Glacier National Park Trivia
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50 free Glacier National Park trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Glacier National Park trivia quiz covers the million-acre park on Montana's Canadian border that George Bird Grinnell called the Crown of the Continent. Questions cover the geology of the Lewis Overthrust and its billion-year-old fossils, the glaciers that have shrunk from 150 to about 25 and may be gone by 2030, Triple Divide Peak, Lake McDonald and the 700 lakes, and the wildlife from grizzlies and mountain goats to harlequin ducks and bull trout. History covers the Blackfeet and the 1895 sale of the mountains, Grinnell's campaign, Taft's 1910 signature, Louis Hill's Great Northern Railway chalets and 'America's Switzerland', the Going-to-the-Sun Road and the Big Drift, the world's first International Peace Park with Waterton, the Red Jammer buses, the 1916 world-record temperature plunge at Browning, the fires and the wooden tour boats. Trails, transport and visitor numbers round it out. Questions run from easy to expert with the difficulty shown on each one. Every answer was checked against a reference page and each question carries its citation. If you enjoy this one, try our Yellowstone and US National Parks quizzes next.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Glacier National Park is in which US state?
Montana
Montana. Despite the name, Glacier holds only about two dozen glaciers, far fewer than North Cascades National Park in Washington, which has more than 300.
Q 02Which Canadian park joins Glacier to form the world's first International Peace Park?
Waterton Lakes
Waterton Lakes National Park lies just across the Canadian border. Rotary clubs on both sides campaigned to link the two parks, and in 1932 both countries' legislatures approved the union as a symbol of peace.
Q 03Theodore Roosevelt had left office when which later president signed the bill creating Glacier National Park?
William Howard Taft
William Howard Taft signed the bill on May 11, 1910, which makes Glacier six years older than the National Park Service, the agency created in 1916 that now runs it.
Q 04Which conservationist, whose name is on one of Glacier's best-known glaciers, called the region the 'Crown of the Continent' in 1901?
George Bird Grinnell
George Bird Grinnell, editor of Forest and Stream, first came on an 1885 hunting trip, kept returning for years, and used his magazine to swing public opinion behind a national park.
Q 05Which animal, often seen on the cliffs beside the Going-to-the-Sun Road, is the symbol of Glacier National Park?
Mountain goat
Mountain goat. Kids follow their mothers up near-vertical ledges within days of birth, and hooves with grippy inner pads let the goats hold slopes too steep for most predators.
Q 06By Glacier National Park's usual rule, what must a mass of ice do to count as a glacier?
Flow under its own weight
Flow under its own weight. Ice generally has to cover about 25 acres before it is heavy enough to move, so smaller patches are no longer counted among the park's glaciers.
Q 07Which predator, wiped out of Glacier National Park by 1936, returned on its own from Canada in the 1980s?
Gray wolf
Gray wolf. Early rangers shot, trapped and poisoned the park's last packs; about fifty years later a pack from Canada denned in the North Fork valley and raised five pups.
Q 08The Going-to-the-Sun Road crosses the Continental Divide at which pass, the highest point on the route?
Logan Pass
Logan Pass, at 6,646 feet, is named for William Logan, the park's first superintendent. Its car park often fills early on summer days, so the park urges visitors to take the shuttle.
Q 09The Garden Wall, a saw-toothed ridge above Glacier's Going-to-the-Sun Road, is a classic example of which glacial landform?
An arête
An arête. Two glaciers ground away at either side of the ridge until only a narrow wall of rock was left standing between their valleys.
Q 10What name is given to the snowfield, often over 60 feet deep, that buries part of the Going-to-the-Sun Road each winter?
The Big Drift
The Big Drift. Ploughing snow this deep is slow work, which is why the road over the Continental Divide usually doesn't open from end to end until late June or July.
Q 11The Going-to-the-Sun Road climbs to its summit with just one hairpin switchback; what is that bend called?
The Loop
The Loop. Builders chose one long climb along the cliffs over a stack of switchbacks, and the road is still so narrow and winding that vehicles over 21 feet long are banned from its alpine section.
Q 12Glacier's Going-to-the-Sun Road and Wild Goose Island appear in the opening credits of which 1980 horror film?
The Shining
The Shining opens with aerial shots of Jack Torrance's car winding along Saint Mary Lake; leftover helicopter footage from the shoot was later used for the ending of Blade Runner's original cut.
Q 13Which Native nation sold the mountains east of the Continental Divide, now the eastern half of Glacier National Park, in 1895?
Q 21What is the tallest mountain in Glacier National Park?
