When it comes to things to do in Glacier National Park besides hiking, nothing tops the Going-to-the-Sun Road — one of the greatest scenic drives in North America. Built between 1921 and 1932, this 50-mile engineering marvel climbs from Lake McDonald on the west side to St. Mary Lake on the east, crossing the Continental Divide at Logan Pass (6,646 feet). You don’t need to get out of the car once to have an experience that will stay with you for the rest of your life.

The sheer cliffs, the waterfall spray that wets your windshield, the moment the road rounds a corner and the Garden Wall appears above you — these are experiences that most visitors driving past miss entirely because they’re looking at their phones. Don’t be those visitors. Pull at every pullout. Roll down the windows. Listen.

Pro Tip: Drive east-to-west in the morning and west-to-east in the afternoon to keep the sun behind you for photography. The road requires a vehicle reservation during peak season — book on recreation.gov months in advance.

One of the most beloved things to do in Glacier National Park besides hiking is boarding one of these historic wooden boats, running since 1927. That’s nearly a century of the same vessels — some of them over 90 years old — carrying visitors across the park’s most spectacular lakes with ranger-trained guides narrating the geology, wildlife, and human history of the landscape around you.

The St. Mary Lake tour is my personal recommendation for first-time visitors. The east-side light on Wild Goose Island at golden hour is one of the most photographed scenes in Montana — and from a boat, you’re inside the frame rather than shooting it from the road. The Lake McDonald tours offer a different experience: surrounded by the park’s famous rainbow-colored pebbles and the cedar-hemlock forest of the west side.

Booking: Tours depart from the Apgar boat dock (Lake McDonald), Many Glacier, Two Medicine, and St. Mary. Book through Glacier Park Boat Company — trips sell out weeks in advance in July and August.

One of the most rewarding things to do in Glacier National Park besides hiking is wildlife watching — the park supports one of the most intact large-mammal ecosystems remaining in the lower 48 states. You don’t need to hike into the backcountry to see spectacular wildlife — the park’s two most productive wildlife-watching zones are accessible without walking more than a few hundred yards from a parking area.

For visitors seeking things to do in Glacier National Park besides hiking, Logan Pass wildlife watching delivers. Mountain goats have become so accustomed to visitors they’ll walk within feet of you. Bighorn sheep frequent the roadside cliffs below the pass. The Many Glacier valley on the east side is Glacier’s premier grizzly bear habitat — the NPS recommends arriving at the Swiftcurrent parking area at dawn and scanning the avalanche slopes with binoculars. On a June morning in 2023, I counted three grizzlies in the valley before 7am without moving more than 20 feet from my car.

Gear: Bring binoculars (10×42 is the sweet spot) and a tripod-mounted spotting scope if you’re serious. Dawn and dusk are prime hours. Keep 100 yards from bears and 25 yards from all other wildlife — it’s federal law, not a suggestion.

The fleet of red 1936–1939 White Motor Company buses — nicknamed “Jammers” by old-timers who said their drivers were always jamming the gears on the mountain road — are one of Glacier’s most distinctive and beloved traditions. Restored in 2002 by Ford with support from a conservation nonprofit, these open-top tour buses run the Going-to-the-Sun Road with guides who have spent entire careers learning the park’s stories.

A full Sun Road tour takes about 3.5 hours. You’ll stop at the same pullouts as everyone else, but your guide will tell you things you’d never find in a brochure — the precise spot where a 1967 rockslide erased a section of the road, the geology behind the park’s famous argillite colors, the reason the park is called “the Crown of the Continent.”

Book through: Glacier Park Inc. at the historic lodges. Half-day and full-day options available. Advance booking essential — these fill weeks out in peak season.

Among the most underrated things to do in Glacier National Park besides hiking is simply looking up at night. Glacier is one of the least light-polluted national parks in the continental United States. On a clear night — and clear nights in late July and August are genuinely common — the Milky Way is visible to the naked eye so clearly that first-time visitors sometimes don’t recognize it as the galaxy. The dark sky above Two Medicine Lake on a moonless August night is among the most profound natural experiences I’ve had anywhere on earth.

The NPS runs periodic ranger-led stargazing programs at the St. Mary and Apgar Visitor Centers during summer. Check the park’s official program calendar for dates. If no program is running, the Apgar picnic area and the Many Glacier Hotel lawn are exceptional independent viewing spots.

Best Months: July through early September for warm temperatures and low cloud probability. New moon weekends are ideal — check a lunar calendar before booking your trip.

Kayaking ranks among the most refreshing things to do in Glacier National Park besides hiking. Most of the park’s lakes are accessible by non-motorized watercraft, and the experience of paddling on Lake McDonald with its extraordinary clarity — you can see the famous multicolored pebbles 15 feet below you — is unlike anything available at more crowded parks. The west-side lakes tend to be calmer and warmer; the east-side lakes are more exposed to the park’s famous wind but offer more dramatic mountain backdrops.

Rentals are available at Apgar Village (Lake McDonald) through Glacier Park Inc. Canoes, kayaks, and rowboats by the hour. Two Medicine Lake is less visited and exceptionally beautiful for a half-day paddle. Bowman Lake in the North Fork is worth the extra drive for serious paddlers seeking solitude.

Safety Note: Glacial lake temperatures rarely exceed 50°F even in August. A capsize without a wetsuit can be dangerous. Lifejackets are required and provided with rentals.

