“St. Mary Lake,” their impromptu guide said. “A lot of people think it’s the most beautiful lake in the world, but you have to get to the upper end to see its full beauty. It runs twelve miles, right up to the foot of the Great Divide. That’s Going-to-the-Sun Mountain you can just see the peak of on the right.”
The scouts looked far up the dancing, wonderfully green-blue waters of the lake, to the tip of a vast pyramid of rock, blue with distance.
“Is that an Indian name? It’s pretty,” said Joe.
“No,” the man answered. “A French missionary priest, who came here with Hugh Monroe back in the 1830’s named the lake St. Mary Lake, and then he went on up it, and over the pass to the west, into the setting sun. So Monroe named the mountain Going-to-the-Sun Mountain. But, of course, it was really Indian in a way, because if Monroe hadn’t lived with the Indians he wouldn’t have thought of such a poetic name.”
The boys were still only half-way to their destination, and the bus soon started off again, still keeping on the prairie, along the eastern edge of the range, and passing along the shore of Lower St. Mary Lake for many miles. At last the road turned sharp west, and began to climb. It climbed into a deep, narrow valley which led right up into the tumbled mass of red and gray and green peaks and rock precipices.
“This is the last stage,” said the man. “We are going up the Swift Current Valley.”
The road was very narrow, and it swung around ledges where there was a massive wall above them on one side and a sheer drop, without protection, on the other. The bus had a siren horn, which the driver set going three hundred yards before he reached one of these curves. As they climbed, the great mountainsides seemed to come nearer and nearer, and at last they towered over their heads, some of them almost perpendicular, and composed of layers of jagged red rock. It was not long before they crossed the tumbling green water of Swift Current River on a bridge close to a foaming waterfall, and brought up in front of a large hotel on the shore of a small green lake.
This was the end of their journey. The scouts got out, and went around to the lake in front of the hotel. Here the full view was spread before them, and Tom whistled, while Joe gasped.
Right in front of them lay Lake McDermott, perhaps a mile long and half a mile wide, the water a beautiful green, for all the lakes in the Park are fed from glaciers, and glacier water is green in color. This lake was surrounded by a fringe of pines. Out of the farther side sprung up a cone-shaped mountain, almost out of the water. To the left and right of this peak, called Sharp’s Peak, and only two or three miles behind it, rose the abrupt head wall of the Continental Divide itself, a vast gray precipice, with great peaks thrusting up from it, and gleaming white snow-fields lying like gigantic sheets spread out to dry wherever there was a place for them to cling. Behind the hotel, on both sides, nearer mountains went up precipitously.
“It’s some big!” Joe exclaimed. “Say—it—it kind of scares me! Think of climbing one of those cliffs!”