Comprehensive Guide Resources and Thematic Collections for Glacier National Park

Montana's crown of the continent wilderness

Glacier National Park

Glacier National Park represents one of the most significant wilderness areas in the United States, protecting a remarkable diversity of ecosystems from prairie grasslands to alpine tundra within a single landscape. The park serves as the crown jewel of the Crown of the Continent Ecosystem, a vast wilderness region that remains largely untouched and provides critical habitat for numerous species including grizzly bears, gray wolves, and mountain goats. The park's significance extends beyond its natural beauty to its geological importance, as the Lewis Overthrust displays some of the oldest sedimentary rocks on Earth, with fossils dating back approximately 1.4 billion years. The establishment of Glacier National Park in 1910 followed decades of advocacy by conservationist George Bird Grinnell, who first explored the region in 1885 and spent two decades working to protect the land. The park's creation was also influenced by the Great Northern Railway, whose president Louis W. Hill saw the tourism potential of the region and helped lobby Congress for the park's designation. Today the park maintains almost all of its modern original native plant and animal species since European discovery, providing biologists with an essentially intact ecosystem for research and study.