National Park Guide: Montana's Glacier

— -- "Get off the tracks at Belton Station (now West Glacier), and in a few minutes you will find yourself in the midst of what you are sure to say is the best care-killing scenery on the continent," famed naturalist and author John Muir wrote of Glacier National Park in his 1901 book Our National Parks.

Today, visitors to the park know precisely the effect Muir was writing about more than a 110 years ago.

"It's awe-inspiring," says Bigfork, Mont., resident and frequent Glacier National Park visitor Pat Keane-Richmond. "The solitude, the hugeness of it. I feel so small when I'm in there. The peaks are so high, and the scenery is so breathtaking."

Glacier boasts some of the most spectacular and accessible high-alpine scenery in the country. Thanks to the 57-mile Going-to-the-Sun Road, which bisects the park and boasts a visitor center at 6,646-foot Logan Pass, visitors can park at the top of the world and within minutes of a stroll through beargrass meadows as curious mountain goats look on.

"Everybody comes here for their own reasons," Keane-Richmond says. "People drive through and never get out of their cars, and they love it. Other people look at a mountain and say, 'I'm going to climb that.' Whatever you put into it, you'll get out of it."

Muir, not one to downplay the powerful positive impact that dramatic landscapes can have on one's well-being, suggested spending as much time as possible in what the locals affectionately refer to simply as "the park."

"Give a month at least to this precious reserve," Muir wrote. "The time will not be taken from the sum of your life. Instead of shortening, it will indefinitely lengthen it and make you truly immortal. Nevermore will time seem short or long, and cares will never again fall heavily on you, but gently and kindly as gifts from heaven."

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About the park

Size: 1,013,322 acres

Visitors: 1,853,564 in 2011

Established: 1910

History: Anthropologist and historian George Bird Grinnell, who would later have a glacier named after him, first ventured into the mountains that would become Glacier National Park on hunting expeditions in the late 1880s. Grinnell, who coined the phrase "Crown of the Continent," was the leading advocate for creating a national park there.

When visiting: Headquarters is in West Glacier, Mont. Visitor information: 406-888-7800.

Of note: Glacier, along with sister park Waterton Lakes National in Alberta, Canada, was established as the world's first International Peace Park in 1932.