Glacier Onboarding 2025: Home is where the heart is.

Some posts require a lot of time and thought, while others can be more emotionally draining. While every now and then, they are just fun and reminiscent.

I think the best part about onboarding for a season as a Red Bus Driver in Glacier Park is …. The end of the mandatory week of training for returning drivers. Why? Because the minute class is done on Friday, I point the truck East and smile for the next two and a half hours until I pull into Beargrass.

I’ve packed most of what I will need for the summer season: clothing, gear, and all of the basics that I can’t get delivered to my cabin door through Amazon or Walmart. But better than just unpacking and setting up camp for three months, I get to see Glacier before it opens.

May can be an incredible month, and mid- to late May may even have some good weather. Maybe you can get in an early-season hike. Or you can do as I did and just drive around and visit old haunts.

Tourists are still few and far between, even on a stellar weather day on the East side. Why? Simple. Nothing is open. There are no accommodations. There is no food or beverage. Even the NPS has a limited presence. Heck, the Going to the Sun Road is still at least a month away from completely opening.

There is a sense of both calm and hustle and bustle. The first J1 foreign students are getting dropped off to open the hotels. Maintenance personnel are running around, fixing winter damage and assessing what will (and won’t) last another season.

But with all that urgency, there is still plenty of calm. I like seeing the shuttered hotels. It’s good to see the Park getting in the last of winter’s slumber, before 3.2 million people utterly destroy it over the next three months.

The snow melt has been underway for a bit now, but seeing those drifts and cornices up on the peaks makes me smile. How many thousands of years has this cycle repeated itself? How many thousand more until all of the snow is gone? Or return?

It is funny to think that employees at this same hotel took in this exact same view over a hundred years ago. I’m sure they told their stories through the generations, just as I am doing now.

Of course, there is always something new to pay homage to. For example, the near-complete shutdown of access to the Swiftcurrent Valley in 2025 for long-overdue infrastructure improvement and maintenance. I like how they took the new trail distance out to the 100th of a mile. Why not put them in feet?

To support the strong Asian student presence, every cafeteria added a giant cooker into which you could throw 15 pounds of rice, and it would be gone by the end of the day. Yeah, they didn’t have these around in the 80s. All we had was peanut butter, jelly, and generic white bread. 

I love how Many Glacier always creates banners for the different departments. It reminds me of high school, when all the popular, good-looking kids excluded everyone else. But wasn’t I a driver in 2022?

Oh, yeah. I guess I was one of the cool, good-looking kids that summer. Well, I at least gave it a try. Now, it can just hang in the rafters until the pack rats can reach it.

But I love driving out of Beargrass. I love pulling onto the highway and looking off to the left at the entrance to the St Mary valley and the start of the Going to the Sun Road. It just feels like home.

The miles of shoreline of St Mary are always welcoming. Typically, with a gale force wind and white caps, but she welcomes us nevertheless. 

Singleshot Mountain reminds me of Glacier Park’s deep history. Some of it is fact, some fiction, and some written with a lot of poetic license forty years after the fact by a fellow called Shultz.

You only see the tour boats being put in if you arrive early in the season. Back in the 1920s, Captain Billy Swanson, a master shipbuilder in the area, crafted all of the vintage vessels that navigate Glacier’s many lakes every summer for almost a hundred years now.

Wild Goose Island remains as iconic as ever. Although the trees on that tiny speck of rock have changed over the years, it still remains the most popular viewpoint in the park. The reasons are obvious.

I decided to walk up what appeared to be a chained-off old service road. Hmmm. Cabin remains from… What? When? So much of the history of Glacier never made it into the books. Or it did, and the books were lost.

Jackson always looks so intimidating before the season opens. But a shame it won’t stay that way. Over half of that snow covering will be gone in less than a month (during a normal season). By September, just a bare dome of scree and cliffs.

The avalanche chutes off the flanks of Going to the Sun are clearing quickly. But the waterfalls that will replace them will last for many weeks and be enjoyed by many of my Red Bus patrons.

I could stand on Sun Point and give a three-hour presentation every day of the week. The geology, the hydrology, the glaciation, and the enormous presence of the Great Northern Railway. Their great monuments to the Gilded Age have long been purged from this site and erased from history.

And two old friends. Going to the Sun and Mataphi. I hope to visit again this season. It helps that they share a common saddle. And the prominence isn’t that bad either.

It will take a warm June to melt off those cornices around the summit. But I can speak to the wind that formed them from the summit I did last summer with my son Mitch.

And mighty Fusillade, along with the mountains that make up the eastern edge of the Continental Divide. If anyone tries to tell people that the mountain is in the Paramount logo, I will publicly shame them without mercy.

Reynolds and Heavy Runner still carry the cloak of late winter. But when the gates open at Logan Pass for the season, there will be many footsteps in whatever snow remains.

I’ve always enjoyed Divide Mountain. It sits all by itself—almost alone—and always watching. It may not appear very inviting, yet when you climb its ridges, all you find are open arms and an outstanding view.

So yeah. Onboarding for a week with the same material and the same list of what not to do (because that one person who keeps doing it) kinda sucks. But then I get to come home for the summer. And home is where the heart is.

And Patrick sucks.