So I was out in Glacier hiking on Thursday (the snow is as hard as rock, so it was hiking, not snowshoeing, not skiing, though if you want to ski, it's a very, very, fast track) and a cold front blew in. The skies went from blue to mushy gray and the wind picked up and the temperature dropped. So I headed back to town where I could see it was still sunny (and amazingly calm) to look for pine grosbeaks, one of my all time favorite birds. Good places to look for pine grosbeaks in Glacier are Two Medicine in the fall and in the south end of the Park (goat lick) and the Gunsight Pass Trail in the summertime. At any rate, there have been some nice flocks in town, but the light has been awful for days on end, with thick deep gray inversions. (An inversion is when cold air sinks in the valley and warm air rides over top of it. Things are all backwards, I know, but it forms fog, sometimes for weeks on end.)
At any rate, the cold front blew out the fog and the setting sun lit this male pine grosbeak damn near perfect. I took a handful of photos before he flew off.