We  hated to leave Many Glacier Hotel but we were going to travel the famous “Going to the Sun Road” so I was excited.  It was even more beautiful than I could have imagined.  We passed the Lake McDonald Lodge on our way to the Village Inn at Apgar where we were staying.  It wasn’t long after unpacking that we ventured back up to the Lake McDonald Lodge.  I want to visit as many of the national park lodges as possible.  This one didn’t disappoint.  It looked, to me, to be in far better shape than the other lodges we have seen.  This is a beautiful lodge with lots of fancy woodworking and craftsman details. The first thing we noticed on the way in was the red tour buses that you see all over Glacier National Park. They are kept spotless.

The general store was a fancy building with beautiful details.

The front of Lake McDonald Lodge faces the lake because back in 1914 the people arrived by boat.  So even though you enter from the road side now, it is the back of the lodge. A fancy backside if you ask me!

In the photo below is the front side where people arrived by boat and made their way up the hill. You can’t see it in this photo but the front is full of beautiful plantings of flowers and stonework.

Here is some woodworking details of the outside trim on the lodge.

It all looked freshly painted and very neat.  The gardens were gorgeous!

A resting area in front of the lodge overlooking Lake McDonald.

Part of the log construction.

More of the log construction details.

A bald eagle flies overhead.

The view of Lake McDonald from the front of the lodge.

The front door of the lodge.

This has to be one of the best maintained of the early lodges of the park system.  I was really impressed!  I’ll soon be posting the photos and videos of the inside of this lodge.

First an update on my house. I went out yesterday and bought some more Peel Away 6 to strip the quarter-round trim that surrounds the baseboards in the dining room.  I can’t put the furniture in the dining room until I finish it all up.  I sure don’t want to move that heavy old oak buffet again.  It weighs a ton. I also bought a coarse sanding sponge.  It would be nice if that took the finish off without having to use any stripper.

It hailed last night pretty good. We only have a couple of weeks before we’ll need to put the storm windows back on.  I can’t remember if they needed some TLC first.  They probably do.  Everything else stops when the seasons change.  You have to make priorities as time is running out on the to-do list for things outdoors that have to be done before winter.

In the Many Glacier Hotel I noticed the old windows in our room, which look to be original, had the ropes and weights replaced with some kind of track system. They worked good for opening and closing the windows and if you can get away with not having those voids in the wall where the weights slide up and down on each side of the window, ie fill them with insulation or foam, you get better weather proofing. It is kind of neat to have the windows with the ropes and weights working nicely but the ropes don’t last all that long and I’m tired of having to take the window trim off and replace those dang ropes. So I’m looking to slowly replace them with that track system in the future. I’m sure it isn’t cheap. But it will be a lot cheaper than replacing the windows which I’ll not do. Who wants some modern window when you can have beautiful antique originals? Not me. But I’d be willing to fudge a little and replace the rope and weight system with the track.
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I was first introduced to the Many Glacier Hotel in an article from one of my “old house” magazines.  It may have been Style 1900, not sure.  It featured the lodges of the national park system.  After reading about them, I would like to visit as many as I can.  Some could be gone before too long.  Things happen, money may not be there to restore, and there is always the threat of fire.  In fact, the Many Glacier Hotel came close to burning down once in its history as did the Old Faithful Inn.

It turns out I took more photos  of the inside of the Lake McDonald Lodge (which we didn’t stay in) than I did of the inside of Many Glacier Hotel.  We were so busy going to see the sights while we were at Many Glacier and the scenery was so spectacular that I forgot about the inside.  Even so, I did love the lobby of that hotel.  The fireplace with the hanging acorn weights was pretty grand.  The view through the wall of windows was like that of our balcony, just beautiful.  The rustic and comfortable chairs were perfect to sit and watch the clouds roll by and the wildlife across the lake.

There was a long hallway between the lobby and the hotel rooms that was lined with tables and chairs for playing cards, reading and putting puzzles together.  Remember those things?  When there is no TV you have to find other things to do in the evening.  Everyone was having a good time doing what used to come naturally.  When was the last time you put a puzzle together?  There are also banks of windows on both sides where you can do nothing but look out at the view.

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One of my favorite things in the evening was sitting around the fireplace.  It just felt right. Note the acorn weights dangling on the sides.  This hotel, as well as many others in the national park system were built by the railways in the teen years of the 20th century.  They wanted you to take their train to come visit the hotels.  You can see in the photo below some of the windows on the bottom left side.  There is a whole wall of those large windows. You could, and people do, sit there all day and be perfectly happy looking out the windows. The restaurants in the building also had great views.

