The Highline Trail: Seven Miles of Exposure

There is a wire cable bolted to the cliff face at the beginning of the Highline Trail, about a hundred yards past the Logan Pass Visitor Center. It is there for a specific reason. The trail at that point is narrower than two hikers walking side by side, and the drop below it, toward the Going-to-the-Sun Road corridor far below, is long enough to focus the mind considerably. The cable is not a handrail in the conventional sense. It is something to grip for people who look at the exposure and discover that they are less comfortable with heights than they thought.

Most people continue past the cable section. The trail opens up after the first mile and runs seven and a half miles along the Garden Wall, the arching spine of the Continental Divide, at an elevation where trees cannot grow. The terrain is beargrass meadows and rock gardens and the kind of sky that has no ceiling. Mountain goats appear on the trail with enough regularity that hikers learn to step around them rather than past them.

The trail ends at Granite Park Chalet, a stone backcountry shelter at the edge of the alpine zone, which has its own specific history. In August nineteen sixty-seven, Julie Helgeson was killed by a grizzly bear near the chalet, one of the two simultaneous attacks that transformed bear management in American national parks. The Highline Trail is the park's signature hike, and Granite Park is its most famous address. They are, in that sense, the same story from both ends.

If you are standing at the Logan Pass trailhead right now, with the cable section ahead of you, the question is simple: seven and a half miles of the most dramatic walking in any American national park, or not.