing. Oh my gosh. I didn't need it but it was awesome. You know with a tight budget it's hard to make the decision to go out or just cook your own food and sometimes I just want to enjoy the special places that surround the areas that I'm in and so I go ahead and make the decision to splurge a little bit. I would definitely recommend Johnson's if you're in the East Glacier area. We're gonna have a nice fire here tonight and enjoy our beautiful surroundings. It's interesting because the campsites that are along the back here, there's a kind of a mountain, a wall here. It says that you have to have a hard-sided vehicle to camp in those campsites. There's little tags on the ones in which you must have a hard-sided vehicle. In the one that we're in now we don't have to have a hard-sided vehicle even though we do. So we're trying to figure out why that is and we're thinking maybe the bears move along the wall back there. Joey said he saw some thimble berry bushes so maybe there's some berry bushes. We don't really know but we found St. Mary to see if we can get those backpacking permits. That is the number one priority this morning so let's do it. Well we got it. We got the permit. We start a trip tomorrow. Oh yeah. Great permit. Going into Elizabeth Lake and Helen Lake. We're back here at camp. I just did a couple of hours of work and now I'm going to make a quick breakfast before we go out and explore. It's going to be the usual bacon and eggs. I want to try to use what food we have left over the next day over today and tomorrow morning so that we don't have any perishables left over while we're on our trip. Don't want anything going bad in the cooler while we're gone. So today it's bacon and eggs. Tomorrow it's bacon and eggs and tonight we're making another foil packet dinner on the fire. So obviously we just saw a grizzly bear and it was very close to camp so I've got my bear spray right here. Sure he'll be able to smell this bacon. Keep your head on a swivel too. Breakfast is done and we cleaned everything up. Definitely leave with a totally clean camp in bear country and now we're going to go explore. We're going to stop at the Outfitter in St. Mary first because I just want to look around in there see if there's anything I need for the trip and then we're going to head over to the Two Medicine area. The area behind me is the Two Medicine area. That's where we're headed. I've never visited this part of the park so I'm excited. Let's go. The Two Medicine region is a starting point for many trails and tour boats take visitors out on Two Medicine Lake for the steep south face of Rising Wolf Mountain towers above the lake. The region was considered sacred ground by several Native American tribes including the Blackfeet and they perform vision quests here. Aside from Chief Mountain, the Two Medicine area is the most sacred section of the park to the Blackfeet. We had seen this waterfall hike as we were passing through the area and decided to go ahead and do it and it was well worth it. It was actually very easy however there was a water crossing if you wanted to get to a better viewpoint which wasn't too bad. pretty much with all the same ingredients if you watch the Yankee Fork Sawtooths video except we are trying a new type of sausage here. It looks really good and we're also going to make corn on the cob. Joey may put corn inside of his foil packet. We'll see what he decides to do. What's Catherine gonna do differently this time? Last time she only went with one layer of foil. Yep that was a mistake. Now I'm gonna go with three. Joey went with three. His did not burn. I went with two. Mine burned. Beautiful red and orange peppers. We've got potatoes, shallots, garlic, onion. We're gonna throw some butter on top. Burnt ends brisket sausage. Already got the corn on there. We've got these ginormous foil packet meals. We'll be doing a lot of hiking over the next six days. It'll be our last real dinner for a while. Here are all my devices that I'm charging for the trip. I've got a headlamp, an inReach, I've got my microphones, my camera, and a power bank. All being charged off of this. We had some sun earlier but no longer today. It's still got about 50% evening by the fire with the excitement and anticipation of the adventure that was to come. Good morning. We are just about packed up and ready to head out on our backpacking adventure. A six day five night adventure but you will have to wait for the next video to see that one. Thank you all so much for joining me on this one. I hope you enjoyed exploring the east side of Glacier National Park as much as I did. It is absolutely beautiful here. One of the most beautiful national parks in the U.S. Probably my favorite. Anyhow, stay tuned for that next video. Thank you so much for joining me and I'll see you on the next adventure. See you soon everybody. Bye bye.