Why stop here
Known as the 'Crown of the Continent,' this pristine wilderness preserves over 1 million acres of ecosystems spanning from prairie to alpine tundra. The park protects sacred sites of the Blackfeet Nation and shows the dramatic geological history carved by ancient glaciers.
Before you go
Hours, fees, access, closures, parking, and trail conditions change. Use the directions link to identify the managing agency and confirm anything time-sensitive before making a special trip.
The long version
Stretching across one million acres of wilderness along the Continental Divide, Glacier National Park preserves what conservationists call the “Crown of the Continent”, a landscape of towering peaks, pristine lakes, and ancient glaciers. The park’s history is also inseparable from the Blackfeet Nation, whose homeland includes these mountains and whose 1895 land cession made the park’s eastern half possible.
People have lived in and traveled through this region for more than 10,000 years, according to the National Park Service. For the Blackfeet, whose traditional territory spanned from the Rocky Mountains, which they called the “Backbone of the World”, out onto the Great Plains, the area now within Glacier National Park was central to spiritual and cultural life. The Blackfoot Confederacy comprises the Siksika, the Kainai, and the Piikani, the last of these including both the Northern Piikani in present-day Alberta and the Amskapi Piikani, the Blackfeet Nation of Montana. Its people followed yearly cycles of hunting and gathering that carried them into these mountains.
The mountains provided game for hunting, plants for medicine and food, materials for tools and shelter, and sacred sites for ceremonies. The high alpine meadows, lakes, and glacier-fed streams formed an integrated ecosystem woven into Blackfeet life for generations.
The 1855 Lame Bull Treaty had recognized Blackfeet territory encompassing much of what is now northern Montana, later reduced to a reservation along the mountain front. By the 1890s, smallpox epidemics, the extermination of the buffalo, and years of hunger had left the Blackfeet in desperate straits.
In 1895, under these circumstances, Blackfeet leaders agreed to sell roughly 800,000 acres of the mountainous western portion of their reservation to the federal government for $1.5 million; many Blackfeet have since maintained that the sale was made under duress. This land became the eastern portion of what would become Glacier National Park. The agreement stipulated that the Blackfeet would retain the rights to hunt, fish, and cut timber on the ceded land so long as it remained public land of the United States, terms whose meaning has been disputed ever since.
The creation of Glacier National Park on May 11, 1910, cannot be separated from the commercial interests of the Great Northern Railway. Louis W. Hill, president of the railway and son of its founder James J. Hill, became the primary advocate for park creation, seeing enormous potential in developing the area as a tourist destination.
The Great Northern Railway promoted the park as a cross-continental attraction under the slogan “See America First,” building grand lodges and backcountry chalets, with its main line skirting the park’s southern boundary. Historians have documented how heavily the railway’s marketing drew on Blackfeet imagery, hiring Blackfeet people to greet trains, camp in tipis outside the lodges, and appear in advertising, even as the tribe itself had little share in the tourist economy taking shape on its former lands.
Within the park itself, the National Park Service completed the Going-to-the-Sun Road across Logan Pass in 1932 and dedicated it on July 15, 1933, an engineering feat that opened the high country to automobile travelers and remains the park’s most famous drive.
When Glacier National Park was created in 1910, the federal government took the position that the park’s establishment extinguished the hunting, fishing, and timber rights reserved in the 1895 agreement, reasoning that the land was no longer ordinary public land. The Blackfeet disagreed, arguing the agreement’s plain terms preserved those rights, and federal courts in the twentieth century repeatedly sided with the government. The dispute over the 1895 agreement’s meaning has never been fully resolved, and the tribe continues to assert its reserved rights.
The loss of access to sacred sites and traditional hunting grounds devastated Blackfeet culture. Ceremonies tied to specific mountain locations could no longer be performed. Traditional food sources became inaccessible. Knowledge systems based on intimate interaction with the high country began to fade.
The economic impact continues today. While visitors to Glacier National Park spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year by National Park Service estimates, poverty on the Blackfeet reservation remains far above the national rate according to U.S. Census Bureau figures. The people who once stewarded this landscape share little of the tourist economy built on their former homeland.
The Blackfeet continue to advocate for restoration of their subsistence rights and for cultural access to their ancestral lands. The Blackfeet Nation is also working to develop its own tourism economy, and tribal leaders have explored creating a tribal national park on reservation lands bordering Glacier that would present the landscape from a Blackfeet perspective.
Sun Tours, operated by the Blackfeet, offers interpretive tours of Glacier National Park from a Native perspective, helping visitors understand the deep cultural connections that predate park boundaries. These efforts represent attempts to reclaim narrative control over their own history and homeland.
Today, Glacier National Park faces new challenges that echo historical themes of balancing preservation with access. Climate change is shrinking the park’s remaining glaciers: U.S. Geological Survey mapping shows about 80 glaciers larger than 25 acres at the peak of the Little Ice Age around 1850, and by 2015 only 26 of the park’s 37 named glaciers still exceeded that size, with every named glacier retreating between 1966 and 2015. Increased visitation strains infrastructure and wildlife habitat. The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the park’s dependence on tourism while revealing the vulnerability of gateway communities.
Glacier National Park represents both the triumph of conservation and the tragedy of cultural displacement. Its stunning landscapes inspire millions of visitors annually while serving as habitat for grizzly bears, mountain goats, and hundreds of other species. Yet this preservation came at the cost of displacing indigenous peoples who had successfully managed these ecosystems for millennia.
The park’s history challenges us to consider whose stories are told, whose rights are recognized, and how conservation can honor both natural and cultural heritage. As the Blackfeet Nation continues to assert their connection to their ancestral homeland, Glacier National Park reminds us that true conservation must address historical injustices while protecting irreplaceable landscapes for future generations.
The Crown of the Continent remains one of North America’s most spectacular wilderness areas, evidence of the power of preservation, and a reminder that this landscape’s human story began long before 1910.