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I took a video of the inside of the lobby and did a movie trace that makes a panorama.  The camcorder software automatically stitches together frames from a video and creates a still photo.  The photos are always a little distorted but they can show a larger portion of a room when you don’t have a wide-angle lens.  See the movie tracer below.

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I want to go back.  The weather wasn’t the greatest while we were there and I’d like to hike more trails and spend more time at this wonderful hotel.  Below are a couple of videos I took.  One is a video sweep of the view from our balcony of this hotel and the other is of the moose family we saw across the lake.

Below-moose family frolicking in Swiftcurrent Lake. A baby moose joins them late in the video. The video taken from our room’s balcony.

In between finishing projects on my old house (I’ll still be working on them,) I’ll be posting about some interesting old buildings I have come in contact with.  During our vacation we intentionally came in contact with many historic buildings including the Many Glacier Hotel in the Glacier National Park in Montana. The history can be found here:  http://www.glacierparkfoundation.org/History/mgh.html

Yes, go.  It’s so gorgeous the price is worth it.  The rooms are not but as the saying goes, you pay for the view.  I get goosebumps still when I think about the grandeur of the place, the views and the moose and the treat or threat of seeing grizzly bears. A person is dwarfed by the huge mountains and it really makes you take a step back and think about things, wonderful things.  This is one place you really do drink in the view. Bears, nope, we paid just shy of $100 for bear spray for the 2 of us because you just don’t take chances with grizzlies.  But the weather didn’t cooperate for too many hikes and we didn’t see any bears.  We saw moose right outside while we were sitting on our balcony.  A bull, a cow and a young baby trying to nurse. It made our day.

When we arrived the clouds and mist lowered onto the mountain tops and we only saw the bottoms but that was still breath-taking.  Mountain goats greeted us.  They just happened to come down from the surrounding mountains to munch on the hotel’s lawn.  We didn’t see them again except for through a scope up on the mountain tops.

The hotel was big and on the shore of pretty Swiftcurrent Lake. We felt like we were in the Swiss Alps (we’ve never been there so…. ) The drawback was that the parking lot was way up on a hill.  We read about that from reviewers of the hotel but thought that shouldn’t be a problem.  It wasn’t but it was a big inconvenience. It’s good exercise.

The only room I could get with a lakeside balcony was a room with twin beds and a shared balcony with 2 other rooms.  I booked back in April for our September vacation.  The rooms fill up fast.  It had a clawfoot bathtub with shower and the sink was outside the bathroom and had a cold and hot faucet but the temperatures don’t mix.  That wasn’t that big a deal for us. The bathroom was small but functional but I didn’t like the very thick plastic shower curtain that was too long and sat in the water when showering.  There was a heater in there that worked good enough.  The rooms are so badly decorated.  Plastic-like fake paneling, totally out-of-period lighting and our room had an adjoining door to the room next door.  There was daylight under the door.  You could hear every word the neighbors said.  There may as well of had a curtain between us.  But who cares!!!?  It’s all about the views and we weren’t in our room very much.  I read somewhere that they will be remodeling next year.  Perhaps we should have waited a few years to come but maybe the price would go up, too, and make it not within our budget.  Really, the rooms just don’t matter when you are in a place like that.

Many Glacier Hotel from the side.

View from our Balcony.

View from the trail at Many Glacier Hotel

Looking straight out from our balcony. That shot almost looks like it is through a fish eye lens but it isn’t.  That bowl effect if from glacier activity thousands of years ago.

But this isn’t a real shot. It is from my movie tracer to show a panoramic view taken from a video sweep of the area.

Nice roomy balcony for watching the sunset.

The trail around Many Glacier Hotel.  We could only go half way around the lake because of trail maintenance.

Trail around the lake.

Sunrise, alpine glow, at Many Glacier taken by my husband.  I sleep in

Our room at Many Glacier Hotel. It’s pretty expensive but you pay for the view.

The balcony door on right, door to adjoining room (locked, I hope, I didn’t try it) on left.  Also, our balcony door blew open in the middle of the night when the wind picked up. I thought my husband got hot and opened it, he thought the same thing about me. It turns out the door doesn’t latch well and really the only thing keeping people from the other 2 rooms that share the balcony out of our room was a small hook and eye on the screen door and honesty. I didn’t care for that, for sure.

