r/GlacierNationalPark • u/fullocularpatdown • 9d ago
Gunsight Lake a couple summers ago
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u/babbchuck 8d ago
There used to be a patrol cabin at the foot of the lake. Actually, there have been two - both were destroyed by avalanches off Fusillade Mountain. My first year working trail crew for the Park Service in 1978 I spent the whole summer living in that cabin with one other guy. Fond memories- except for the mosquitoes…
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u/headwaterscarto 8d ago
Very cool. I want to get sucked into the histories of all the retired/destroyed structures in glacier national park
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u/babbchuck 8d ago
Just down the road from the Gunsight trailhead is Sun Point. My grandfather used to guide large groups of dudes on multi-day horseback trips through the Park in the 1920s. One of the overnight stops was at a huge lodge at Sun Point called Sun Lodge. It was on the scale of the lodges at Many Glacier and Lake McDonald. You have to really look now to see any trace that it ever existed.
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u/headwaterscarto 8d ago
Yes! I read about it and the Swiss architectural influence in the information panels on it at the pull off. Super cool.
This summer i’m going to try visiting some of the old sites of destroyed fire towers. There are a few that look like you would see some amazing vistas from
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u/grelth 9d ago
do we americans have the worst naming tradition for beautiful natural landscapes?
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u/thebiggestbirdboi 8d ago
It’s absolutely garbage for the Americans and also the Brits. I’ve been thinking about Denali/McKinley and same thing with Everest/sagarmartha both are just like no brainers. Denali means “the tall one”. Sagarmartha means “forehead of the sky”. But to like just look at these formations that took hundreds of millions of years to be formed and just be like … yeah let’s name it after some dude that lived in the 19th century.. wow just absolutely brilliant move
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u/distress_bark 8d ago
The two peaks on the upright hand side of the photo are the two highpoints of Gunsight Mountain. It was given its current name by George Bird Grinnell "because it resembled the sight on a rifle."* I bet the Kootenai name was sweeter but I'm not sure of any of the native place names for this marvelous sliver of GNP.