Logan Pass

After much anticipation and a few false starts, our season has finally gotten fully underway with the opening of the Going-to-the-Sun Road and the Logan Pass Visitor Center! With an elevation of 6,646 feet, Logan Pass is the highest point along the road and sits directly at the Continental Divide. And it is definitely the busiest place in the park: on Opening Day (June 22) the NPS recorded 9113 visitors at the pass.

And let me tell you, those people want to shop! The two photos above were taken about one minute apart, just before and just after we opened the doors one recent morning. Like our other visitor center stores, we sell t-shirts, hoodies, patches, pins, keychains, books, mugs, and so much more. But people just seem to especially want to buy them at the Top O’ the World! Our opening day sales broke all previous records, and while not always record-breaking, overall sales have remained at a high since we opened.

Our workday is broken into two shifts–openers and closers–and each shift drives up together in one of the Conservancy’s vehicles, typically a Toyota RAV4 or a Ford Expedition if we have to bring a load from the warehouse, which we have had to do a lot lately because we are selling more merchandise than the warehouse can send in the delivery vehicle! Above are a couple shots of the road, taken from the passenger’s seat on a trip where I’m not driving. You can see the road cutting across the side of the mountains, and in the second shot you can see the one switchback on the road. GTSR was constructed over 11 years between about 1921 and 1932 and was originally conceived with 15 switchbacks. However, very late in the planning stage, the National Park Service decided to adopt a plan that, while more expensive than the original plan, utilized only one switchback, which better preserved the natural landscape. As a result, the road is considered an engineering marvel, holding three major official designations as a National Historic Landmark, National Register of Historic Places, and National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark. As someone who’s basically afraid of heights, though, I mostly just remind myself that this road is designed and maintained for the average driver to be able to navigate safely. Rob and I recently previewed a documentary that came out this year entitled Journey to the Sun, which is about the history and current-day operations of the road and is a must-see if you love Glacier!

People love Logan Pass for many reasons: the hikes, the views, the wildlife! I primarily like it for the workout. Our stockroom is located underneath the visitor center, and it’s a three-story climb to bring items up to the store. I estimate that I (along with all my other co-workers) run a box or tote of merchandise up the stairs about 15-20 times per shift, which adds up over the course of a day to a nice cardio workout and everyone is always a little bit breathless when we reach the top! By the end of a shift, I am truly exhausted. But I really consider it a privilege to be able to do this–back when I was turning 60, I realized that the best thing I could do for myself moving forward was to find a job that required me to be active. Last year, it was upper-body work scooping ice cream; this year, it’s legs and glutes. But I knew this going in. As I told my boss on Opening Day, “This is why I went to the gym all winter!” I have noticed, though, that it’s cutting into my ability to do more strenuous hikes. By the time we get to our days off, I’ve already put in 3-4 days of intense training and I could really use a rest! So we’re trying to find a way to balance our work days, hikes, and rest days in order to give ourselves some time to recover. The photo on the right is a view from my lunch break one afternoon last week.

The schedule above might give you the best idea of how this all works up here. Everyone takes turns stocking apparel and non-apparel as well as running the registers, one hour at a time. Openers leave the West Glacier warehouse at 7am and typically arrive at Logan Pass at 8:30. Closers leave the warehouse at 10am. We all overlap for a few hours, then openers leave at 4pm and closers leave when the store closes at 7pm. And as I mentioned in an earlier post, we all take turns driving the road! One of the ways in which our day is kind of surreal up here is that we are almost completely cut off from all communication with the outside world. Once we start driving up the road in the morning, we lose cell or wifi service and there’s no service at the top of the mountain either! There is Starlink for the registers, otherwise we wouldn’t be able to run any transactions, but we don’t have the password for it. So other than the company cell phone, there’s no ability to communicate with the outside world. Customers often want to know the password for the wifi or some other detail–one guy asked me the score for the World Cup game the other day–but we really have no knowledge of these things. Rob and I just watched the Apple TV series Severance over the winter, and it’s a little like that but a lot less sinister! My “outie” sometimes brings a book for my “innie” to read over my lunch break; other times I just sit and admire the view!

There are two famous hikes with trailheads at Logan Pass: The Highline, which traverses along the Continental Divide for about 12-15 miles, and the Hidden Lake trail, which leaves from behind the store and takes hikers out to an alpine lake that sits between Mount Reynolds and Mount Clements. The Highline just opened yesterday, and I am still on the fence about whether or not I can do it. The first quarter-mile follows the side of a cliff, as seen in the photo above (from the internet, not from personal experience). I have done a little research online and learned that it is significantly less dangerous than the famed Angel’s Landing in Zion National Park, which I refused to do (except for one weak moment in which I thought that maybe I could do it and Rob thankfully nixed the idea!). But people do occasionally fall to their death from this part of the trail and I’d prefer not to be one of them. The rest of the trail is just a strenuous, though beautiful, hike along the Garden Wall, with a view of the Grinnel Glacier along the way.

The Hidden Lake trail is deceptively difficult, at least at this time of year. Normally a relatively easy hike out to the lake, large parts of the trail are covered with snow right now, making conditions slushy and slippery as the snow melts. We’ve sold a number of trekking poles at the store to people who want to hike this trail. But more ominously, three people on separate days have broken their legs on this trail in the two weeks it’s been open! And the best way to get them to medical care is via airlift. I was surprised to learn this, but it is actually easier, faster, and more economical for surrounding communities to send a helicopter versus an ambulance. There are a couple companies who offer airlift services to local hospitals–this one is owned and operated by a Gulf war veteran who hires other vets to pilot the helicopters. I used to think air rescue was part of a life-or-death situation, but now I feel more relaxed when I see the choppers overhead. The photos above are from an airlift that took place during my shift a few days ago.

And, of course, there’s the wildlife! The photo above is my view from the cash register on my most recent shift three days ago! Although I am continuously busy checking people out while operating the register, visitors are just as awed as I am by the sight of six bighorn sheep right outside our window. So we all took a 5-second break from our activities to photograph the herd, and then immediately went back to our transactions. Logan Pass is only open for about three months out of the year, so I’m looking forward to seeing as much of it as I can before it closes!

ADDENDUM: JULY 12

Yesterday I saw my first mountain goat while driving up the Pass to work! Famed for their ability to walk on cliffs and to withstand high elevations, the mountain goat was chosen about 100 years ago as the symbol for Glacier National Park. But until recently, they have been pretty scarce. I feel so fortunate to have been able to see not just one, but two of them up close!

On a more somber note, we learned yesterday in the middle of the afternoon that the GTSR road was temporarily closed due to an accident: a rock had fallen on someone’s personal vehicle and they were severely injured. We later learned that the rockfall had come from the Highline trail, which runs about 100 feet above the road at the point where it is traversing along the cliff. Whether by human error, goat traffic, or just natural landslides, rockfall along the road is extremely dangerous. The person who was hit was medically stabilized and airlifted to a local hospital but we have not heard any news yet about their condition. It’s horrible to think about accidents happening to visitors in a national park, but these very real incidents do happen. I will be keeping this person in my thoughts. And of course I’m grateful that both Rob (who was driving the delivery vehicle yesterday) and I made it home safely.