The quaint old period-appropriate sink with single faucets each for hot and cold. The green on the tub was a bit “green” but the room was clean and the linens were fresh and that’s the main thing.

I’ll be posting the inside of the Many Glacier Hotel lobby on my next post. The lobby is awesome!

Looking back at towards the Many Glacier Hotel. It was gloomy but beautiful. The weather wasn’t our friend while we were there, just a few hours here and there was it sunny. We hated to leave but we looked forward to going to Lake McDonald (still in Glacier National Park) and then on to Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons.  I got so excited when I looked back and saw this view I had my husband quickly pull off the road and I jumped out of our Explorer catching my arm in the seat belt causing my camcorder to be thrown quite a ways onto the payment.  The settings seem a bit off now but good enough.  Later I also would get excited and in my hurry to capture, wolves, eagles and the like in Yellowstone and the Tetons, my camera went for some hard hitting rides again. I have to control myself

My rush to finish painting my kitchen was because we were leaving for a 16-day cross-country trip to some of the most beautiful national parks in the US.  I never got the grate put back up on the wall because there is plaster damage where we took it down and the wood it was screwed into was damaged and wouldn’t hold the weight.  I think we were lucky it never fell off the wall all this time, it’s heavy. We just left it off and I wasn’t going to let it bother me on my vacation but I’ll have to get back at it now.

We stayed in the historic Many Glacier Hotel, built in 1914, in Glacier National Park.  The lobby and fireplace were awesome as well as the alpine views out the glass wall facing the lake and glaciers.  Next we headed down, via the Going to the Sun Road, to Lake McDonald in Glacier National Park and visited the Lake McDonald Lodge built in 1914. The grounds were beautiful, the lobby smaller than Many Glacier’s but still wonderful and decorated with all sorts of animal skins and rustic charm.  We didn’t stay there as I choose the Village Inn at Apgar, built in 1956, only because of the huge picture-window view every room had looking out over Lake McDonald.  It was breath-taking! Then on to Yellowstone National Park where we stayed a few days at the Mammoth Hotel in the Mammoth Hot Springs area of Yellowstone. The wing of the hotel we stayed in was built in 1913.  We visited that area of the park and then stayed at the Lake Yellowstone Hotel and Cabins where we stayed another 4 days.  Before we left, we stopped in at the Old Faithful Inn, built in 1904. The best, best, best lodge ever! I couldn’t believe the lobby inside!  We also stopped in at the newly completed “green” Old Faithful Visitors Center that cost 27 million.  The A-frame wall of windows faced Old Faithful Geyser. It’s a beautiful building but I wasn’t blown away by the displays.  We were at the old center 9 years ago and I found that more interesting.

English speaking visitors seemed to be close to a minority while we were in Yellowstone.  It appeared most people were Asian or German. There were lots of tour buses and you had to hope they wouldn’t be in the area you happened to be visiting as those areas got pretty crowded. I was surprised there were so many in Yellowstone because the main lodges were in their last week of operation for the year and children were back in school.   Most lodges were closing for the winter. Still, I’m sure there were less people than were there in the summer.  We visited Yellowstone 9 years ago and my husband and I were often the only people around when we saw the sights.  We came in the first week the lodges open back then and it was pretty cold but worth not having the crowds.

We left Yellowstone and headed down to the Grand Tetons.  Just beautiful! We stopped in at the Jackson Lodge while visiting.  The view from the lobby’s wall of windows is just beautiful.  Someday I’d like to spend a few days in that lodge!  There are often moose hanging out in the meadow not far from the lodge. In this perfectly gorgeous, serene setting there were people talking loudly on their cellphones, doing business instead of drinking in the views.  We were thankful that for most of our trip there wasn’t cell-phone service, TV nor internet.  We had to actually look out and enjoy the sights and sounds of the national parks.

We drove about 5,600 miles on this trip and the car purred along without a hiccup.  We listened to audio books through the more boring states (and there were quite a few.) Of all the states we went through, Montana wins as being our favorite state hands down.  We traveled through Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Nebraska (would we ever get through it?) Iowa and back through Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and back to Pennsylvania on this trip. We’ll have to go back someday.  I’d like to see Glacier National Park again as the weather hindered some of the sight-seeing while we were there, though it was still breath-taking. I’d like to go up to the Prince of Wales Hotel in Canada which is part of the International Peace Park which Glacier is a part of.  We don’t have our passports yet so we couldn’t drive the few miles north to see it.  Next time!

I’ll be sharing some of the lodge photos I took in some up-coming posts in between some more of my house projects.