Tour Blog — Day 5

2026-07-22 — Glacier National Park, Going-to-the-Sun Road, border crossing into Alberta.

I wonder if moose appreciate things. A ground squirrel ran by my feet at Logan Pass today and didn’t even seem to clock that I was there, he was so used to humans. Moose are a lot bigger, though, and I’d imagine have bigger brains. I wonder if the moose who get to see these views every day ever stop and look up at the mountains and wonder how amazing it is that they live here. I suppose they probably don’t. They have nothing to compare it to. They have no concept of a place called “there” that looks any different from “here.” All they know is that they are where they are, if they even know that.

When you take the red jammer buses up the Going-to-the-Sun Road, you wind up at Logan Pass, where they officially opened the road back in the 1930s. There’s a gift store there with windows that frame an incredible view of the mountains, and right in front of those windows sits an information table that reads, “Living in Glacier National Park is no vacation for the ‘locals.'” It’s talking about the constant fight for food, hiding from predators, protecting young, and competing for mates that defines the existence of every animal in the park. Makes you wonder if the moose is just tired of scraping out a living and wants to pack up his family and move to Missouri. Far fewer bears there, ya know.

Perspective and contrast seem like uniquely human inventions. When you have no idea what ugly is, it’s really hard to land on what beautiful is. So we humans go around putting labels on everything: good, bad, right, wrong, ugly, pretty, majestic, diminutive. I know that sounds a little like I’m knocking the whole practice, and it does have its downsides, but it earns its keep too. It produces in us a sense of smallness in the face of things that are actually grandiose, and that smallness is what prompts us to think about our place in all of it. That’s the thing that makes somewhere like Glacier so powerful – it’s so far outside what any of us are used to that it makes you wonder, if this place exists and I had no idea, what else is out there I haven’t seen yet? Banff’s still ahead of us, and if you think the mountains in Montana are impressive, buckle up.

I was talking with the folks on Hope bus this morning, before we went into the park, about a friend of mine who recently moved to Kansas City with his family. I’d been at his house helping him move in, and the subject of New G came up, the way it usually does with anyone who actually knows me. They asked where we were headed this year. When I told them Glacier and Banff, his wife said, “…those are both on my bucket list!” Some people spend their whole lives hoping for a reason to make one of those trips happen, and we just knocked one out and are about to land another.

And just think – that stupid moose is out there every single day, and he wants to move to Missouri.

Guys, it was a long day. A weird one too, honestly, because we never really got off the bus. Yeah, we were in Glacier, but we spent three hours on the red jammers (buses, just with tighter quarters), an hour and a half getting a bite at Lake McDonald Lodge, then right back on the buses. The border crossing went easy; the Canadian agent even took our picture in front of the “Welcome to Alberta” sign. The push up to Calgary was a beast, but nobody got left at the border this time, so that’s a win. We pushed hard enough that we skipped dinner altogether and the kids ordered DoorDash once we got to the hotel at 8:45 – but Bemo’s letting us sleep in a little tomorrow. We don’t leave for Edmonton until 9:30.

Emily and I are on the truck tomorrow, and we will be for two days. I’m looking forward to it – a couple days alone with my baby cakes in a box truck is its own kind of trip. I’ll holler at you tomorrow from Edmonton, the northernmost city in North America with over a million people.