Day 4 - Teton to Butte

This will be a very short blog today as it was really a day for travelling between locations – namely Teton to Glacier National Park. The trip is approx 450 miles so an overnight stay somewhere in the middle was required. We chose Butte in Montana, 250 miles away.

But we didn’t leave straight away. We wanted to take the cable car to the top of Rendezvous Mountain at 10,450 feet. So after vacating our lodge we wandered across the resort to purchase tickets. There was no queue and we were straight onto the ‘tram’.

The quick journey to the top gave some amazing views over the whole of the valley and beyond and it was surprisingly warm when we reached the summit. There were warning signs everywhere stating that if you wandered off the ‘official’ routes then you were on your own and the cost of any rescue would be yours! Most of the official walks took you down into the resort and we saw many people walking in the other direction – up from the valley floor to the summit! We spent about an hour at the top before taking the tram back down, the easy way, for lunch.

After lunch we drove to Butte through the state of Idaho and into Montana – three states in one day, which took us five hours. For the first hour and a half of being in Idaho we saw nothing but miles and miles of agricultural land in all directions; a patchwork layer of deep green and gold. None of the fields seemed to be divided by walls or fences of any kind but just changed colour abruptly as we drove by. The further north we went the more wild the landscape became and we settled into its beautiful monotony.

At last we reached Butte in Montana; the largest town or city we had seen in the whole of our journey. We will spend the night here before continuing on north towards the Canadian border and Glacier National Park tomorrow.