Stanley Kubrick opened The Shining with an aerial sweep across St. Mary Lake, and the one-acre island in that frame is still there. Wild Goose Island sits roughly a mile offshore, a knot of subalpine fir standing on glacial rubble. The lake behind it runs about 9.
9 miles long and drops close to 300 feet, filling a trough gouged by ice that retreated some 12,000 years ago. St Mary Boat Tour Glacier National Park tours follow that trough westward from the Rising Sun Boat Dock, where open water meets the wall of the Continental Divide.
Congress established Glacier National Park on May 11, 1910. The Great Northern Railway had already begun raising chalets along the eastern slope, marketing the range to travellers who arrived by rail. Going-to-the-Sun Road opened in 1933, threading the northern shore of the lake on its climb to Logan Pass. Passenger boat service is older than much of that pavement. The Glacier Park Boat Company has operated vessels inside the park since 1938, and the same family has held the concession for generations.
The lake sits at 4,484 feet on the park's eastern edge, where the prairie of the Blackfeet Nation ends and the mountains begin without preamble. Wind is the constant. It funnels down the valley most afternoons, stacking whitecaps against the shoreline cliffs. The Reynolds Creek Fire burned across the northern shore in 2015, and the standing grey snags remain part of the view — an unedited record of how a subalpine forest resets itself.
Wooden-hulled launches define the fleet's character. The vessel working these waters is named Little Chief, after the peak rising from the southern shore, and its route passes Red Eagle Mountain, Mahtotopa, Sun Point, and the drainage feeding Baring Falls. Interpretive commentary aboard covers glacial geology, Blackfeet place names, and the mountain goat and bighorn sheep that work the scree above the treeline. Glacier National Park boat tours here are less about distance covered than about angle. Seen from the road, the valley is a corridor of pullouts and guardrail. Seen from the deck of the St Mary Boat Tour Glacier National Park tour, it becomes legible end to end: a U-shaped trough, sheer on both flanks, cut by ice and still holding its meltwater.
7 hr
