Going-to-the-Sun Mountain: The Name the Blackfeet Already Had

The mountain you are looking at has had more than one name, and the one on the map is the oldest. Going-to-the-Sun Mountain, rising to nine thousand six hundred forty-two feet above the road corridor near the Logan Pass approach, carries a name tied to Blackfeet stories about the Sun. Blackfeet tradition tells of a spirit who finished his work and returned to the sun, and this peak is tied to that story.

The English name is usually credited to the writer James Willard Schultz, who proposed it in eighteen eighty-eight while hunting with his Blackfeet friend Tail-Feathers-Coming-Over-the-Hill. It stuck.

The road that takes that name covers fifty miles across the park, but the mountain itself sits above the most dramatic section, the east-side approach where the road climbs above the tree line and the peaks close in from every direction. Driving toward Logan Pass with Going-to-the-Sun Mountain above you, the name acquires a quality that a less storied summit might not earn. You are, in the most literal sense, going toward the sun, uphill, into open sky, with a peak named for that exact movement standing over the road.

The Blackfeet names that survived in the park geography tend to be the ones that early white visitors found striking enough to translate rather than replace. Going-to-the-Sun is the most famous of these. Reynolds Mountain, just north of the pass, carries the name of a white surveyor. The asymmetry in which names survived and which were overwritten is not random. It reflects decisions made by people who arrived here after the Blackfeet had been naming this landscape for centuries.