The Highline: This classic Glacier National Park hike offers great rewards (and reservations were easy to get)

Glacier National Park’s Highline Trail opened last week, so we went on a 10-mile round trip stroll down the trail.

We decided to approach the trip as if we were tourists, which is to say we got a Going-to-the-Sun Road reservation the day before (there were more than 900 available) and we didn’t start out for Glacier until almost 9 a.m.

Getting into the park was fairly easy — there were no long lines. The Sun Road construction zone from Apgar to North McDonald Road was rough and dusty, but being a Sunday morning, there were no construction delays.

On the way up it was nice to see pullouts with parking spaces available. Even the Loop still had some spaces, but Logan Pass, as we expected, had none.

So we parked east of the pass and hiked the extra quarter mile to the Highline.

There were a host of different folks on the trail. Everyone seemed in a good mood, though no one seems to know trail etiquette which is the person going uphill has the right-of-way.

The trail was busy to Haystack Butte, then the crowds thinned out quite a bit beyond that. We saw bighorn sheep, marmots, a lone billy mountain goat, a mule deer buck and more ground squirrels than we could count.

We saw a woman carrying a rather large pack while her boyfriend or husband had none and we also ran into a couple that had hiked out and up to the Grinnell Glacier Overlook. The woman seemed in considerable discomfort on the way out — I asked if she wanted an Ibuprofen, but her husband said she couldn’t have one — she was pregnant.

I gave them a look and he shrugged, noting it was her idea to do the hike, not his. I have only done that hike from the Loop, which is way more elevation gain, but a shorter distance. We also did quite a bit of additional off-trail travel on that jaunt. It wasn’t particularly difficult, but hiking down the Loop was no fun. It never is.

At any rate, we went far enough out on Sunday so we could see Granite Park Chalet and Swiftcurrent Lookout. I’m not in love with Granite Park — not because it’s not beautiful — it is. But because it has cell phone service and people start yakking on their phones as soon as they figure that out.

I don’t go into the backcountry to listen to other people’s phone conversations.

But I’m just old and crotchety.