Saint Mary Lake, Montana, United States
I needed an easy day after yesterday’s incredibly long hike,
so I decided to spend it doing touristy things along Going-to-the-Sun Road
which bisects Glacier from east to west. It is one of the most spectacular
roads in America even if the highest altitude at Logan Pass is only about 6,600
feet, minimal by Colorado standards and even those in southern Montana.
Just about everyone who visits Glacier drives across it on
Going-to-the-Sun road, so it’s very touristy during the short season the road
is open and gets very crowded. That season is often only three months long and
usually less than four since it typically only opens sometime in June and
closes again with early heavy snowfalls usually in October. The parking lots
fill up early and close, and the shuttle bus system along the road seems inadequate
sometimes resulting in long waits and defeating the purpose of leaving your car
behind at the entrance visitor centers. That’s largely because visitation has
increased so much. You can look up annual visitation statistics for national
parks online now.
The last year I was in Glacier in 2001 annual visitation was
1.68 million; by 2017 it had almost doubled to 3.31 million. To be honest, I
didn’t do all that many of the stops along the road and the shorter hikes
available from it on either of my two previous trips to Glacier. I’ll change
that this time
Back in 1988 I went on a whirlwind car tour of the West with
my mom between my junior and senior years in college. We traveled mostly the
way we used to when I was growing up – lots of driving, and “seeing things”
largely meant driving past and looking from the car with relatively few
activity stops. My memories of that trip through Glacier are rather sparse, but
we drove across the park from west to east and stopped at Logan Pass for a
while. On my second trip in 2001 I spent
more time in the area and recall centering my trip on three significant hikes
in the park as well as going to Waterton Lakes in Canada for a few days, but I
still didn’t make many of the stops to other sites along the road.
I ended up spending most of the day around Saint Mary’s Lake
on the east side of Logan Pass.
I should mention that the east and west sides
of Glacier National Park actually look quite different, the land east of the
Continental Divide in the Atlantic and Arctic Ocean watersheds being somewhat
higher, drier, and more Wild West in appearance while that west of the Continental
Divide that drains toward the Pacific via Flathead and Columbia rivers is more
thickly forested and feels more like the Pacific Northwest. To me there’s
something about the side east of the divide that is especially spectacular, a
very open western landscape of knife edge ridges, contrast of colors, and
particularly big skies where the plains meet the mountains. I also find the scenery around Saint Mary
Lake much more impressive than that around Lake McDonald on the west side, both
of whose shore Going-to-the-Sun Road follows.
A few of these stops include Sun Point where a short trail
leads from a large parking area to a rocky peninsula that juts into Saint Mary
Lake for spectacular views in all directions.
It almost made me want to take one of the boat cruises on the lake for views
from more vantage points, even though I usually consider boat rides a bit
passive for my taste. Another overlook
of the lake frames Wild Goose Island, a few rocks in the lake with a tree growing
on them, perfectly. A few miles farther west at Sunrift Gorge a stream carves
an impressive gorge through rocks. The three-mile round trip hike to Saint Mary
Falls and Virginia Falls is easy and very popular. Anywhere else the set of smaller
falls in between the two main ones would me a significant attraction in their
own right, but at Glacier these little falls don’t even appear to be named.
It was fairly late in afternoon before I continued up and
over Logan Pass. The parking lots and
roadside pullouts were mostly full, so I didn’t get to take many photo stops
along the way – wait for my return across the road in a few days at a less
crowded time of day. I continued on to the Flathead Valley and Kalispell in search
of a gym for a few iron pumping sessions before returning to the park the next
day.
2025-05-23