Cracker Lake worth the initial mucky hike

By Pierre LaBossiere - 09/24/2008

MANY GLACIER — The day after I did a 16-mile, 3,500-foot climb to Swiftcurrent Peak in Glacier National Park (topped off by a bottle of Red Jammer huckleberry creme soda), I wanted an easier hike.

Though I felt better than I expected after that monster hike up Swiftcurrent Peak, I didn't want to abuse the soles of my feet. So I decided to try a hike to Cracker Lake. It was only 12 miles roundtrip, and only climbed a little more than 1,000 feet.

It turns out Cracker Lake is quite easy and worth the mileage. I left early in the morning while almost all the slugabeds staying at Many Glacier were still sawing logs. In fact, the vegetation along the trail was still frost-tipped, which turned out to be a big issue later.

The first 1½ miles of the Cracker Lake trail is actually a bit of a drag. The trail is used by both hikers and a horse riding concession at Many Glacier, so it is extremely muddy and horse poopy. Much of the way, you can hike alongside this deep half-pipe of mud, but there are spots where you have to get right down in the muck. Gross. I kind of wish the National Park Service would build a separate trail for horses.

Anyway, after slogging through ankle-deep mud for about 45 minutes, the horse trail loops off and you're on a strictly people trail. The footing immediately improves. However, there is a lot of vegetation crowding the trail. My legs got drenched, and it was only a few degrees above freezing, so after about another half-mile, both legs were completely numb. You might want to consider doing this trail on a warmer day than the day I hiked it earlier this month.

Thankfully, the trail eventually climbs out of a boggy canyon bottom into a dry forest. My legs dried out and the feeling returned. About a mile before the lake, the trail climbs into a gorgeous meadow and stunted alpine-forest setting. You can see the imposing 2,000-foot-high cirque wall towering over Cracker Lake, but you can't see the lake itself just yet.

At this point, I stopped because I saw something brown loping down the hill toward me. At first, I thought it might be a young grizzly. (We saw two grizzlies along the Swiftcurrent Pass trail the day before, and I was elected to "take the point" for a group of about 12 hikers because I was the only one who thought to carry bear spray.) Turned out, it was just a big, fat marmot running down to the little trees along the lakeshore.

Eventually you round a bend, and there is the lake, pea-soup green and silty, tucked up against the talus slopes beneath the wall of rock. It was only 9:30 a.m.; it took me only 2½ hours to reach the lake — a nice, easy hike, except for all that mud.

The lake is about a half-mile long. I had heard that there was an old mining camp here and I wanted to see if I could find it. It turns out it's kind of hidden at the far end of the lake. I wandered along the southern shore for a while as an icy wind blew down off the headwall.

You can climb up on a little rock outcropping that rises about 100 feet above the lake (there is a little campground below the rock outcropping, and I tried not to intrude on a couple of people camping), or you can hike all the way to the talus slopes at the foot of the headwall.

The trail peters out at the mining camp at the far end of the lake. It's basically a tangle of old, rusted mining equipment.

I decided that the meadow way back at the other end of the lake seemed to be the nicest route. Plus, it was actually in the sun where my clothes would get a chance to dry, so I went the half-mile back there and had a picnic.

Which was when the fat marmot reappeared. It stood up on a rock a few feet away from me. The meadow was apparently its base of operations. It proceeded to fill its mouth up with chunks of grass. After gathering a huge load of grass, the marmot ran back down into the trees, then returned a few minutes later.

This went on for more than an hour. The marmot would pack its mouth with grass, and then run off for five minutes, then return to its work. It didn't give a rip about me sitting in its meadow, and at times was pulling up grass only two or three feet away from me. I guessed it was either hoarding food or lining its burrow for the oncoming winter.

I was struck by how I was sitting in this absolutely gorgeous spot, and instead of watching the shadows move across Cracker Lake, I was more fascinated by the marmot busily harvesting the meadow grass. Nature is grandeur, no doubt about it, but here was a wild animal's mundane work of winter survival taking center stage.

Eventually, a group of hikers came along — and at that point, there were too many people around. The marmot was willing to tolerate me in the meadow, but four people were too many and it ran off, this time not returning. I felt like I had imposed enough on the busy marmot and that the lake was going to get crowded soon, so it was time for me to leave. Plus, I started looking forward to another bottle of that Red Jammer huckleberry creme soda.

I saw a lot of animals in Glacier this trip. Four marmots total, two grizzlies, two bighorn sheep, a whole herd of mountain goats and a black bear. But that one hour alone in the Cracker Lake meadow with the industrious marmot is what I'll remember the most.

Pierre LaBossiere is an assistant news editor at the Missoulian.