Glacier National Park, Montana
Glacier National Park – in Montana’s Rocky Mountains – has glacier-carved peaks and valleys running to the Canadian border. It’s crossed by the mountainous Going-to-the-Sun Road. It has 700 miles (1,100 km) of hiking trails and is attractive to backpackers, cyclers, campers and stargazers. In 2017, the International Dark Sky Association named Glacier Park and its Canadian counterpart, Waterton Lakes National Park, the world’s first transboundary international dark sky park. A stargazer wrote, “Glacier still has an inky-dark zenith, though light domes from surrounding towns are starting to show up on the horizons. The mountains also generate lots of clouds, especially winter and spring. By mid-summer there is usually a thin haze of forest fire smoke, often drifting down from British Columbia. In spite of all this, Glacier is still a great place for stargazing when the conditions cooperate!”