As I’ve said before, Glacier National Park is not just beautiful, but huge, with a staggering diversity of charismatic features. Take this locale, Saint Mary Valley, through which I hiked on a ranger-led tour between Sunfire Gorge and Virginia Falls. Even with the dead trees from a fire that roared through the valley the year before I visited, it’s a literally awesome landscape. And it’s just one section of Glacier National Park.
The cornucopia of thrilling environments at Glacier make it my favorite national or state park in the United States. It has forests, it has lakes, it has waterfalls, it has alpine, all relatively easily accessible via the engineering feat that is the Going to the Sun Road. This makes visiting Glacier an efficient use of time and money.
