Like most Americans, I rarely travel by train in my own country, and it’s a tragedy because I love train travel. Unlike air travel, you’re still entangled in the landscape, slipping through remote valleys and along rocky rivers, gliding across open plains. There’s no need to worry about traffic, or keeping your eyes on the road. You can chat or nap. At dinner time, you can retire to the dining car for food that can really be enjoyable, and then stretch out on a bunk to pass the night. There’s an undeniable romance to it all.
And from Seattle, travel to Glacier National Park by train is convenient and relatively inexpensive. You can catch an Amtrak train in downtown Seattle just before 5:00PM, have dinner on the train and watch the scenery roll by all evening, sleep all night, wake up and have a hot breakfast, and arrive at one of the three Glacier Park stations between about 9:30 and 11:00 in the morning. It’s not as fast as flying, but it’s infinitely more relaxing.
So last June, we took a Thursday evening train to the park and a Sunday evening train back, both in order to get mid-week rates (which are a bit lower), and had most of Friday, Saturday, and Sunday to explore the park. For two adults, a private roomette with two “beds” costs a total of about $575, round trip, and the price includes all of the meals (my steak would otherwise have cost over $25). If you wanted to really go on-the-cheap, though, standard seats would have cost only $160 per adult, round trip, with no included meals.
Photography was not my purpose for this trip. In fact, I’d really only intended to take a few vacation snap-shots along the way, but in Glacier, there’s so much beautiful scenery, it’s hard to avoid taking at least a couple of pretty shots.
On Friday, we drove up the Going to the Sun Road from the west entrance of the park. We stopped at lakes and waterfalls and rivers, and the mountains just kept getting more beautiful as we climbed. In the early evening, we reached the Logan Pass Visitor’s Center, beyond which the road was still closed for the winter. The weather was windy and still pretty chilly, but I did see a scraggly-looking mountain goat. That evening, I had huckleberry pie for dessert.
Saturday’s route ran north along the east side of the park, dipping into the park for excursions near the Two Medicine Lakes, Saint Mary Lake, and finally, past Lake Sherburne to Many Glacier, where I hiked along Swiftcurrent Lake to Lake Josephine, and didn’t see a bear (though everyone told me there was one just ahead). The weather was perfect that day, and I preferred the scenery on this side of the park. Next time, I’ll consider staying at the Many Glacier Lodge rather than the Isaac Walton Inn1 The Isaac Walton Inn is conveniently located in the center of the park, in Essex, and they also rent cars .
When Sunday finally arrived, we knew that we had a train to catch in the evening, so we found some beautiful, secluded spots not more than a couple hours drive from Essex. As the sun started getting low in the sky, we returned to Essex and hopped on the west-bound train, and settled in for the night. At 10:30 on Monday morning, we pulled into King Street Station. For those who work a standard 9-5 job, it would be easy to go straight from the train to work, and only miss a couple of hours.
Glacier National Park is huge. Even after driving around for three days, we hardly scratched the surface of places easily accessible by car, and we didn’t even touch all of the trails that require any amount of serious hiking. Perhaps next time I go, I’ll spend a couple of weeks and I’ll do some serious photography.
