Going to the Sun Road:

Engineering, Politics, and Landscape in Glacier National Park, 1910–1933

Introduction

Few roads in the American West carry the weight of history that clings to the Going-to-the-Sun Road in northwestern Montana. Stretching 50 miles across Glacier National Park from the town of St. Mary on the east to West Glacier on the west, the road crosses the Continental Divide at Logan Pass at an elevation of 6,646 feet. It is a feat of early twentieth-century civil engineering accomplished under difficult conditions, shaped by competing federal priorities, Indigenous land tenure, regional economic ambitions, and the emerging ideology of American conservation. The road’s history is inseparable from the political and cultural forces that created Glacier National Park itself and from the broader story of how the United States government sought to make wild landscapes accessible — and profitable — to a motoring public.

Origins and the Creation of Glacier National Park

The land through which the Going-to-the-Sun Road would eventually pass was, for centuries, the territory of the Blackfeet Nation. The mountains the road traverses were sacred to the Blackfeet people and central to their ceremonial and subsistence practices. In 1895, federal negotiators purchased a strip of land along the eastern edge of what is now the park from the Blackfeet Tribe for $1.5 million, with the tribe retaining hunting and fishing rights. That transaction, contested and misrepresented in subsequent decades, set the legal and political foundation upon which the park would be built. In 1910, Congress established Glacier National Park, removing the land entirely from public access for subsistence use and initiating a regime of managed recreational tourism (Glacier National Park Act, 1910).

The Great Northern Railway, under the leadership of Louis W. Hill, was instrumental in promoting Glacier as a tourist destination. Hill understood that a national park adjacent to his rail lines could generate substantial passenger revenue. He financed the construction of a series of Swiss-style chalets and hotels within the park and launched aggressive advertising campaigns that traded on imagery of the Blackfeet people — hiring tribal members to pose for promotional photographs while simultaneously excluding them from economic participation in the park’s tourist economy. The railway’s involvement shaped public expectations of Glacier as a destination before any road existed to reach its interior (Buchholtz, C. W. Man in Glacier. Glacier Natural History Association, 1976, pp. 40–55).

Early Road-Building Efforts

Before the Going-to-the-Sun Road, access to Glacier’s interior was limited to horse and foot trails. The park’s first superintendent, William Logan, for whom Logan Pass is named, recognized early that automobile travel was transforming American leisure habits and that a park without a motor road would struggle to attract the growing class of automobile tourists. The National Park Service, formally established in 1916, inherited the challenge of balancing preservation mandates with the political reality that congressional support depended on visitor numbers, which in turn depended on access.

Preliminary surveys for a transmountain road began as early as 1916, but substantive planning did not accelerate until the early 1920s. The National Park Service engaged landscape engineers and road builders who were instructed to design a route that would remain visually subordinate to the landscape — a design philosophy articulated explicitly in agency correspondence of the period. Frank Kittredge, a Bureau of Public Roads engineer who worked on Glacier road projects, described the guiding principle as building roads that “fit the mountains rather than move them” (Carr, Ethan. Wilderness by Design: Landscape Architecture and the National Park Service. University of Nebraska Press, 1998, p. 203). This approach governed decisions about alignment, grade, tunnel placement, and the construction of stone guardrails and retaining walls that would eventually become iconic features of the road.

Construction and Engineering Challenges

Congress appropriated the first dedicated funds for the transmountain road in 1921, and survey work intensified through the mid-1920s. The Bureau of Public Roads, working in coordination with the National Park Service, completed the final route alignment by 1924. Construction began in earnest in 1925 under the supervision of Bureau of Public Roads engineer George Goodwin. The project was divided into sections and let out to private contractors who faced extraordinary logistical obstacles.

The road required workers to operate at high elevation for only a few months each year before winter conditions forced a halt. Snowpack at Logan Pass often exceeds 80 feet, and construction crews frequently began each season digging out the previous year’s work before new progress could begin. The most technically demanding section was the stretch along the Garden Wall, a narrow arête on the west side of the Continental Divide. Here, workers blasted and chiseled a roadbed into near-vertical cliff faces, lowering men on ropes to drill blast holes into rock faces above the route. Temporary tramways carried equipment and materials to sections unreachable by any other means.

The western tunnel, bored through the Garden Wall at the 6,680-foot level, presented particular difficulty. Workers drilled from both ends simultaneously; the two crews met with an alignment error of less than two inches — a precision achievement noted in Bureau of Public Roads construction reports of the period (Bureau of Public Roads, Annual Report of the Chief of the Bureau of Public Roads, U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1929, pp. 44–46). Across the project as a whole, contractors moved approximately 185,000 cubic yards of rock and earth. Stone for the retaining walls, culverts, and guardrails was quarried on site wherever possible, allowing the finished road to blend with its surroundings in color and texture.

Labor conditions were harsh. Workers lived in tent and wood-frame camps along the construction corridor, with limited shelter and medical facilities. Wages were modest, and high-altitude labor above the treeline carried physical risks that were poorly understood and inadequately mitigated by the standards of the day. Primary records held at the Glacier National Park Archives document work stoppages related to equipment failures and at least one fatality from a blasting accident during the 1927 season (Glacier National Park Archives, Superintendent’s Annual Report, 1927, West Glacier, Montana).

The Question of Names and Indigenous Significance

The name “Going-to-the-Sun” derives from a Blackfeet story associated with the mountain of the same name that rises near the road’s eastern approaches. Going-to-the-Sun Mountain figures in Blackfeet oral tradition as the location where Napi, a central figure in Blackfeet cosmology, ascended to the heavens. The adoption of this name by park officials and the Bureau of Public Roads was not the result of formal consultation with the Blackfeet Nation but rather reflected a broader pattern in which federal agencies incorporated Indigenous place names and imagery into park promotional identity without meaningful participation by the communities from which those names originated.

