Many Glacier Hotel

Louis Hill, who took over the Great Northern Railway from his father in 1907, set out to make Glacier the railroad's American Alps, and Many Glacier Hotel was the centerpiece. Begun in 1914 on the shore of Swiftcurrent Lake, it opened on July 4, 1915, a Swiss chalet of five storeys under the peaks of the Many Glacier valley, built to fill the railroad's trains and advertised across the country in its See America First campaign. Its lobby columns are fir trees brought in by rail and hauled overland from Browning.

The hotel nearly burned in August 1936, when the Heaven's Peak fire ran down the Swiftcurrent valley, and the lake flooded its lower rooms more than once. By the 1990s it was in such poor shape that parts of it were sinking toward the water, and in 1996 the National Trust put it on its list of the country's most endangered historic places. In 2000 the interior secretary, Bruce Babbitt, told a congressional committee that the only fix was a can of gasoline and a match.

Instead the Park Service rebuilt it piece by piece over seventeen years, for about $40 million, keeping the hotel open through most of the work and finishing in 2017 with the restored lobby staircase. It has been a National Historic Landmark since 1987. The road to Many Glacier leaves US-89 at Babb, on the Blackfeet Reservation, and the valley's trailheads are a short drive past the hotel.