PTARMIGAN TUNNEL:

HOW GLACIER PARK BLASTED A DOORWAY THROUGH STONE

A Wall Named for a Winter Bird

In the high country above Many Glacier, where the Lewis Overthrust has pushed ancient seabed rock into a nearly vertical rampart, a narrow band of gray stone separates two of Glacier National Park’s most storied valleys. Mountaineers and rangers call it the Ptarmigan Wall, after the alpine grouse that molts from mottled brown to snow white with the seasons, trading one camouflage for another as the year turns. Below the wall sits Ptarmigan Lake, and above it, cut through solid rock at roughly 7,200 feet, runs a passage that has no equal elsewhere in the park: the Ptarmigan Tunnel, a man-made corridor some 250 feet long that lets travelers pass directly through the mountain rather than over it. It remains, nearly a century after its construction, the only trail tunnel in Glacier National Park (Historical Research Associates).

The tunnel’s story is not simply one of scenery. It belongs to the larger history of how a private railroad company and a fledgling federal park service tried to move paying tourists, on horseback, across some of the most difficult terrain in the northern Rockies, and how a Depression-era construction crew, working three months with jackhammers and dynamite, solved a problem that had frustrated trail builders for two decades.

Before the Tunnel: The Belly River Problem

Glacier National Park was established in 1910, and almost immediately the Great Northern Railway, which had lobbied for its creation, set about building the infrastructure to draw travelers off its transcontinental line and into the backcountry. Because federal appropriations for trail construction lagged behind demand, the railway itself financed much of the park’s earliest trail system in its first years, later seeking reimbursement as federal funds became available. Crews cut routes over Swiftcurrent Pass, Gunsight Pass, Piegan Pass, Red Gap Pass, and Gable Pass, often following older Blackfeet travel corridors, prospector paths, or game trails (Butler, qtd. in Marino).

By 1915 the Great Northern’s saddle-horse operations had consolidated under a single concessionaire, the Park Saddle Horse Company, organized by Kalispell attorney Wilbur N. Noffsinger and his law partner Hans Walchli. At the request of the park’s superintendent, Noffsinger absorbed the smaller independent outfitters into the larger company, doubling its capitalization, and the National Park Service granted the expanded firm an exclusive contract to supply horses, guides, and camp staff for the park’s multi-day tours (Montana Historical Society). Within a generation the company, operating under the brand Bar X 6, had grown into what one park chronicler called the largest saddle-horse concession in the world, running upward of a thousand horses and carrying more than ten thousand riders a year over the North Circle, South Circle, and Inside Trail routes that linked the park’s chalets and hotels (SummitPost, “Historical Look”).

The Belly River country, tucked against the Canadian border north of Many Glacier, was a key destination travelers wanted to reach, but getting there required a long detour. Riders could cross Red Gap Pass or Gable Pass to the east, follow the Belly River itself from the international customs station near Chief Mountain, or approach from the north by way of Stoney Indian Pass out of Waterton Lake. All of these routes were, in the language of the era’s trail planners, considerably longer and less scenic than a more direct line would be. The Ptarmigan Wall stood squarely in the way of that direct line, and for two decades it stopped ordinary travel cold. As late as 1926, the only people crossing it were technical climbers; the British mountaineer Dorothy Pilley scaled the Ptarmigan Wall that summer, with Elizabeth Lake spread out far below her, at a time when no tunnel existed to offer an easier way through (Marino).

Building Through the Mountain

By the late 1920s the National Park Service had decided to solve the problem by going through the wall rather than around it. The agency contracted the work to Ole Westman, and construction of what its final report called the "Ptarmigan Trail Tunnel," began on July 27, 1930. Crews blasted narrow working platforms into the sheer rock on both the north and south faces of the wall, then lowered compressor-driven jackhammers to the platforms and began drilling from opposite ends toward the center. Ten-hole rounds of dynamite widened the bore in stages until the two headings met partway through the mountain. The excavated rock was not wasted; it was used to build the stone retaining walls and horse-sized landings, or adits, that still frame each portal, patterned after the same masonry style then being used along the Going-to-the-Sun Road (Historical Research Associates). Westman and his crew finished the passage on September 30, 1930, having completed the roughly 250-foot bore in a little more than two months (Historical Research Associates).

The approach trail was, if anything, a harder undertaking than the tunnel itself. The route along the wall’s north face, cut and blasted from a nearly vertical slope with the aid of dynamite and compressor-run jackhammers, was described by park trail engineers as the most demanding trail construction the park had undertaken up to that point. Along its most exposed stretches, workers built mortared stone walls roughly two feet thick from slabs of rock released during blasting, protecting a tread only about four feet wide from the drop below, engineered so that loaded pack horses could still pass along the concave cliff face (SummitPost, “Ptarmigan Tunnel”). The tunnel and trail opened to horse traffic the following season, giving riders departing Many Glacier Hotel a direct link, by way of the tunnel, to Elizabeth Lake and the Belly River valley, with the return trip often completed by way of Red Gap Pass or on to Waterton Lakes in Canada.

A Question of Attribution

Modern accounts of the tunnel, including many written for hikers today, commonly credit its construction to the Civilian Conservation Corps, and it is worth pausing on that claim. The Corps was a real and important presence in Glacier’s backcountry during the 1930s, building trails, campgrounds, and fire lookouts across the park after its creation under the Emergency Conservation Work Act. But the Corps was not established until the spring of 1933, nearly three years after Ptarmigan Tunnel was completed. The park’s own final construction report, filed under Trails, D30 at Glacier National Park headquarters, credits the work instead to a private contractor, Ole Westman, working directly for the National Park Service in 1930 (Historical Research Associates). The confusion is understandable. Both the tunnel and the Corps belong to the same broad decade of relief-era backcountry construction, and popular writing about the park has long blurred the two. But the documentary record is specific enough to correct the record: the tunnel predates the Corps by three years, and its builders were paid trail-construction laborers under contract to the Park Service, not enrollees of a New Deal relief program.