The historical record on how the road received its name is incomplete. Stephen Mather, the first director of the National Park Service, is sometimes credited with the decision, but archival research has not produced a definitive documentary record establishing the chain of decision-making. What is documented is that the name appears in Bureau of Public Roads correspondence by 1926 and in congressional testimony shortly thereafter (U.S. Congress, House Committee on Appropriations, Interior Department Appropriation Bill for 1927: Hearings, 69th Cong., 1st sess., 1926, pp. 391–392). The Blackfeet Nation was not a party to these deliberations.

Completion and Opening

The Going-to-the-Sun Road was substantially completed in the summer of 1932, though the formal dedication did not occur until July 15, 1933. The opening ceremony drew several thousand visitors and was attended by Montana Governor John Erickson, National Park Service officials, and representatives of the Great Northern Railway. Newsreel cameras recorded the proceedings, which received national coverage. Notably, members of the Blackfeet Nation participated in the ceremony in ceremonial dress — a continuation of the pattern established by Great Northern promotional practices in which Blackfeet presence was curated for its visual appeal to non-Indigenous audiences rather than for purposes of political recognition.

The total cost of construction came to approximately $2 million, a figure that underrepresents the actual investment when Bureau of Public Roads administrative costs and related infrastructure expenditures are included. By the standards of the era, it was among the most expensive per-mile road projects undertaken by the federal government (Ruhle, George C. Guide to Glacier National Park. John W. Jarvie, 1949, pp. 88–91).

Visitor access was immediate and dramatic. The number of automobiles entering Glacier National Park rose sharply after 1933, straining facilities that had been designed with a smaller audience in mind. The road transformed the park’s visitation patterns, shifting the balance away from the railway-dependent lodge tourism that Great Northern had cultivated and toward independent automobile travel. This transition had lasting consequences for the economic relationships between the park, the railway, and the surrounding communities of northwest Montana.

Designation and Preservation

The road’s engineering and aesthetic significance gained formal federal recognition in 1983, when the Going-to-the-Sun Road was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. In 1985, it was designated a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark by the American Society of Civil Engineers. These designations reflected a growing scholarly and institutional consensus that the road represented an exceptional integration of transportation infrastructure with landscape design.

The road’s physical condition became an increasing concern through the late twentieth century. Decades of freeze-thaw cycles, deferred maintenance, and escalating visitor traffic degraded the road surface, retaining walls, and drainage infrastructure. In the 1990s, the National Park Service undertook comprehensive assessments that documented structural deterioration throughout the corridor. A major rehabilitation project, funded through a combination of federal transportation and park appropriations, began in the early 2000s and extended for more than a decade. The project prioritized historically appropriate materials and construction methods, with stone sourced to match original quarry characteristics wherever possible (National Park Service, Going-to-the-Sun Road Rehabilitation Environmental Assessment, Glacier National Park, 2002, https://parkplanning.nps.gov/projectHome.cfm?projectID=10624, accessed 14 April 2026).

The rehabilitation effort also prompted renewed engagement with the Blackfeet Nation regarding the cultural landscape through which the road passes. That engagement, while more substantive than earlier periods of park management, has remained incomplete in the view of tribal representatives who have called for greater recognition of Blackfeet sovereignty over the mountain landscape and its place names (Flint, Andrew. “Glacier National Park and the Blackfeet Nation: A History of Contested Land.” Montana: The Magazine of Western History, vol. 67, no. 2, 2017, pp. 24–41).

Legacy and Significance

The Going-to-the-Sun Road occupies a complicated position in Montana and American history. As an engineering achievement, it stands as one of the most technically demanding road projects of its era, constructed by workers using methods that combined industrial blasting and hand labor in conditions of exceptional difficulty. As a work of landscape design, it remains a studied attempt to make infrastructure visually subordinate to natural surroundings — an attempt that, by most accounts, succeeded to a degree unusual in twentieth-century highway construction.

At the same time, the road’s history is entangled with the dispossession of the Blackfeet people, the commercial imperatives of the Great Northern Railway, and the paternalistic assumptions of early national park management. The landscape through which the road passes was not empty when the federal government arrived, and the choices made about access, naming, and Indigenous representation left a legacy that has not been fully reckoned with in either the historical literature or park policy.

What the road offers the historian is a concentrated view of how the United States government, private capital, and competing ideologies of wilderness and tourism converged in a specific place at a specific moment. It is not simply a road through the mountains. It is an artifact of political economy, shaped by forces that extended from the halls of Congress to the tent camps of high-altitude construction workers, and from the boardrooms of the Great Northern Railway to the councils of the Blackfeet Nation.

Works Cited

Buchholtz, C. W. Man in Glacier. Glacier Natural History Association, 1976.

Bureau of Public Roads. Annual Report of the Chief of the Bureau of Public Roads. U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1929.

Carr, Ethan. Wilderness by Design: Landscape Architecture and the National Park Service. University of Nebraska Press, 1998.

Flint, Andrew. “Glacier National Park and the Blackfeet Nation: A History of Contested Land.” Montana: The Magazine of Western History, vol. 67, no. 2, 2017, pp. 24–41.

Glacier National Park Archives. Superintendent’s Annual Report, 1927. West Glacier, Montana.

National Park Service. Going-to-the-Sun Road Rehabilitation Environmental Assessment. Glacier National Park, 2002. https://parkplanning.nps.gov/projectHome.cfm?projectID=10624. Accessed 14 Apr. 2026.

Ruhle, George C. Guide to Glacier National Park. John W. Jarvie, 1949.

U.S. Congress. House Committee on Appropriations. Interior Department Appropriation Bill for 1927: Hearings. 69th Cong., 1st sess., 1926.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​