Glacier’s rivers and lakes hold native westslope cutthroat trout, bull trout, and mountain whitefish. The park is one of the last strongholds of the native bull trout in the lower 48, and catch-and-release fishing here is both an ecological responsibility and a genuinely excellent experience. No Montana state fishing license is required inside park boundaries, but a free park fishing permit (self-issue at visitor centers) is needed.

The North Fork of the Flathead River — which forms the park’s western boundary — is excellent for both wading and float fishing. McDonald Creek above Avalanche Creek is stunning and accessible without a long walk. Several Whitefish-based outfitters offer guided half-day and full-day trips inside park boundaries.

Attending a ranger program is one of the most rewarding things to do in Glacier National Park besides hiking. The park’s interpretive talks are among the best in the National Park System — and that’s a high bar. The park runs talks on glaciology, Indigenous history (the Blackfeet Nation has deep connections to this landscape that predate the park designation by millennia), fire ecology, and wildlife biology throughout the summer. Most programs are free with park admission.

The Blackfeet Cultural Program, offered in partnership with tribal educators, is particularly worth seeking out. It provides context for the park’s landscape that the standard NPS narrative doesn’t fully capture and offers a perspective on the land that makes everything you see afterward look different.

Schedule: Check the NPS Glacier Ranger Programs page for the current summer calendar. Programs run June through September at Apgar, St. Mary, Logan Pass, and Many Glacier.

Glacier allows horses on a significant portion of its trail system, and several outfitters offer guided rides that take non-hikers into terrain they’d never otherwise see. Swan Mountain Outfitters — the park’s authorized concessionaire — runs rides from the Apgar, Lake McDonald, and Many Glacier corrals. A two-hour guided ride covers more ground than most half-day hikes while requiring essentially no physical fitness from the participant.

The rides through the cedar-hemlock forest above Lake McDonald are especially atmospheric in morning light. For something more dramatic, the Many Glacier rides move into the alpine terrain of the Swiftcurrent valley — grizzly country, elk meadows, and the kind of scenery that makes riders go silent mid-conversation.

Book: swanmountainoutfitters.com — reservations required, 2–4 weeks in advance during peak season.

Exploring the historic lodges is an essential thing to do in Glacier National Park besides hiking. The Many Glacier Hotel — opened in 1915 by the Great Northern Railway — is often called “the Jewel of the National Park System.” It sits at the edge of Swiftcurrent Lake with four named peaks visible from the lobby windows, and its great hall with the Swiss-chalet timber construction is one of the most dramatic interior spaces in any American hotel. You don’t need to stay here to visit; the restaurant and bar are open to day visitors.

Lake McDonald Lodge, built in 1913, is equally historic and has a more intimate character — a hunting lodge aesthetic with the lobby fireplace and hand-painted log furniture that feels authentically of its era. Sitting on the lodge porch at dusk, watching the lake go silver, is one of the most quietly magnificent things I have ever done on a trip to any national park.

Glacier is arguably the most photogenic national park in the lower 48, and the Going-to-the-Sun Road provides access to views that professional photographers return to year after year. The key locations — Wild Goose Island overlook, Weeping Wall, the Big Bend, the Garden Wall — are all roadside and require nothing more than parking and stepping out of the car.

Golden hour on the east side (St. Mary Lake basin) is world-class. The angle of light on the mountains from approximately 6:30–8:00am in July and August creates a warmth and depth that landscape photographers know as “Montana light” — it’s genuinely unlike the light quality anywhere else I’ve shot.

The Logan Pass Visitor Center sits at 6,646 feet on the Continental Divide and is worth the drive even if you never leave the building. The park’s glacier retreat exhibit — showing the dramatic ice loss since 1850 with side-by-side historical photographs — is among the most affecting climate change visualizations in any public space I’ve encountered. The Apgar Visitor Center has excellent natural history exhibits and a bookstore curated by the Glacier National Park Conservancy.

The picnic area at Lake McDonald — accessible from the Apgar area on the west side — is one of the most beautiful picnic settings in North America. The lake’s famous multicolored pebbles, colored by the park’s unique argillite and siltite geology, line a shoreline backed by the cedar-hemlock forest and framed by the Lake McDonald Lodge to the east. You can wade in (it’s cold), skip stones, or simply sit and watch the reflection of the Livingston Range on the surface.

Insider Note: Arrive before 9am to get a shoreline picnic table. By 10am in July and August, the Lake McDonald area is one of the busiest spots in the park.

The east entrance at St. Mary is dramatically different from the west — drier, windier, more open, with views of the prairie meeting the Rockies that feel like the edge of two worlds colliding. The St. Mary Visitor Center, the Running Eagle Falls (a short 0.6-mile walk, the only one on this list), and the Two Medicine Valley are all accessible from the east entrance. Two Medicine in particular — the park’s least-visited major area — often has parking available when the rest of the park is at capacity.

Most people don’t know Glacier is accessible year-round. The west entrance near Apgar stays open in winter, and the lower section of the Going-to-the-Sun Road becomes a designated cross-country ski and snowshoe route when it closes to vehicles. The winter silence here — in a landscape that receives several hundred thousand visitors per summer — is genuinely surreal. The park averages 150+ inches of snowfall annually, and the terrain is excellent for beginner-to-intermediate nordic skiing.

Winter Note: The Going-to-the-Sun Road closes to vehicles at Camas Creek on the west side and at St. Mary on the east in late fall. Avalanche awareness is essential — take an AIARE Level 1 course before venturing off groomed routes.