From Horse Trail to Hiking Landmark

The world the tunnel was built to serve did not last. The circle-tour system of chalets and saddle horses that had defined Glacier tourism in the 1910s and 1920s declined steadily after the Second World War, as automobile travel and the completion of the Going-to-the-Sun Road drew visitors toward the park’s roadside attractions. The Park Saddle Horse Company ended its large-scale operations in 1945, and of the original twelve backcountry chalets built to house circle-tour riders, all but two (Sperry and Granite Park) have since been removed or lost (Glacier Guides). The tunnel itself, however, endured, and as backpacking and day hiking displaced saddle-horse touring as the dominant way to experience Glacier’s interior, Ptarmigan Tunnel found a second life as a hiking destination rather than a horse trail. In the summer of 1975 the National Park Service hung heavy iron doors across both portals, closing the passage each year from October 1 until it reopens in mid-July, largely to manage snow load and control access during the shoulder seasons (Historical Research Associates).

Danger at the Portal

The tunnel has not been without tragedy. In early July of 1998, Connie Lindsay, a forty-seven-year-old woman from Polson, Montana, rode to the tunnel from Many Glacier with her husband and two companions. The group dismounted and led their horses through to view the scenery on the north side, and Lindsay stopped roughly twenty-five yards beyond the portal to photograph the Belly River valley while standing beside the low stone parapet that lines the trail. Her horse, grazing on a nearby snowdrift, jerked suddenly, apparently startled by the cold, stumbled, and knocked her against the retaining wall before losing its footing entirely. Both horse and rider went over the wall and fell hundreds of feet down the cliff face below. Park rangers reached the site by helicopter and recovered her body from a rock chimney beneath the tunnel. The Glacier Park Foundation recounted the accident in the fall 1998 issue of its members’ publication, The Inside Trail, calling it one of the most freakish accidents in the park’s history (SummitPost, “Ptarmigan Tunnel”). The parapet that failed to stop her fall still stands today, largely unchanged from 1930, a reminder that the tunnel’s convenience was built along genuinely precipitous terrain.

Legacy

The Ptarmigan Tunnel’s significance was formally recognized in 1986, when it was added to the National Register of Historic Places as part of the broader Glacier National Park Multiple Resource Area, following a nomination prepared two years earlier by the Missoula firm Historical Research Associates. The nomination cited both the structure’s engineering achievement and its illustration of the National Park Service’s early commitment to opening remote backcountry to visitors, meeting the Register’s criteria for both historical event and architectural significance (Historical Research Associates; National Park Service). Today it is administered as a contributing structure within that larger historic district, one that also includes the North Circle, South Circle, and Inside Trail routes built during the same horse-tourism era.

What the tunnel represents, finally, is not a triumph of wilderness engineering so much as a compromise between two competing demands: the railway’s need to sell an accessible, marketable backcountry experience, and a landscape that offered no accessible way across a several-hundred-foot wall of vertical rock. Two crews with jackhammers, drilling toward each other through the dark for two months in the summer of 1930, resolved that compromise permanently. Visitors walking through the tunnel today, between the meadows of Ptarmigan Lake and the long descent to Elizabeth Lake, are passing through a piece of engineering built for horses that outlived the horse-tourism economy it was designed to serve, and that continues, largely unaltered, to do the job it was built for nearly a century ago.

Works Cited

Butler, Mike. Getting Around in Glacier National Park. Quoted in Marino, Carol. “New Book Highlights Travel in Glacier Park Past to Present.” Daily Inter Lake, 28 Feb. 2021, https://dailyinterlake.com/news/2021/feb/28/new-book-highlights-travel-glacier-park-past-prese/. Accessed 27 Aug. 2026.

Glacier Guides. “Hiking Ptarmigan Tunnel in Glacier National Park.” Glacier Guides & Montana Raft, https://glacierguides.com/blog/hiking-ptarmigan-tunnel-glacier-park/. Accessed 27 Aug. 2026.

Historical Research Associates. “Ptarmigan Tunnel.” National Register of Historic Places Nomination Form, Glacier National Park, June 1984. National Park Service, NPGallery, https://npgallery.nps.gov/GetAsset/65d0dd92-950c-4b3c-a904-b523df321f33. Accessed 27 Aug. 2026.

Marino, Carol. “New Book Highlights Travel in Glacier Park Past to Present.” Daily Inter Lake, 28 Feb. 2021, https://dailyinterlake.com/news/2021/feb/28/new-book-highlights-travel-glacier-park-past-prese/. Accessed 27 Aug. 2026.

Montana Historical Society. “Park Saddle Horse Company Records, 1915-1947.” Finding aid, Montana Historical Society Research Center Archives, Archives West, https://archiveswest.orbiscascade.org/ark:80444/xv32152. Accessed 27 Aug. 2026. 

National Park Service. “Ptarmigan Tunnel.” National Register of Historic Places, National Register Information System, Reference No. 86000360, NPGallery, https://npgallery.nps.gov/AssetDetail/NRIS/86000360. Accessed 27 Aug. 2026.

SummitPost. “Centennial Series: A Historical Look at Glacier’s Horse Trails.” SummitPost.org, https://www.summitpost.org/centennial-series-a-historical-look-at-glacier-s-horse-trails/472386. Accessed 27 Aug. 2026.

SummitPost. “Centennial Series: Glacier National Park’s Ptarmigan Tunnel.” SummitPost.org, https://www.summitpost.org/centennial-series-glacier-national-park-s-ptarmigan-tunnel/469896. Accessed 27 Aug. 2026.