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Glacier National Park, Montana

The late July storm broke over the valley like a wave over the prow of a ship. Hikers, emerging from the forest, dashed across stretches of lawn as lightning cut across the darkening sky. Couples in canoes awkwardly zigzagged their way toward the dock as thunder rumbled overhead.

In front of the Many Glacier Hotel, picnickers packed up their lunch and scurried toward the first open door. Only a boy remained, shirtless and thigh-deep in the shallows of the icy-cold lake, shattered now by the brisk tattoo of rain.

Inside, a hastily built fire gained strength and filled the lobby with the scent of burning pine. Wet shoes and socks lined the hearth, and in time, not an empty sofa or chair could be found.

"Look how big it is, Daddy." A girl opened her palm to reveal a handful of hail, which was now bounding off the deck.

A man in his mid-40s shared a Hershey bar with his ponytailed daughter. A young girl fell into the pages of her novel. Someone pushed a trash can beneath a leaking skylight, and over by the piano one guest stood, violin poised, and began to play "Music of the Night," accompaniment for the din of strangers and friends that suddenly filled the room.

The rain and hail lasted two hours that Monday afternoon, but no one seemed bothered. At the Many Glacier Hotel, where storms and bears and rugged expanses of mountainous beauty abound, the communal experience is a welcome, if temporary, respite from the call of the wild.

My wife, Margie, and I stayed here last summer during a 10-day trip to Glacier National Park. We planned to divide our time on the eastern side of the park in a district known as Many Glacier and at the Prince of Wales Hotel in the Canadian township of Waterton. I had initially come here to tell the story of a Southern California man who was returning to the park after being attacked the previous summer by a grizzly on one of its trails.

Editor's note: See our Daily Travel Deal Blog for details on Glacier lodging deals and package rates for fall 2007 and beyond.

Confident that encounters like his are the exception, I extended our stay to sample a vacationer's summer experience of Glacier and in the process discovered that the park is a glorious combination of the raw and the cooked, the wild and the civilized, a place where the hand of man is surprisingly at home in a world teeming with predators and untrammeled nature.

ALPINE APPEAL

OK, I admit it: I was beat. By the time I finished the 12-mile round-trip trek to Grinnell Glacier, my dogs were barking. It was my first full day in Many Glacier, and I was hiking with a group that included Johan Otter, the survivor of the bear attack.

Described as a moderate climb -- a 1,600-foot gain over six miles -- the trek to Grinnell Glacier is one of the most popular in the park, and we felt safe. As we slowly ascended the switchbacks above Lake Josephine, calling out "Aaa-ooo" to keep any unseen bears at bay -- always best to make a lot of noise when hiking on these trails -- the Grinnell Valley spread out before us.

Steep mountains with jigsaw patches of snow near their peaks cradled turquoise lakes. Meadows of wildflowers -- false hellebore, penstemon and columbine -- lapped against copses of alder and forests of elfin spruce. No wonder hikers think of Switzerland when they see these vistas.

To understand the appeal of Glacier, you must go back more than 20,000 years, when an ice sheet covered this part of northwestern Montana so deeply that only the tallest mountains were visible, rising like islands in a frozen sea. The pressure of the ice carved the horns, arêtes, cirques and hanging valleys for which the park is known.

Blackfoot Indians called this stretch of the northern Rockies "Miistakis," the Backbone of the World. Naturalist George Bird Grinnell named it the Crown of the Continent, a title fitting both the park's location and its mountains' majesty.

Nowadays, however, its glaciers are getting all the attention.

Toward the end of the 19th century, explorers documented more than 100 glaciers, some covering nearly 1,000 acres. Five years ago, there were 37, and today, 27. By 2030, scientists predict, they will all be gone.

As we ate our lunch, rested and watched waterfalls drop into the lake at the base of Grinnell Glacier on Sunday afternoon, we felt humbled to know that perhaps we were watching snow that had turned to ice from before the time of Lewis and Clark slowly disappear.

COMFORT IN WILDERNESS

The two flights of stairs came easily after the trail to Grinnell Glacier. Down a long hall and to the left, our room at the Many Glacier Hotel had a stone fireplace and a balcony overlooking the lake. In the afternoon, the sun and a strong breeze streamed through the open windows.

When it opened July 4, 1915, the hotel was improbable for its ambition. More than four stories tall, longer than a football field, it was built no fewer than five days from the nearest town and railroad depot, but Louis Warren Hill was a determined man.

President of the Great Northern Railway, sole proprietor of the rail lines to the park and champion of its tourist potential, Hill was intent upon turning a profit on God's country and 100 years ago embarked on an ambitious program of building chalets and lodges throughout the park. Today, seven of the 11 buildings that Hill -- and other like-minded entrepreneurs -- constructed still stand, the others victims of fire and neglect. Some are accessible by car, others by hiking. Architecturally, each was set on the edge of the wilderness and designed to rival the wilderness.

Towering on the eastern shore of Swiftcurrent Lake, the Many Glacier Hotel overlooks the Grinnell and Swiftcurrent valleys, each green with forests of lodgepole pine and each shadowed by the broken-toothed peaks of the Continental Divide in the distance. In the still of the morning, the reflection in the lake picks up the near-perfect symmetries of the two adjacent valleys.

With its white trim and brown siding and the diamond-and-cloverleaf patterns cut into the balusters on the decks and balconies, the Many Glacier Hotel is a rugged kind of gingerbread. In the lobby, 20 Douglas firs, each 30 inches in diameter, rise four stories and support timbers of nearly equal girth. The fireplace is in the middle like a fire ring, its chimney a leaky flue of riveted sheet metal supported by wires and counterweights. On afternoons, a hazy light drops down from skylights. Nothing here is too perfect, too clean or too well matched, giving the hotel a rustic ease.

The Many Glacier Hotel and the other lodges inside the park are "the last front porches in America," said bellman Jason Snow, stepping in one morning from the porte-cochere. "In the evening, people talk with each other. Strangers go hiking with each other; they have dinner together."

Later in our stay, after taking a tour of the hotel, I spoke with Joanne Reid, who first visited Many Glacier in 1956 and spent two seasons working in the hotel's dining room. She had returned with an Elderhostel group.

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