Established: May 11, 1910
Gateway town: East Glacier Park, famous for its huckleberry ice cream, located on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation.
The lodge: On the shores of Swiftcurrent Lake, Many Glacier Hotel (pictured, with its vintage limo) is like a Swiss chalet on steroids.
The meal: Sautéed Montana trout with lemon and capers at Many Glacier Hotel.
Critter watch: Canada lynx looks like a mountain lion wearing snowshoes. Many people start their Highway 89 trip up in Canada, where the road starts. But, if you're tight on time, Glacier is the best park to begin the route. Once there, look up at the peaks of Montana’s
Glacier National Park—Mt. Gould, Mt. Grinnell, Going-to-the-Sun—and they are snaggle-toothed, beautiful, terrifying. Testimony to the sculptural power of ice. Glacier’s glacier story is complicated. The park has glaciers, 25 of them, which were at their best 500 years ago. The mountain-sculpting work was done by long-vanished Ice Age glaciers from 2 million years ago. Spend time in the park, and you pick up the names for the formations they created. Moraine: an untidy slope of boulders pushed down a mountain by a glacier. Arête: a knife-sharp ridge of rock. A park carved by brute force has an aura. Glacier is the edgiest of national parks, the moodiest. On a sunny summer morning, it shines with such alpine loveliness, you half-expect to see Maria from The Sound of Music tripping across a meadow. Ten minutes later, thunderclouds have massed and the world goes gray, grim, thrilling with menace as if Maria had wandered into Game of Thrones.
Glacier is also the park where you see clearly that national parks aren’t as timeless as we want them to be. At the visitor center in Logan Pass, a ranger gives an impromptu talk about Glacier’s current glaciers. They are shrinking, thanks to a warming planet, and may be gone by 2030. Glacier will still be wild and still be beautiful. But it will be different.