Glacier National Park – Activities Besides Hiking in Glacier?

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Most of the advice on this (great) site deals with hiking in Glacier National Park. How much can a person see in the park by driving in a car?

My fiance and I are considering two possible honeymoon options: Glacier National Park or Acadia National Park. However, my fiance doesn’t want to commit himself to doing a long hike every day.

When we went to Great Smokey Mountains National Park, we did some hiking, but we found that there were many scenic drives that let us get great views from our car.

Would something like this be possible at Glacier National Park?

For example, if we went for a week, could we plan on alternating, with maybe three days of hikes and three days of scenic drives? (I know that the Going to the Sun Road is a drive. I’m wondering if there are other options.)

Thank you! This site is wonderfully informative!

Answer

Hi and thanks for such a great question!

I know that you’re aware of Going to the Sun Road, but for others reading this, I’m just going to link out to this page on Going to the Sun Road and share a bit about it before going into detail on other scenic drives.

Going to the Sun Road is a great activity, but you’d be hard-pressed to be entertained for three days of driving it purely as a scenic road and not hiking.

Compared to Great Smokey Mountains National Park and the Blueridge Parkway, Glacier does not offer the kinds of day-long scenic drives you may be looking for (neither does Acadia though).

That said, you can spend a half day driving to Polebridge, Montana and enjoy the activities there…

Or you can spend a half day driving to the Two Medicine area and enjoy those activities…

Or, you can spend a few hours driving to Waterton Lakes National Park in Canada (it borders Glacier National Park) and explore the activities in that region.

Either way, it is certainly possible to hike for 3-4 days and do scenic drives for 1.5-2 days and horseback ride, take helicopter tours, or boat tours to fill the rest of your time.

You just need to adjust your expectations and know that the scenic drives will not be all-day activities like they are in Great Smokey Mountains National Park, but rather few hour activities to take you from beautiful point A to beautiful point B.

Bottom line: Take a Glacier National Park vacation for your honey moon. You won’t regret it.