New to the game, and, at one point, we had a full staging area full of locations, and, couldn't put up enough points to advance. Is this normal, or did we just run into a strange situation?

Welcome to the game!

Crowding the staging area with locations is one thing the encounter deck can do to give you a bad day. You can only clear one location per round via traveling + questing, so in a game with more players, it's more likely that you'll see the staging area fill up.

To deal with it, put some cards in your deck(s) that can place progress tokens on locations in the staging area. In the Core set, this means the Northern Tracker (spirit ally) and Snowbourn Scout (Leadership ally). There are other cards sprinkled throughout the available adventure packs and deluxe expansions that help as well.

Did you play a tactics deck?

No we didn't play tactics. I saw that you could us cards to place tokens, but, there were just so many. Not a problem, I was just wondering if that was something that happened often, All in all we had a pretty good time up to there. Game is starting to flow pretty well for us.

welcome

yes, this is very normal until you get into the flow of the game...different scenarios need different amounts of questing vs. fighting, and often you need to lose a quest several times before you get the balance right

rich

Location overload is a common cause a failure, especially initially, and this plagues monosphere decks, which may not include the cards necessary to avoid this. With add-on packs, you'll get more cards able to handle this properly and balance the various taks you need to do to progress during an adventure. Some cards, such as songs, will also allow you to add sphere symbols to your heroes and increase their verstility when spending resources.

So would northern tracker put a token on all the locations in staging area including the current quest I'm on?

I am sorry but its no, it says put 1 progress token on each location in the staging area.