There’s a wealth of accommodations along the eastern and western boundaries of the park, especially in the towns of East Glacier Park and West Glacier. Despite their names, these towns, with populations of only a few hundred each, are more like distant cousins than identical twins. West Glacier, half an hour from the Kalispell airport, is generally newer, and sprawls.

East Glacier Park, two and a half hours north of the Great Falls, Mont., airport, is a charming, tumbleweedy throwback with a string of weathered eateries and motor-court lodgings that are only slightly post-World War II. There’s also the Backpacker’s Inn, a combination hostel and super-cheap motel with a mostly youthful clientele who like the clean, spare single rooms for $30 a night. I’ve stayed in each of these places a time or two, but this night — after a fiery, pepper-laden dinner of enchiladas pasillas at Serrano’s Mexican restaurant among a crowd of other glacier-gawkers and local ranchers — I opted for the Mountain Pine Motel. It has endured, with appearance and ambience intact, since 1947. The owners are descendants of the pioneer Sherburne family that helped settle the park area in the 1890s.

Nearby is the century-old Glacier Park Lodge, a grandly creaky log cabin writ very large. There are three such concessioner-run legacy hotels at the park, erected by the Great Northern Railroad to lure tourism. My favorite is the Many Glacier Hotel, a darkly comical but generally comfortable old wooden monstrosity with a Swiss theme (the bellhops wear lederhosen). Its broad verandas face a transfixing view of a horizon of pinnacles that surround Swiftcurrent Lake — one of 131 named lakes in the park (631 others are as yet unnamed; feel free to follow my example and name a few after your friends).

When my wonderful clawfoot tub leaked onto the occupants of the room below, the two repair-crew guys who showed up grinned and shrugged after some futile work: that’s kind of the way this place is, they said. The only other available room was infested with bats, and smelled like it, I was told. It was a great stay, just the same. Half of the hotel is being renovated all this season and is closed, along with one of the dining rooms.

The Many Glacier Hotel is also the start of one of the park’s most popular hikes, to Grinnell Glacier. The 8- or 10-mile hike is strenuous, though less so than the Siyeh Pass Trail, and the payoff is that you can get within a stone’s toss of the glacier itself, the surface area of which is more than twice Sexton’s.

I embarked with a ranger-guided group on Chief Two Guns — a trim 45-footer, built locally and hauled up here somehow 50 years ago — for a quick trip over Swiftcurrent Lake. Then a short walk to another boat, the even older Morning Eagle, across Lake Josephine to the trailhead. The boats moved past a shifting panorama of jagged rock faces, slender waterfalls, and high above, the destination glacier. The trail is often crowded, but that scarcely registers in these surroundings. Hikers stop to catch a breath and find it taken again by the view out over the string of lakes, far below, fed by Grinnell’s meltwater. Connected by cascades, each lake is a deeper blue than the one above.

After three hours of steady ascent and a final quarter-mile of hard climbing, the trail ends at the foot of the glacier and an iceberg-studded, expanding lake. The lake does not appear on old maps, according to the ranger. It is a byproduct of the fact that Grinnell’s surface is 40 percent smaller than a half-century ago.