Ode to the Glacier Park Lodge

“She sleeps! My lady sleeps!” refers to a sleeping lover in the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem, Serenade. I speak not of this person, but to the Grand Lady of East Glacier Park, Glacier Park Lodge, which by the time this is read will be preparing for a long and well-deserved winter nap.

 After a short, but busy, summer season she is pretty tired and needs her rest. Soon she will get it. As soon as the Lodge was closed at noon on September twenty third and the doors were locked she immediately began getting ready to turn in for the winter. 

She doesn’t prep for sleep by herself, but rather needs the help of the remaining seasonal employees and especially the help of the maintenance crew. She can’t be allowed to just turn in and just go to sleep. 

Oh no! For to do so would be disastrous and quite ill advised. She must first be made ready for bed and then tucked in. As soon as the Lodge is closed and the doors locked for the season all of the Lodge beds are stripped and the bedding is returned to the laundry to be washed and put away. This is done so quickly that I imagine that some of the bedding is still warm from the last night’s usage. Later on the evening of the closing day a farewell dinner is given for all of the remaining employees. 

This is a fun-filled occasion but a somewhat sad one as well for many of the employees will head for home or other jobs as early as the next day. The remaining employees, of which I am one, will begin in earnest the next day to really get the Grand Lady rather for sleep.

 I am a shuttle driver so I don’t actually do the physical work of closing down the Lodge. My job is to get the employees who need rides to the airport in Kalispell and I can assure you that this can sometimes be a tear-jerking journey…so I always keep a ready box of Kleenex in the van for such farewells. 

Meanwhile, back at the lodge the maintenance crew is starting to do their most necessary work. Anybody who knows anything about the East Glacier area knows that the winters over here are brutal.

 This means temperatures way below zero, a lot of snow, and winds that exceed a 100 miles an hour in force and this is just the truth of an “average” winter: sometimes it can be a lot worse. If the maintenance crew doesn’t do its job and the Lodge is not truly and successfully winterized the Lodge won’t make it through the winter. 

Up to now and after a 110 years an unsuccessful winterizing of the Lodge has never occurred and probably never will, so good is the maintenance crew at doing their job. Just what are the main tasks of this process?

 First of all the Lodge is boarded up and then the utilities are taken care of. This means shutting off all of the water and winterizing the pipes…a broken pipe and water coming into the Lodge must be prevented at all costs. I know that all gas lines and electrical affairs are properly taken care of as well. Even after all of the prep work is completed and the Great Lady is allowed to go to sleep, nothing is left to chance: she is still looked over during the winter by a skeleton maintenance crew stationed in East Glacier. 

By the time all is done, and it is not done overnight, but takes weeks to complete, not only is the Lodge put to bed but so is most of East Glacier. By the end of October virtually all of the services in the community, with the exception of one gas station, one trading post, and a hole in the wall café, are shut down and the community is moving into a long, cold, and windy winter. Everyone and everything needs a rest sometime and East Glacier and the Glacier Park Lodge are no exception. 

Come next March the town and the Lodge will begin waking up from its long winter nap and getting ready to begin another tourist season. In this endeavor I will close by quoting the famous journalist and broadcaster Edward R. Morrow: ”Good night and Good Luck”

Chris Ashby of East Glacier Park (summers) is a frequent contributer to the Hungry Horse News.