Lake McDonald Lodge: The Last Great Northern Hotel

When you step into the lobby of Lake McDonald Lodge, the first thing you notice is the hunting trophies. Mountain goats, bighorn sheep, and deer heads line the walls above a stone fireplace, arranged in a way that suggests a wealthy sportsman's retreat rather than a national-park hotel. That impression is correct. The building started its life exactly that way.

John Lewis, a Great Falls businessman with money from land and livestock, built the original Swiss chalet structure between nineteen thirteen and nineteen fourteen on the south shore of Lake McDonald, opening it in June of nineteen fourteen. He had purchased the shoreline property and built a private sporting lodge for himself and his guests, people who came to fish the lake and hunt the surrounding country before Glacier National Park had fully organized its regulations around such things. The setting was extraordinary. Lake McDonald stretches ten miles from east to west, the deepest lake in the park at four hundred seventy-two feet, surrounded by old-growth cedar and hemlock on its western end, peaks and cliffs rising directly from the water on the east. Lewis understood what he had.

In nineteen thirty, the Great Northern Railway bought the lodge from Lewis and incorporated it into the chain of park hotels the railroad had been building since nineteen thirteen. The acquisition completed the Great Northern's grip on the park's west-side lodging. The company made modifications but kept the Swiss-chalet bones: the exposed log structure, the balconies, the massive stone fireplace, the animal mounts that Lewis had hung when it was his personal retreat. Those mounts stayed. They are, technically, artifacts of the pre-park sporting culture that the park's own regulations would later make impossible.

The Great Northern added the surrounding cabins and a boathouse. Red touring buses, the iconic White Motor Company vehicles that the railroad operated throughout the park from nineteen fourteen onward, connected Lake McDonald Lodge to Going-to-the-Sun Road once the road was complete in nineteen thirty-two. The lodge became a node in the park's transportation network, a place you arrived at by bus from the east side after crossing Logan Pass, or departed from heading east.

The National Register of Historic Places recognized the Lake McDonald Lodge Historic District in nineteen seventy-eight. The hunting trophies in the lobby are still there. The lake outside is still four hundred seventy-two feet deep, still cold enough that swimming it in July requires a specific kind of stubbornness.