Logan Pass

Six thousand six hundred forty-six feet at Logan Pass, and the road goes no higher. The lot's just ahead on your right. Take the nearer road in. The farther one is the exit, but go by the signs. If it's full, don't wait in the road. Carry on, and the tour goes with you. If you pulled in, it's a right out of the lot and the long way down to Saint Mary begins. Park, and Boone has a tale for this pass, three or four minutes. If the car going off cuts me out, tap play, and stay close till he starts. You've reached the Continental Divide, and the country splits right here. Rain on the west side runs to the Columbia and the Pacific, and rain on the east side to the Missouri, the Mississippi and the Gulf. Two drops can land a foot apart and finish a continent away from each other. The Blackfeet called the Rocky Mountains the Backbone of the World, and the park says this entire area holds great spiritual importance to the Blackfeet, Salish, Pend d'Oreille and Kootenai people. Rolling on, Lunch Creek comes first, down a natural rock staircase from Pollock Mountain through carpets of summer flowers. It was a lunch stop for early visitors. Stay on the pavement there, because the park has had to replant the paths people wore in. About a mile past the lot you'll go through the East Side Tunnel. Look at the portals as you pass. Crews dug it in nineteen thirty-one before any road reached it, and the white mortar was stained with lamp black so the masonry would blend into the mountain. If you've parked, open your door and the air tells you where you are. It runs ten to fifteen degrees cooler up here than in the valleys, and snow can come in any month. Bring a layer. There's water and flush toilets in summer, and no food for sale. The walk to make is Hidden Lake Overlook, from behind the visitor center, one point three miles one way and six hundred eight feet up, on boardwalk and packed soil, with stairs and switchbacks. Your first steps cross a fossil reef more than a billion years old. Stay on the boardwalk and the trail, because some plants up here may grow only half an inch in five years. The Highline leaves from across the road, and it's no stroll, eleven point eight miles one way, much of it exposed. In the nineteen thirties, park naturalists led daily walks from this pass to Hidden Lake and to Clements Glacier. By nineteen forty-nine, a park bulletin was calling it the former Clements Glacier. They had a daily walk to a glacier, and the glacier left first. The meadows around you are tended. Grizzlies dig for glacier lilies in early summer, the digging releases nitrogen, and the lilies come back larger and thicker in the old digs. Keep a hundred yards from the gardener. Just east of the lot is the site of the Big Drift, where snow blown over the Divide piles forty to eighty feet deep. It's the last stretch cleared every spring, usually where the east and west plow crews meet, with the whole road open at their backs.