I first learned about the Floral Park Traverse in the same roundabout way that most employees at Glacier National Park learn about the extensive network of off-trail routes and mountain summits that aren't listed on the park’s maps, which is to say through word of mouth and from sources of varying reliability. 

At the Lake McDonald Lodge, where I waited tables in the summer of 2022 and where the nearest cell signal is at the summit of Mount Brown, I accumulated this information from a coworker who would spend slow shifts narrating the routes he was scouting in J. Gordon Edwards's "A Climber's Guide to Glacier National Park," long considered the bible for anyone looking to land themselves in a precarious situation on the chossy mountains that form the Crown of the Continent.  

The Floral Park Traverse, or the Hidden Lake Route from Logan Pass to Sperry Chalet as Edwards called it, traverses some 20 miles from Logan Pass to Lake McDonald Lodge, gaining 4,000 feet and then dropping 7,000. The route winds around the far side of Hidden Lake, gains the ridge leading up to the summit of Bearhat Mountain and then descends into alpine country that can't be seen from the Hidden Lake Overlook.  

I was reminded of all this on a summer day in late August, when a handful of friends and I devoted a Saturday to journeying into the heart of Glacier National Park.  

The five of us began the day at the Apgar Visitor Center, with tickets for the 6 a.m. shuttle in hand. We would have preferred an earlier alpine start, but this was the earliest shuttle, and the shuttle made the whole process of hiking from point-to-point much simpler. Our car was at Apgar and we would finish our hike 9 miles up the road at Lake McDonald Lodge, but that was a problem we hoped to solve later.  

One of the great ironies of the Floral Park Traverse is that it begins in the chaos of Logan Pass at the Hidden Lake Trail. At 7:15 a.m., we joined the throngs of first-time hikers, families with children and grandparents meandering toward one of Glacier's most recognizable viewpoints. But our day would take us far past the classic view of Bearhat towering behind Hidden Lake, and so we pushed on, descending to the lake and navigating through dense trees to the ridge at the far side.

From the ridge, we were treated to our first view of Floral Park and the Sperry Glacier Basin. A sliver of Avalanche Lake, visible beyond the cliffs thousands of feet below us, gleamed a brilliant turquoise color. 

Clouds had been gathering all morning. As we stood on the ridge, rain began to fall, and I remembered hearing that the dense clouds drifting in from the Pacific Ocean tend to catch on the spiny backbone of the continent and pool in this basin like no other place in Glacier. In a whiteout, navigation is all but impossible. 

But the clouds were high and the weather forecast called for sunny skies by noon, so we began the steep descent to Mary Baker Lake and Floral Park below. The route made its way down a drainage more suited for water than for people, with packed dirt and loose rocks. My friend Lauren Frick and I watched as the boys in our group, clearly lacking any sense of self-preservation, drifted farther and farther from us.   

WHEN WE finally reached the bottom, we found an alpine Eden. The wildflowers were in full bloom at this time in the summer, Indian paintbrush and fireweed carpeting the meadows of the high country. We made our way up and down (and up and down) the steep terraces carved by glaciers thousands of years ago, navigating through cliff bands and hoping not to stumble upon one of the grizzly bears who are known to haunt this hidden oasis.  

In the glacier basin, the clouds broke and the sun illuminated the brilliant blue lakes left behind by Sperry Glacier as it has receded. Even this late into the summer season, bergs of sparkling white ice still floated in water rendered an opaque turquoise by the suspended glacial flour.  

Sperry Glacier is small for a glacier — only around 287 acres, the last time the United States Geological Survey measured it in 2014 — and is one of 26 in the park, down from the 80 or so that were recorded at the end of the Little Ice Age in the 1850s. This is what I have learned from eavesdropping on park rangers over the years, often when they are explaining to disappointed visitors that Glacier National Park actually takes its name from the long-vanished glaciers that carved these valleys thousands of years ago.  

As we traipsed through the basin, though, I wasn't thinking about any of this. I was only listening to the symphony of cascading water echoing throughout this amphitheater carved by ice and time, where the winds from the coast and from the continent have conspired for millennia to create a landscape unlike any other in Glacier National Park.  

We couldn't remain in this alpine paradise forever, as much as we wanted to, and we eventually rejoined the trail at the stone steps cut into Comeau Pass, the start of the straightforward 9-mile descent to Lake McDonald Lodge. 

IT WAS during these monotonous miles that we happened upon Todd. At 71, with tanned and weathered skin from a life in the mountains, Todd is one of the holdouts from an older generation of Glacier National Park devotees, who came of age when "A Climber's Guide" was first published and the park was far quieter than it is now. He's lived in West Glacier for most of his life, where he married a park ranger's daughter, and that morning had hiked up to Sperry Chalet to join some of his children for a single-day summit of Gunsight Mountain.  

Some hours later, we finally arrived at Lake McDonald Lodge and attempted to hitchhike back to our car at the foot of the lake, but no one seemed keen to pick up a group of five 20-somethings coated in dirt.  

But Glacier is sometimes kind to those who love her, and not five minutes behind us, Todd emerged from the woods. We piled into his pickup, and he raced down the winding curves of Going-to-the-Sun Road faster than any of us expected, but Todd had been driving this road along the lake longer than any of us had been alive, and he had to meet his wife for a picnic by the lake before the sun set.  

Reporter Elsa Ericksen can be reached at 406-758-4459 or [email protected]. If you value local journalism, pledge your support at dailyinterlake.com/support.

    Ryan Reiffer, Lauren Frick, Grisha Namyasenko and Luke Simmons at the Hidden Lake Trail boardwalk in Glacier National Park before embarking on the Floral Park Traverse on Aug. 22, 2026. (Elsa Ericksen/Daily Inter Lake)
  

    Luke Simmons, Ryan Reiffer, Lauren Frick and Grisha Namyasenko take cover under a boulder during a brief rain shower on the Floral Park Traverse on Aug. 22, 2026. (Elsa Ericksen/Daily Inter Lake)
  

    Lauren Frick next to a stream along the Floral Park Traverse with Heavens Peak in the background on Aug. 22, 2026. (Elsa Ericksen/Daily Inter Lake)
  

    Luke Simmons, Grisha Namyasenko, Lauren Frick and Ryan Reiffer scout the route ahead on the Floral Park Traverse on Aug. 22, 2026. (Elsa Ericksen/Daily Inter Lake)
  

    Floral Park Traverse takes its name from the abundance of wildflowers found along the route in the summer months. (Elsa Ericksen/Daily Inter Lake)
  

    Luke Simmons relaxing during a lunch break along the Floral Park Traverse on Aug. 22, 2026. (Elsa Ericksen/Daily Inter Lake)
  

    The first of Floral Park and the Sperry Glacier Basin before the long descent to Mary Baker Lake on Aug. 22, 2026. (Elsa Ericksen/Daily Inter Lake)
  

    Sperry Glacier sits in the background of this glacial lake along the Floral Park Traverse on Aug. 22, 2026. (Elsa Ericksen/Daily Inter Lake)