Aug 27, 2026 – Day 4
Today was a bucket-list day: we boarded one of Glacier’s legendary Red Jammers — vintage buses rolling since the 1930s, roll-back canvas tops and all, named for the sound early drivers made jamming the manual transmission into low gear on the steep grades. Our ride: the fabled Going-to-the-Sun Road, 50 miles of twisting, breathtaking, hair-raising mountain pass, and the first road ever crowned a National Historic Place, Landmark, and Civil Engineering Landmark all at once.
After lunch we regrouped with the motorcoach at Lake McDonald Lodge and pressed on southwest across the Continental Divide — the line where the continent decides which ocean your water is headed to, Atlantic east, Pacific west. Along the way, we passed Hungry Horse Dam: a 564-foot concrete arch with the world’s tallest spillway (490 feet), built in 1953 and named for two horses who beat impossible odds to survive a brutal lost winter. These days it keeps the lights on in Kalispell, Whitefish, and Columbia Falls, and helps manage water all the way down to the Grand Coulee and Bonneville dams.
We crested the continental high point and rolled into Whitefish, Montana by late afternoon — still a working railroad town, and gateway to the park and the slopes. Our hotel, Grouse Mountain Lodge, was built in the 1980s to welcome rail passengers making their way to this mountain outpost. A leisurely dinner at the lodge capped off the day.
