West Glacier, Gateway at the Mountains

The little community at the park's west entrance has lived under two names. When the Great Northern Railway punched through Marias Pass and reached this spot in the early eighteen nineties, the railroad christened its station Belton. For almost six decades that name stuck, even as the Belton Chalet went up in nineteen ten as the first of the railway's grand lodges at the park, and workers bunked here while blasting and grading the Going-to-the-Sun Road through the nineteen twenties and thirties.

In nineteen forty-nine, residents voted to rename the town West Glacier, figuring the new name made the draw clearer to tourists scanning a map. The Belton name survived on the train depot and the chalet. Today Amtrak's Empire Builder still stops here on its Chicago-to-Seattle run, making this one of the only national park entrances you can reach by passenger train.