On a family road trip through Glacier and Yellowstone National Parks

The 1,000-mile car journey enchants parents and a youngster with awe-inspiring scenery and wild animal sightings.

As my daughter, Ursula, bounded along the mountain trails of Glacier National Park, I felt a smile spread across my face. We’d flown from pancake-flat Houston to Montana to see old friends and visit old haunts, and now my one and only was surging uphill like a mountain goat, imbibing the fresh air along Avalanche Lake Trail. With my wife, Christina, by my side, I marveled at the sturdy, steady pace set by our 11-year-old as she climbed over steep rocky steps rising through a majestic woodland of hemlock and pine. We’d left the traffic of the park’s famous Going-to-the-Sun Road behind and were headed for a high-altitude picnic.

It seemed inconceivable to me that Ursula was a mere preschooler when I last set foot in Glacier, a million-acre jewel of parkland in Montana. I fell for the park back when I was in my 20s: During a brief spell working as a line cook in nearby Whitefish, I would backpack during days off. Later, I relocated to Missoula and landed my first full-time newspaper job, with many holiday weekends spent with friends canoeing the park’s out-of-the-way lakes near the Canadian border. In the late 1990s, I moved to Texas with Christina, who’d received her undergraduate degree from the University of Montana. While I’d made it a point to visit since then, she hadn’t been back to the Treasure State in 20 years. 

We were both sporting a touch of gray and mildly creaky knees last summer when we decided to take a family road trip with our daughter to get reacquainted with the landscape and natural wonders that had helped first kindle our romance. We wanted to make the most of Missoula, while Ursula had clearly articulated her desire to explore not only Glacier but also Yellowstone National Park, which one of her young neighborhood friends had raved about. The best avenue to check all these boxes was a 1,000-mile family road trip across Big Sky Country—with brief side trips to fly-fish a few trout streams. We wouldn’t do any backpacking, but Montana’s scenic highways offer plenty of chances to gawk at rushing rivers and jagged alpine vistas, not to mention scope wildlife. Our checklist included sandhill cranes, ospreys, and eagles; bighorn sheep, mountain goats, and bison; and grizzly bears, black bears, and wolves. 

So a couple of days after flying into Missoula, where we caught up with old friends and rafted on the Clark Fork River, we filled our rented Dodge Journey SUV with gear, cranked up the radio, and hit the road. Christina rode shotgun and Ursula ensconced herself among stuffed animals and snack crackers in the back. Eventually, we tired of Taylor Swift and Bruno Mars and started an audio version of Rick Riordan’s recent best-selling series, Trials of Apollo.

Into the wild

Ursula shot ahead to hike alongside Emily Jo, a cheerful and sporty role model for my city girl who’s growing up in Houston, and our posse bushwhacked across rolling grasslands to a streamside lunch spot. We glassed soaring raptors, a few pronghorn antelope, and a couple of intrepid anglers. I desperately wanted to see wolves, but they stayed hidden. Everybody was thrilled when a couple of sandhill cranes showed up, standing about 4 feet tall, showing distinct red caps. By the end of the hike, we were sweaty and sunburned, ready for a dip in the Lamar River. 

Having already declared her affinity for Glacier (“When can we go back, Dad?”), my daughter was now deeply absorbed in the sights and sounds of Yellowstone. Not that I was surprised. Few things please Ursula more than the chance to see wild animals in their native habitat.

On our last morning in the park, we woke as the sun peered over the jagged Beartooth Mountains, hoping to finally catch the sly gray wolves at home in the Lamar Valley before we made the trip to Old Faithful. We pulled up alongside a crowd below a stony formation known as Soda Butte, but as soon as we arrived, the wolves disappeared into the tall grass. We combed the shadows with our binoculars, hoping to spy this enduring, if controversial, symbol of the American West, but we were denied an audience with the wily Canis lupus. Then, as we prepared to depart, a ranger alerted us that a grizzly had crossed the road maybe a half-mile away, so we hurried up the valley to see what we could see. 

The bear sauntered across a clearing in the mid-distance. A group of antelope stood suddenly in the tawny grass and burst across the hillside, their bellies flashing white as they sprinted. A tour bus pulled up, disgorging its passengers. Then the big bear stood on its hind legs to sniff the air, and as I focused my binoculars I could see its cocoa-colored fur ruffled by the breeze. I had spotted brown bears in the wild before, but with my “little bear” daughter along, this sighting felt like a gift. 

Yellowstone kept giving as we closed in on our final goal. It took an hour of driving to get from the grizzly zone to the Old Faithful Inn, where parking was nearly as hard to come by as a wolf sighting. But soon we happily quit the car and strolled toward the plaza surrounding the most famous geyser in America, if not the world. Families and couples crowded together in anticipation as the geyser began sputtering, the pressure building to send steaming hot water into the air with a hiss. Gorgeous spumes nearly 200 feet high roared out of the ground, the ahhs and whoas of maybe 1,000 people echoing across the viewing platform. 

Old Faithful slowed. The ancient foam fountain shrank back into the earth, and I set my camera aside. Holding Ursula’s hand, I drew her and Christina closer. Soon, we’d be in the car listening to Greek myths or Taylor Swift. Back in the big city, our lives would accelerate in no time. But spending these days among the West’s eternal mountains, surveying wildlife, swimming in rivers, and breathing fresh air in Glacier and Yellowstone had reset our priorities. With my growing child resting her head on my shoulder, I embraced this last best chance to just stand still.

Houston-based Dan Oko has written about his outdoor adventures for Outside and Men’s Journal.