Mount Cleveland
Mount Cleveland reaches 10,466 feet, one of only six summits in the park above 10,000 feet. The land beneath it was bought in 1895 during Grover Cleveland's presidency, and the peak carries his name.
Q 22Rain falling on Glacier's Triple Divide Peak can flow to the Pacific, the Gulf of Mexico or which other body of water?
Hudson Bay
Hudson Bay. Water from the peak's north side joins the Saskatchewan river system and crosses Canada to reach it, which is why the summit is called the hydrological apex of North America.
Q 23The Lewis Overthrust pushed Glacier's ancient rocks about how far eastward over much younger rock?
About 50 miles
The Blackfeet
The Blackfeet sold under pressure from miners hunting for copper and gold. The prospectors found too little to mine, and within a few years the boom was over.
Q 14What did the Native people of the plains east of Glacier call the Rocky Mountains?
The Backbone of the World
The Backbone of the World. The range marked the western edge of their homeland, and bands wintered in the wooded valleys at its foot, sheltered from the winds that swept the open plains.
Q 15Which railroad built Glacier's Swiss-style hotels to sell the park as 'America's Switzerland'?
Great Northern
Great Northern. Its trains delivered tourists to the park's edge, and its hotels and chalets were spaced about a day's horseback ride apart so guests could tour the backcountry in the saddle.
Q 16Which hotel on Swiftcurrent Lake was built as the showpiece of the railway's Swiss-style lodges in Glacier?
Many Glacier Hotel
Many Glacier Hotel went up in a single year: crews worked through the winter to open it on July 4, 1915, using timber logged nearby and milled on the lakeshore.
Q 17Which stone-built chalet in Glacier's backcountry was gutted by the 2017 Sprague Fire and reopened in 2020?
Sperry Chalet
Sperry Chalet lost its roof and timber interior, but the 1913 stone walls stayed standing, so crews braced them and rebuilt the dormitory inside the original shell over two summers.
Q 18What are Glacier National Park's famous red tour buses called?
Red Jammers
Red Jammers. The nickname first belonged to the drivers, who could be heard jamming the gears on the steep climbs; when cracked frames retired the 1930s fleet in 1999, Ford paid millions to rebuild it.
Q 19Which lake is the largest in Glacier National Park?
Lake McDonald
Lake McDonald, 10 miles long and more than 460 feet deep, fills a valley that Ice Age glaciers gouged out and then dammed with the rubble they left behind.
Q 20Why are some of Glacier's lakes, such as Cracker Lake, an opaque turquoise?
Suspended glacial silt
Suspended glacial silt, also called rock flour. Glaciers grind the bedrock beneath them into a powder so fine that it hangs in the meltwater, and it turns some of the park's streams milky white.
About 50 miles. The slab came to rest on rock more than a billion years younger than itself, the reverse of the usual order, in which the oldest layers lie at the bottom.
Q 24Glacier's rocks hold fossils more than a billion years old of which early life form?
Stromatolites
Stromatolites are layered mounds built up by mats of blue-green algae. By releasing oxygen as they grew, such algae helped create the air we breathe today.
Q 25Which lone peak on Glacier's eastern edge, left standing by erosion, is the best-known remnant of the Lewis Overthrust?
Chief Mountain
Chief Mountain is a block of ancient rock resting on much younger shale. Erosion stripped away the slab around it, leaving a tower that Native peoples have long held sacred.
Q 26Which two native mammals seen when Europeans arrived had vanished from the park by 2020?
Bison and woodland caribou
Almost every other historic species survives, giving biologists an intact ecosystem; grizzlies and lynx are threatened but at historical numbers here.
Q 27Which fish native to Glacier is federally listed as threatened and must be released at once if caught?
Bull trout
Bull trout. No licence is needed to fish in the park, but lake trout introduced a century ago have spread through its big western lakes and now crowd out the native bull trout.
Q 28Which non-native fungus has killed a large share of Glacier National Park's whitebark pines?
Blister rust
Blister rust reached North America by accident in the early 1900s. The pine's fatty seeds feed Clark's nutcrackers, red squirrels and bears, so every dead tree is a loss for the animals of the high country.
Q 29Which colourful sea duck flies inland each spring to nest along Glacier's fast mountain streams?
Harlequin duck
Harlequin duck. It winters in pounding surf on rocky coasts, then pairs fly inland to nest beside white water, following every bend of the river rather than cutting across country.
Q 30What world weather record was set in January 1916 at Browning, just east of Glacier National Park?
The biggest 24-hour temperature drop
The biggest 24-hour temperature drop: 100 °F, down to −56 °F. The plains here lie where warm chinook winds meet Arctic air spilling south from Canada, so temperatures can swing wildly within hours.