Glacier National Park: America's Switzerland and the Crown of the Continent
Near Going To The Sun Road, Montana
About thirty miles northeast of Kalispell, the valley gives way to a wall of peaks so jagged and vertical that they look like something assembled from scratch for dramatic effect. This is the southern edge of Glacier National Park, established by Congress on May eleventh, nineteen ten, as the tenth national park in the United States.
The campaign to protect this landscape was led largely by one man: George Bird Grinnell, a naturalist, ethnographer, and editor of Forest and Stream magazine who first visited in eighteen eighty-five and spent the next quarter century lobbying for federal protection. Grinnell named dozens of features here and drew the attention of Theodore Roosevelt, who had explored the West with him. Congress finally acted in nineteen ten, creating a park of more than a million acres.
The Great Northern Railway immediately saw opportunity. The line's president, Louis W. Hill, son of the Empire Builder, launched one of the most ambitious tourism marketing campaigns in American railroad history. He branded Glacier as 'America's Switzerland' and commissioned a series of Swiss-chalet hotels and backcountry chalets throughout the park, some of which still stand. The railroad carried tourists from Chicago and Saint Paul to the park's western entrance at West Glacier, where Kalispell's proximity made it the logical base for visitors.
The park's signature engineering achievement came later. Construction of the Going-to-the-Sun Road began in nineteen twenty-one. Engineers spent eleven years cutting a fifty-mile route across the Continental Divide at Logan Pass, blasting through cliffs with nearly half a million pounds of explosives. The road opened on July fifteenth, nineteen thirty-three, at a final cost of more than two million dollars. It is today a National Historic Landmark. The glaciers the park was named for are receding, with scientists projecting that the major named glaciers could be gone within decades. The park that remains is still one of the most dramatic landscapes on the North American continent.
