Day 16 of 2019 Western US Tour, July 27, Road Trip to Salt Lake City

Our final day roaming America’s mountain areas for the summer of 2019. The plan of the day was to drive from Kalispell, the gateway to Glacier National Park, to Salt Lake City, where our flight to Washington DC would depart the next day.

My GPS tracked more than 1000km for the day (we have two drivers). Here’s the route we took:

If one just searched Google Maps, the default route between these two points was farther East along I90-I15. However, we took a different route of US93-US28 before reaching Idaho Falls. This added an hour (but only 2 miles) to our journey, but we were able to pass some wonderful forests along US93 (photos below), and some stunning wide open valleys along US28 (no photos since I was driving).

So after breakfast, we checked out of our hotel at Kalispell and went on the road at 8:30am. We made a brief stop at the town of Bigfork just before 9am, the only town around Flathead Lake that’s got cellular coverage. It’s 24 hours before our Southwest flight to Baltimore’s departure as checkin opened.

After that, it’s the beautiful Montana Highway 35, with lush forest on one side and sights of Flathead Lake on the other.

Orchards and vineyards lined most of the road, but since it’s a Saturday morning there wasn’t much activity going around.

After crossing onto US93, farmland began to sprawl around.

We made a brief stop at the Walmart Supercenter outside city of Missoula, where we stocked up on food for the remainder of the day. That’s also where I took over driving, until 2 hours later that we were approaching Lost Trail Pass, the border of Idaho and Montana.

All of sudden it was beginning to rain.

The rain lasted about 5 minutes, in the following photo, rain drops were clearly visible illuminated by sunlight.

I took over driving again after exiting the town of Salmon. A few bridges on US28 was under construction and limited to one-way traffic. Unfortunately this one-way traffic was handled by unintelligent traffic lights, instead of crossing guards. As a result, waiting for red lights before a totally empty bridge wasn’t the best part of this trip.

Otherwise, US28 passed through some wonderful landscape between two mountain ranges, that’s most representative of this country’s wilderness.

At about 4:30pm, we reached Idaho Falls, that’s both the name of the city and of a series of man-made waterfalls in the downtown area. We took a moment admiring this array of waterfalls, had dinner in a nearby restaurant, before moving on to Salt Lake City.

And I took over driving since Malad Summit all the way to Salt Lake City. It was 8:40pm by the time we arrived at our hotel by Salt Lake City Airport, just a few minutes before sunset.
In case one was wondering, yes we originally planned to watch sunset by Great Salt Lake. But it’s late we were tired, so we called it off.
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