It all happened, but unfortunately for a romantic conception, it did not
happen with dramatic speed. Hundreds, thousands, sometimes millions of
years intervened between the greater stages of progress which, with
intervening lesser stages, merged into a seldom-broken quietude such as
that which impresses to-day's visitor to the mountain-tops of Glacier
National Park. And who can say that the landscape which to-day's
visitor, with the inborn arrogance of man, looks upon as the thing which
the ages have completed for his pleasure, may not merely represent a
minor stage in a progress still more terrible?

The grist of Creation's past milling has disappeared. The waters of
heaven, collected and stored in snow-fields and glaciers to be released
in seasonal torrents, have washed it all away. Not a sign remains to-day
save here and there perhaps a fragment of Cretaceous coal. All has been
ground to powder and carried off by flood and stream to enrich the soils
and upbuild later strata in the drainage basins of the Saskatchewan, the
Columbia, and the Mississippi.

It is probable that little remained but the Algonkian shales and
limestones when the Ice Age sent southward the first of its three great
invasions. Doubtless already there were glaciers there of sorts, but the
lowering temperatures which accompanied the ice-sheets developed local
glaciers so great of size that only a few mountain-tops were left
exposed. It was then that these extraordinary cirques were carved. There
were three such periods during the Ice Age, between which and after
which stream erosion resumed its untiring sway. The story of the ice is
written high upon Glacier's walls and far out on the eastern plains.

IV

Into this wonderland the visitor enters by one of two roads. Either he
leaves the railroad at Glacier Park on the east side of the continental
divide or at Belton on the west side. In either event he can cross to
the other side only afoot or on horseback over passes. The usual way in
is through Glacier Park. There is a large hotel at the station from
which automobile-stages run northward to chalets at Two Medicine Lake,
the Cut Bank Valley, and St. Mary Lake, and to the Many Glacier Hotel
and chalets at Lake McDermott. A road also reaches Lake McDermott from
Canada by way of Babb, and Canadian visitors can reach the trails at the
head of Waterton Lake by boat from their own Waterton Lakes Park. Those
entering at Belton, where the park headq