Wild Goose Island is the small rocky island on St. Mary Lake that opens Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, rising just 14 feet from the water. The overlook has parking and an accessible viewing area, and it frames Fusillade Mountain, with Citadel Mountain on the left and Goat Mountain on the right. St. Mary Lake is about ten miles long and rarely calm. One guide calls morning, up to about eleven, the best time for the view. The road's name comes from the nearby mountain, and writers have long repeated stories about it that its own namer disowned. The Golden Stairs and Rising Sun lie just to the east. A Boone tale plays here for listeners who park.
You've seen this island, even if you've never been here. Ease over for the overlook on your right. If you pulled in, turn right for Rising Sun. Parked? Boone has a tale for you here, three or four minutes. Shut the car off and I may cut out, so tap play and stay close. If you're rolling on instead, the road just past the overlook swings around gray-white rock called the Golden Stairs, and Rising Sun is about a mile past the overlook, with a camp store and, in season, the last food on this road. The size limit ends there. About two miles past Rising Sun, a pull-off on your right has an exhibit naming Triple Divide Peak, far across the lake. It sends water to three drainages, the Pacific, the Atlantic and Hudson Bay. Stanley Kubrick opened The Shining on Wild Goose Island. It rises just fourteen feet from the surface of Saint Mary Lake, and it's the first thing in the film. His first camera crew reported that Glacier wasn't interesting. Kubrick saw their test shots and, in his word, was staggered. He replaced them with Greg McGillivray, a helicopter specialist, who spent several weeks filming. By one account, leftover footage from those flights became the happy ending tacked onto the first release of Blade Runner. Now look up the lake from the overlook. The peak in the frame is Fusillade Mountain, with Citadel on the left and Goat Mountain on the right. George Bird Grinnell named Fusillade in eighteen ninety-one to tease Henry Stimson, later Secretary of State, and a companion, for wasting a whole volley on a group of goats on its side. The goats kept the mountain. The lake below it was once one long body of water, seventeen miles from end to end, until gravel from side streams split it in two. Going-to-the-Sun. You may have heard that name is an old Blackfeet legend. The park's own overview calls it a considerable controversy. Many writers assumed it was an original Blackfeet place name, and the overview says the English name traces to James Willard Schultz, in the eighteen eighties. The road borrowed it from the mountain in the early nineteen thirties. In nineteen twenty-nine Schultz put it in his own words. I myself named Going to the Sun Mountain, he said. There is no Indian legend in connection with its name. Schultz and Grinnell handed out many of the mountain names here that sound Native. The older layer is on the water, because the Blackfeet do have names for most of the larger lakes, streams and rivers. For this lake, they're the ones I'd keep. The Lakes-Inside, and the Walled-In Lakes. Stand at the rail and you'll see why, a long road of water with mountains shut around it, and one very small island holding its own.
Photo: NPS / Jacob W. Frank · Public domain