Going-to-the-Sun Road โ€” mountain pass
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Going-to-the-Sun Road

  • 2 min read
  • 48.695ยฐ N 113.817ยฐ W

Interesting facts

  • Up to about 24 metres of snow can pile up at Logan Pass, and the deepest snowfield just east of it has long been known as the Big Drift.
  • Clearing the road each spring takes about ten weeks, even with machines that can shift 4,000 tons of snow an hour; on bad days crews advance only about 150 metres.
  • Before the road existed, crossing the heart of the park took several days; the same journey can now be driven in a few hours.
  • Landscape architect Thomas Chalmers Vint's route along the Garden Wall replaced a plan with many switchbacks, costing more but scarring the mountainside far less.
  • The road was first proposed in 1917 by park superintendent George Goodwin and cost about $2.5 million by the time it opened end to end.
  • It was one of the first National Park Service projects designed specifically for visitors arriving by automobile.
  • The park's 1930s red tour buses are called Red Jammers, after drivers who had to jam the manual gearboxes into low gear on the steepest grades.
  • Aerial shots of a car on the road along St. Mary Lake open Stanley Kubrick's 1980 film The Shining.
  • St. Mary Lake and the road appear in Forrest Gump, behind Forrest's memory of a lake so clear it seemed to hold two skies.
  • According to one legend, a deity came down from the Sun to teach the Blackfeet to hunt and left his image on the mountain that gives the road its name.

Why it is worth it

Going-to-the-Sun Road is one of the few roads that is itself the reason to visit a national park. For about eighty kilometres it crosses Glacier National Park in Montana from West Glacier to St. Mary, running the length of Lake McDonald on the west side, climbing over the Continental Divide at Logan Pass, 2,026 metres up, and dropping down to the shore of St. Mary Lake on the east. It was built between 1921 and 1932 and formally dedicated in July 1933, and it was the first road in the United States to be listed at once on the National Register of Historic Places, as a National Historic Landmark and as a Historic Civil Engineering Landmark.

The engineering is the point. Rather than blasting a highway through the mountains, the builders laid the road along the grain of the land, with stone guard walls and arches built from local rock so that the work would sit quietly in the scenery. On the western climb it makes a single great hairpin, the Loop, and then traverses the Garden Wall, a knife-edged ridge with the road cut into its face and the valley falling away beneath. At the Weeping Wall, meltwater streams down the rock cut straight onto the roadway; further on, the Triple Arches carry the road across a cleft in the side of Pollock Mountain, and short tunnels pierce the ridges on both sides of the pass.

Logan Pass itself is a meadow world above the trees, with views of hanging valleys, cirques and the remaining glaciers of the park. The road takes its name from Going-to-the-Sun Mountain, which rises above St. Mary Lake; the name is linked to a Blackfeet story of a spirit who came down from the Sun to teach the people to hunt and then returned up the mountain. Winter takes the road back every year: as much as twenty-four metres of snow can pile up at the pass, and clearing it takes crews around ten weeks, so the full crossing is normally possible only from early summer into autumn. Vehicles longer than about 6.4 metres or wider than 2.4 metres are not allowed on the central section between Avalanche Creek and Rising Sun.

Getting there

The western end of the road starts at West Glacier on U.S. Route 2; Kalispell, the nearest sizeable town, is about 66 km away, and Glacier Park International Airport (FCA) about 54 km. The eastern end joins U.S. Route 89 at St. Mary.

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in the United States 228The Most Spectacular Mountain Passes 12The Greatest Engineering Wonders in the United States 26The Greatest Engineering Wonders 271

From the encyclopaedia

Going-to-the-Sun Road is a scenic mountain road in the Rocky Mountains of the western United States, in Glacier National Park in Montana. The Sun Road, as it is sometimes abbreviated in National Park Service documents, is the only road that traverses the park, crossing the Continental Divide through Logan Pass at an elevation of 6,646 feet (2,026ย m), which is the highest point on the road. Construction began in 1921 and was completed in 1932 with formal dedication in the following summer on July 15, 1933. Prior to the construction of the road, visitors would need to spend several days traveling through the central part of the park, an area which can now be traversed within a few hours, excluding any stops for sightseeing or construction.

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