United States
Glacier National Park
Turquoise meltwater glowing beneath glaciers that shrink a little more every summer.
The meltwater pools glow a turquoise so vivid it looks artificial, rock flour suspended in water that spent centuries as ice. Going-to-the-Sun Road cuts across the Continental Divide through the middle of it, drop-offs steep enough to silence a full car, while mountain goats watch from ledges as if they built the place.
Glacier still holds twenty-five named glaciers, down from roughly one hundred and fifty in the mid-19th century, and the retreat is visible year on year; scientists no longer put a date on their disappearance, only a direction. Going-to-the-Sun Road, itself a National Historic Landmark, crests the divide at Logan Pass, where beargrass and glacier lilies bloom in a narrow window each July. Trails climb from the road to lakes of electric meltwater directly beneath the ice, and this remains one of the last landscapes in the contiguous states where grizzly bears and grey wolves still share the same valleys. The park anchors the Crown of the Continent, a wild sweep of peaks, cedar forest and chains of lakes running to the Canadian border.
Friends
The Highline Trail's ledge walking and a meltwater lake below the ice make this the hiking trip a group measures later ones against.
Couple
Historic lake lodges with Swiss-chalet bones, boat rides on still water and the divide road at golden hour do the romance unprompted.
Solo
The solitude deepens with every mile from the road, and a solo walker on the high routes learns what bear spray on the hip actually buys: attention.
Family
The cedar boardwalk trails and lake boat tours suit small legs, and the divide road delivers the alpine drama through the windscreen.
- Twenty-five named glaciers remain of the roughly one hundred and fifty here in the mid-1800s, and their retreat is visible summer to summer.
- Going-to-the-Sun Road crosses the Continental Divide at Logan Pass, a National Historic Landmark drive ranked among the continent's finest.
- Grizzly bears and grey wolves still share these valleys, one of the last places in the contiguous states where both remain.
- Beargrass and glacier lilies bloom across the alpine meadows in a narrow July window, with mountain goats grazing the same slopes.
Huckleberry everything: the wild purple berry of these mountains, picked, never farmed, and baked into everything the gateway towns sell.
A huckleberry bear claw from the 1914-era Polebridge Mercantile, the off-grid bakery at the park's remote North Fork entrance.
Serra da Estrela
Portugal
Portugal's highest range — glacial valleys, wild heath, and shepherd dogs the size of bears.
Drakensberg
South Africa
Basalt walls rise above sandstone caves painted across thousands of years.
Arthur's Pass
New Zealand
An alpine village where the world's only mountain parrot audits every arriving car.
Tongariro Alpine Crossing
New Zealand
Emerald lakes glow in active volcanic craters on a moonscape ridge traverse.
Pictured Rocks
United States
Mineral-stained cliffs of rust, copper and jade rising from Lake Superior's clear depths.
Acadia National Park
United States
Winter's first American sunrise strikes Cadillac's pink granite before the country below wakes.
Sleeping Bear Dunes
United States
Sand bluffs four hundred and fifty feet tall plunging into Lake Michigan's turquoise shallows.
Glacier Bay
United States
Tidewater glaciers calve thunder into the sea, and summer humpbacks breach across the bay.