The scenery, of course. Here it is absolute, and a key contributor to Glacier's wild magic. But there's more. There's the delicious clean air and turquoise water and scarcity of backcountry traffic. There's the maniacal night-music of wolves and loons and, most profoundly, the palpable presence of grizz.
Glacier is a paradise from a bygone epoch.
Yet scenery, no matter how breathtaking, is merely a stage. It's the resident players who lend it life. For a while we thought it must be loons, those eerie yodelers in the northern night. And here too, near Logging Lake, we saw our first wild wolves, members of the famed Magic Pack that'd immigrated down to Glacier of their own free will, from Alberta and British Columbia. While my math isn't great, I calculate that Glacier has roughly twice the grizzly population density of Yellowstone.