Why I should have been a Glacier Park Red Bus Driver (not a front desk clerk).

I finally consolidated all of my Glacier Park crap from the last 35 years into a nice little bookcase. Which looks nice under a new professional high-quality map of the park that I bought and framed last summer. It really pulls the wall together. My own personal GNP shrine.

As such, I found some stuff in an old folder that hadn’t seen the light of day for a very long time. Like the Tour and Room rates from my first summer there almost 40 years ago.

I’m adding these hard-to-read columns of numbers into this post as an image. So the 80% of you looking at this on our phone will have to do some serious finger spread/pinch action.

But it is completely worth the effort! Now I know that costs have changed a lot over the years. Keep in mind that $1 in 1985 would be worth $2.80 today. So I’m going to use an x3 (or 300%) factor for this discussion.

Now let’s take a look at room rates. I’ll make it a little easier on your eyes. Take a peek at the Swiftcurrent Two Bedroom Cabin with NO bathroom below. I remember passing out the keys for these things when I worked the front desk that summer for $20 a night.

Currently, for 2023, that same cabin (with nothing done to it in 40 years but some paint and maybe new mattresses) is going for a whopping $175 per night. With inflation, I would expect $20×3 = $60. And don’t forget. You still have to pay for a shower.

Another example (now above). The Swiftcurrent Motel was $45 a night back in the day. And I remember people even way back then complaining about spending that much money for a room from 1958 with zero remodels.

I stayed in one of those rooms just last summer. And it was an astounding $255 a night. Adjusted, it should be $45×3 = $135. So you can see there is some fuzzy math going on with the pricing of accommodations.

Clearly, all other accommodations will be at least 600% higher in 2023 than in 1985. Or twice inflation. And there have been few if any upgrades to lodging across the board.

I don’t want to get into how the American public is getting priced out of their National Parks, since this post is meant to be a little more selfish and all about me.

I want to talk about what the Red Bus Tours may have been like back then. The first thing you’ll notice, there is no per-seat pricing (which is all we do now). That’s when you pick a 4, 6, or 8-hour tour and pay for the number of seats you want. That pricing model didn’t come out until 1987.

Before that, you could ONLY ride the Red Bus if and only if you were taking one of the package tours listed. Those tours were multi-day and included both lodging AND food AND boat tours AND transportation. What a deal. Just look and see.

Everyone knows I hate math but I love what numbers can tell me. So let’s take the big six-day tour above and break down what the experience would be like (for both the tourist and the Red Bus driver). Imagine an entire week of being chauffeured from luxury mountain hotels to the next chalet-inspired five-course meal in a vintage motor coach.

This is a big tour. Six days. I’ll use the ‘high’ cost for a couple (two people – Dbl/Twin) is $371.60 each. Let’s round to $750 for a week of fun. Let us look at what we get for that.

Tourist: Show up at East Glacier Lodge sometime in the afternoon by your own transportation. Hang out. Buy some gifts. Back then they had a golf course and an outdoor swimming pool. You could also take in some of the performances by the Blackfeet tribe. The normal cost of lodging and meal (with wine): is $135

Red Bus Driver: Nothing. The first day of driving starts tomorrow.

Tourist: Going to be a chill morning. Get up just a little early. Grab some eggs benedict in the lodge dining room with a wonderful view. Meet your driver. Sit back for the 2.5 to 3-hour drive up the Looking Glass Highway, pass thru St Mary, and finally into O Canada! Our home and native land! Get there for a nice lunch. Kick around all afternoon. Have a great dinner. Catch the evening cruise on Waterton Lake. Sweet! The retail individualized cost for all of that (in 1985) would have been about $135.

Red Bus Driver: Are you kidding me? I sleep in. Drive a couple of hours. Done well before noon. And now I have ALL day to hang out in Canada. What a horrible job!

Tourist: Another easy morning. Great breakfast with Canadian Bacon and soft-boiled eggs. Take in coffee on the hotel deck overlooking the lake. An easy two-hour drive to the next hotel. Arrive well before noon for lunch, then dinner, then another wonderful boat tour on a pair of incredible mountain lakes. The approximate cost is $160.

Red Bus Driver: Again?! Incredible. I drive a couple of hours after partying all night with Doug and Bob McKenzie! I’m driving by late morning. I’ll be hiking all afternoon and then playing basketball at the employee hoop in the upper parking lot.

