Glacier Park Lodge - Glacier National Park, Montana

Glacier National Park has four areas that are a must see to photograph. One of those areas is Two Medicine, located on the eastern side of the park a bit northwest of St Marys. Our group left our hotel in Kalispell, Montana, in a three-car caravan, leaving at 5:30am. A few hours later, our tour leader extraordinaire, Jeff Clow, knowing that our group required a pit stop, outdid himself by stopping at the Glacier Park Lodge (sometime all that is available  is a port-a-potty).

I had never been to the hotel before and I knew that it was going to be a great stop as soon as we started down the long driveway. The lodge was built in 1913 by the Great Northern Railway. Its purpose was to bring tourists via the railroad to explore the eastern part of the park. At that time, there was no road that connected the east and west side of the park. When I walked inside, I knew that I would be shooting the lobby with it's large size and the 60 40-foot tall Douglas fir columns that lined the supported the roof. I should have prefaced this post by admitting that I have an addiction to shooting rustic architecture. In any case, I decided to capture the architecture by shooting hand-held brackets, knowing that I would probably process the images as an HDR.