Glacier National Park is a range of the Rockies in northwestern Montana, hard against the Canadian border, and the way through it is a ledge blasted along the Continental Divide. Building the Going-to-the-Sun Road took eleven years and nearly 230 tonnes of explosives, with crews hung on ropes to cut a line up to Logan Pass at 2,026 metres. Rather than scar the slope with switchbacks, the builders traced one long traverse along the Garden Wall. The road climbs from lakeshore forest into alpine meadow, and a new peak, waterfall or valley swings into view at almost every bend. By the top you have crossed the whole width of the park in one slow climb. From the pass a boardwalk carries on through the meadows to an overlook above Hidden Lake, where the glacier-carved basin drops open at your feet under the pyramid of Bearhat Mountain.
Mountain goats graze within sight of that path, crossing near-vertical rock with startling ease. The park's white emblem is not a goat at all but a cliff-dwelling relative of the antelope. Two-toed hooves with rough rubbery pads grip bare stone, letting it stand on ledges centimetres wide above enormous drops. Down at Lake McDonald the water laps a shore of pebbles you can read straight through it: red, green and grey argillite, a mud-rock more than a billion years old. The red ones formed where the iron in them rusted above the old waterline; the green stayed submerged and never did. Aspens turn gold on the west side in mid-September, and the western larch, a conifer that drops its needles, blazes yellow there in late October. The park is named for ice it is losing — fewer than thirty glaciers left of the eighty that were here in 1850. Its most storied day hike climbs past waterfalls and lakes to Grinnell Glacier and the milky, iceberg-flecked lake below it. The ice at the end is visibly smaller than it was a generation ago — a shrinking landmark you can still stand in front of.