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| Driving is a challenge, but keeps the driver a bit busy for viewing all the sights. When I was there in late August of 2011, Red bus tours were booked solid for a week or more in advance.
There is a free shuttle bus service along the Going to the Sun Road. Goes from the east visitor center to the west visitor center with a bus change at Logan Pass. They run bigger buses on the east side than are allowed on the west side, so the west side is a fleet of 9 passenger vans. I made the round trip in most of a day by shuttle. Parking during the season at Logan Pass is tough. There is a lot bigger demand than there are parking places. I drove it too. I saw more scenery riding shotgun in the van on my trip east. I got pictures on possible from that position, not possible to get by driving and stopping.
The show Motion on the LiveWell network, livewellnetwork.com showed two shows this last week on hiking in Glacier, both very good, filmed about a week before I was there. They are probably available on line. Some I have found, some didn't display smoothly.
There are dozens of other places to see besides the Going to the Sun Road. There are two major lakes on the east side with their on boat tours and lodges with restaurants. There is a town with restaurants on the west side. There is a town just outside the park on the north west corner and a couple lakes up that was with over worked gravel roads, each with unique scenery. The Red bus tour up the east side does get to those lakes, but you have to drive on the northwest side yourself. US 2 around the southern edge of the park is faster than going up and over, but isn't as scenic. About half way around there is a vintage lodge where plain burgers are about $30 each and some rooms are in converted diesel locomotives with a room rent of a few hundred bucks a night, two or three nights minimum.
I found a guide book besides those put out by the park service handy in finding all the places to see. Mine came from Moon publishing and I recommend it highly. It got me to places off the beaten track so far that while I was at the town NW, a couple dropped by my truck as I fixed lunch and wondered how I'd found their "private" territory. I showed them the Moon guide book and the gal knew the guide book author and promised to give her a very hard time about exposing that "private" territory.
The roads in the park to the NW lakes were over driven, not maintained, and so very rough one lane so when meeting another vehicle one had to drive out into the woods, especially when the oncoming vehicle was a truck with duals.
According to the tour guide on one of the boat trips, the average Glacier visit lasts only as long as it takes to drive the Going to the Sun road. I was there three days, and if I had been able to schedule a red bus tour to Canada, I would have, and if I hadn't pulled a back muscle working on my camper before I got to Glacier, I would have taken (if I could have arranged it, I didn't check) a horseback ride to Sperry Chalet (destination of one of the Motion show hikes). So I would have been there at least 5 days. In those three days I crossed the pass four times, two times each direction. There are hundreds of miles of hiking trails all over the park, often with lots of rise or fall so they aren't all simple. There are some that are level enough for a wheel chair.
Point is that if you want to ride the red bus, call and make reservations NOW, you probably won't get to ride if you wait until you arrive to get the reservations. The drivers on the free shuttles don't give any travelog, and are mostly silent, but the passengers are anything but silent. However the scenery from free shuttle or red bus is the same end to end. The red bus stops, you get out and walk a bit and then get back on the same bus to continue. With the shuttle you can get off just as often, just to go on, you wait for the next shuttle. A half day round trip by red bus probably will take all day or longer by free shuttle if you stop as often as the red bus does. There is a ton of stuff to see besides the spectacular Going to the Sun road, so don't quit after one trip across the park on that popular road.
Gerald J. | |
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Glacier National Park