Tourist: Wake up in what can only be called paradise. Drove over the famous Going to the Sun road with the canvas top down. Passed the Weeping Wall after spending some time at Logan Pass. Cruised thru the temperate rainforest on the West side and pulled up in front of the magical Lake McDonald Lodge. In plenty of time for lunch at the lodge, then dinner, then yet ANOTHER boat tour!!! The approximate cost is $160.

Red Bus Driver: Come on, is this really a job? Drive 3 hours and I’m done for the day? Lots of hiking out of Lake McD!

Tourist: This is a great trip. Slept in today. Took Highway 2 down around the southern end of the Park. Not a lot to see, but relaxing nevertheless. Another wonderful dinner at the East Glacier Lodge, and this time a cruise on Two Med Lake in the afternoon. The approximate cost is $140.

Red Bus Driver: Another couple of hours of driving for the day. But after I drop them off for lunch, I’ll have to come back and take them the 15 minutes to the boat ride. But I LOVE the Two Medicine area. Then all afternoon to find something to do. Maybe take up fly fishing? Kayaking?

Tourist: Last day to sleep in. Take a long breakfast. Enjoy coffee and start the trip home in whatever got us here (car, train, or rocketship). Cost: $25

Red Bus Driver: Start my next tour today

Time for the numbers. So the approximate cost of paying separately for all of the lodging/meals/boat tours is about $755. Which makes you think it is almost a wash. But remember, I have factored in NO transportation costs. And the ONLY way you can ride a Red Bus is with a package tour.

Plus my dollars were retail and would be discounted for the packages, leaving a little more meat on the bone. In the end, I still don’t think the gross margin was all that great (which is why they were discontinued shortly after this season).

Remember this was an all-inclusive trip paid upfront. That means the only out-of-pocket cost a tourist would be paying is for ice cream, greens fees at the golf course, and trinkets from the gift shop. This brings me to the most important part of all: The Tip. What do you trip your driver?

Now I’ve heard a lot of things about (and directly from) legacy Red Bus Drivers from the 1970s and 1980s. Back then, all the driver had to do was smile and drive. They would tell a few jokes, but there was no mandatory commentary or rule you needed to be spewing out facts and/or nonsense 80% of the time.

I’ve heard most drivers would just throw a sleeping bag in the back of their bus and sleep there most nights. As a Jammer, you stayed at a different lodge/location each night and the ‘communal’ beds were pretty nasty.

Plus the hotels would load the Jammer up in the morning with a special cheese/meat/crackers box. To be brought out during the trip for the guests when going over Logan Pass or making picnic stops.

And how a lot of them would take home enough cash in tips to make a serious dent in college tuition that fall. But does that pan out? If a driver had the same group for the better part of a week, would they make better bank?

This would be kinda like when you take a trip on one of those big cruise ships. You have the same maid service every day. Same waiters at dinner. And when it’s all done, you give them a gratuity at the end of the trip. Using that model, what might that look like for a Red Bus Driver?

In my example, the guests have been with me for four days. If had 16 riders (8 couples) on this package tour, I would think the minimum tip would be $20 per couple. In today’s dollars that would be $60. 6×8 = $480 / 4 = $120 a day.

A Jammer would work a combination of 2, 3, and 4-day tours that would average 5 to 6 days a week (more likely the latter with such a short season). 6×120 = $720 a week. Interestingly enough, my tax-adjusted tips for 2022 per week were $717 a week. Hmmmmm. Very spooky.

But to be honest, I think that the weekly $720 estimate is low, and the average was probably double that. Especially when you take into consideration it is the end of your guests’ stay in the Park and most still have vacation cash left in their pocket (this was an all-inclusive vacation outing). And ultimately, they recognized all Red Bus drivers (at that time) were starving college students.

Another reason why I think tips were on the (very) high side. With so few time-clock hours counting towards the final net take-home pay, if tips did not compensate for that shortfall, no one would ever return for a second season. And so many of them did.

But regardless of my tip math, let’s not ignore the elephant in the room. In 1985, a Red Bus Driver was only driving a max of 3 hours a day. That is a 15 to 18-hour week. Last summer I clocked 14 hours in a single DAY more than once. So this was a full-time part-time job back then. In the heart of some of the best hiking and climbing in North America!

But alas, I will never know. I was a front desk clerk that summer of 1985, pulling down a whopping $3.35 an hour less $6.75 a day for room and board. My NET was only $900 for three months. Adjust for 2023, who today would work summer for $2700? No one. Not even me.

I had to wait 35 years to be a Red Bus driver. Although the glory days and the Roaring Eighties are over, I think there still might be a little thrill out there if I look hard enough. After all, I am a storyteller in search of an audience.

GoatBoy out!