Lake McDonald Lodge

Lake McDonald Lodge has its back to the road. When John Lewis, a land speculator who had bought the old Snyder hotel on this shore in 1896, put up a new building through the winter of 1913-14, there was no road to face. Guests came by train to Belton, now West Glacier, and up the lake by boat, and so did every load of material that could not be cut on the spot. The Spokane architect Kirtland Cutter drew it as a Swiss chalet, three and a half stories of timber and stone, and it opened in June 1914 as the Lewis Glacier Hotel. A road reached it by 1921; the lake side is still the front door.

Lewis decorated it as a hunting lodge, and the mounted heads he hung in the lobby are still on the timbers, long after the trophies came down in Glacier's railroad hotels on the east side. Charlie Russell, who kept a summer place on the lake, could sometimes be found telling stories by the lobby fire, and the dining room carries his name. The lodge was made a National Historic Landmark in 1987 as one of the finest large Swiss chalet buildings in the country.

The red buses leave from the front of the lodge and the tour boat from its dock. Rooms are simple by design and book up early, but the lobby is open to anyone driving through on Going-to-the-Sun Road.