Sun Point

Before there was a road over the mountains, the way to the best view on the east side was by boat. The Great Northern Railway, which was building Glacier into a destination for its own passengers, began putting up Swiss-style chalets on the rock of Sun Point in 1912, about a hundred feet above St. Mary Lake. Guests came over the trails on horseback or rode a launch up the lake from the railway's St. Mary Chalets at the foot of the mountains, and by 1915 the Going-to-the-Sun Chalets could sleep some two hundred. They were so popular that the St. Mary Chalets became little more than a dining room where people waited for the boat.

The road finished them. Once Going-to-the-Sun Road opened in 1933, visitors could drive to Sun Point in a day and sleep in the cheaper private auto cabins going up for motorists, which the railway declined to compete with head-on. The Depression thinned the guests, the chalets closed during the Second World War and stood empty after it, and in 1948 they were torn down. A single concrete footing is left on top of the point.

The rock itself is still the place to stand. A short nature trail drops from the Sun Point lot to the point and its view west up the lake toward the peaks at its head, then runs along the shore to Baring Falls, where Baring Creek pours over a ledge a stone's throw from the lake. The east-side shuttle stops at the lot, which is often the easier way in.