Rising Sun and the East Shore: The Road's Quieter Side
Near Going To The Sun Road, Montana
Most people who drive Going-to-the-Sun Road are heading west to east or east to west, chasing the summit at Logan Pass. Rising Sun Motor Inn and Campground, on the north shore of Saint Mary Lake about seven miles west of the Saint Mary entrance, sits at a point where most drivers are either building anticipation or winding down from the experience of the high road. It is not a dramatic stop. That is part of what makes it worth understanding.
The structures at Rising Sun date to nineteen forty-one, built by the Great Northern Railway as part of its effort to provide lodging at multiple points along the Going-to-the-Sun corridor rather than concentrating visitors only at the large hotels at either end. The motor inn form, a cluster of small individual cabins oriented around a central service building, was the Great Northern's adaptation of the emerging auto-tourist cabin court concept to the national park context. Families arriving by car needed something different from the wealthy rail travelers the large hotels had been designed to serve. Rising Sun was designed for that family.
The nineteen forty-one buildings survived intact long enough to be recognized as a historic district on the National Register of Historic Places, one of several Great Northern-era properties in the park that document the transition in American travel from rail to automobile. The motor-court typology that the Great Northern used at Rising Sun, individual cabins rather than a single large structure, was a deliberate response to the privacy and independence that car travelers expected. You parked at your cabin. You came and went on your own schedule. You were not dependent on the railroad's timetable.
Saint Mary Lake stretches nearly ten miles from east to west beyond the Rising Sun shoreline. The lake's colors shift through the day in ways that serious photographers plan around: early morning silver, midday turquoise, late-afternoon gold on the peaks of the Lewis Range. The road beyond Rising Sun, heading west toward Logan Pass, begins its serious climbing almost immediately. This shore is one of the last calm places before the mountain takes over.
