travel dates: July 2022
It’s difficult to write about the St. Mary/East Glacier KOA without comparing it to its cousin on the other side of Glacier National Park, the West Glacier KOA. So I won’t even try!
Where the West Glacier KOA features pristine landscaping, boatloads of amenities and activities, and spectacular mountain views, the St. Mary/East Glacier KOA features rustic, natural landscaping, solid but comparatively lackluster amenities, and…spectacular mountain views. You really can’t build a campground near Glacier and avoid spectacular mountain views.
Interestingly, Dave will immediately rank the East Glacier KOA higher than West Glacier. I think he just thinks they had better mountains over there. I’m more torn; I liked them both: I can definitely appreciate the resort experience West Glacier offers, but I wasn’t sad to trade it in for the slightly more rugged beauty of East Glacier after a few days, either. So, to sum up, you’ve got two excellent KOA options on either side of Glacier National Park!
Booking and Arrival:
Anywhere near Glacier, you’re going to need to plan well in advance, and we booked our site a year in advance. That said, the campground reservation scene continues to look a little less intense now than in the past couple of years, and I put in some weekend dates in summer 2024 and found plenty of availability. What’s more, rates haven’t shot up here like at the West Glacier KOA. We paid around $110 night in summer of 2022, and it looks like if you want a site in 2024 you’ll pay around $130, so a modest increase, but nothing like prices nearly doubling since 2022 over at the West Glacier KOA (interestingly, we paid a good bit less for the West Glacier than East Glacier KOA in 2022, whereas it looks like we’d be paying at least $60-70 a night more if we were going next year).
If you’re going from west to east or vice versa in Glacier with anything but the smallest of RVs, it will mean taking the long way around the south side of the park, because the Going to the Sun Road has a 21 foot length restriction. The good news is the drive is pleasant and scenic (Milo spotted a bear!) and isn’t that long; it should take right around 2 hours if you take the route I’m about to suggest that you take. It’s definitely worth picking two base camps–one west and one east–so you can easily get to everything you want to see in the park.
Your GPS will likely suggest you take Hwy 2 to the south of the park (coming from the west, which is what we did; reverse if you’re going the other direction) and then turn onto either 89 or 49 to 89 to head north to St. Mary and the KOA. The KOA website itself will not try to dissuade you from this plan. But we don’t think you should do it! We googled and read several recommendations to take Duck Lake Rd/Hwy464 instead, and we were very glad we listened to this advice. 464 is longer, mile-wise, but it’s easy driving with gentle grades. I don’t think larger vehicles are even allowed on 49, the most direct route. They are allowed on 89, but we drove it in our van to get to Two Medicine and decided we really would not have wanted to do it with the trailer. There was a lot of road construction when we were there, which I gather is common. But even without that, it’s a steep, windy road with some drop offs. Duck Lake Road for the win!
Once we made it to the KOA, things went smoothly with check-in; things are clearly marked and there’s plenty of room by the office. This is another one of those Montana campgrounds with a 3 PM check in time, BUT we called and they told us any time after noon was actually fine (we did not encounter this kind of flexibility at other Montana campgrounds, and it was very welcome here since we had a short drive that day).
Campsites:
As noted, things over here are a little more rustic than at West Glacier, but we were happy with our long pull-through site for the most part. There’s not much privacy and not a ton of separation between sites, but there are picnic tables and fire rings and enough room to hang out and enjoy them.
I don’t know what it is with Glacier campgrounds and electricity, but we ran into trouble again here. Both we and the guy at the site next to us were having issues with our electricity cutting out every few minutes. Someone from the office came by and told us that the 50 amp wasn’t working at either of the sites (this was, it seems, a known problem) and that we could both either move to another site or just use 30 amp. Guy next door (who had a very big 5th wheel, if I remember right) opted to move, but we decided to just use the 30 amp (we only have one AC and pretty much never need more than 30 amp; it just means we cut the AC off when we use the microwave or whatever as a precaution). So it was somewhat annoying that they kept putting people with 50 amp RVs in those sites even though they knew this problem existed. But it ultimately didn’t affect our stay much.
We were in a section with a few rows of long pull-throughs near the office, and we found these sites convenient to everything and good for looking at mountains. But there some sections that are a little more tucked away, and there are also lots of cabins and tent sites.
It looks like I took this picture to show you what a patio site looks like. It’s big!
Amenities and Activities
The East Glacier KOA is designated a Holiday, not a resort, which means you get a standard slate of amenities but not the over-the-top kind of stuff they have over on the west side. No Airstream selling local craft beer for you here! But they do have a big camp store with a nice selection of groceries and souvenirs and ice cream. There’s a pool, which looked nice and very busy, but which we didn’t use during our stay.
I’m going to complain about bathroom capacity again here; there didn’t seem to be nearly enough showers for how big the campground is, and there was nearly always a wait for one. But aside from that the bathhouses were nice enough.
One advantage this KOA has over the western one is direct water access; Dave and a couple of the kids took the paddle board out here. There’s a narrow trail through the woods to the spot where you can launch a kayak or SUP (onto Lower Saint Mary Lake), so no hanging out at a beach area on shore like we did at Lake MacDonald.
Location
Like on the west side, this KOA gets you remarkably close to the national park entrance: it’s just a five minute drive to the St. Mary Visitor Center (which is where you’ll pick up the Going to the Sun Road). There are a few different restaurant options in the immediate area, including Rising Sun Pizza, which will deliver right to the campground, and which offers surprisingly good pizza as well as wings (for some reason they would only deliver pizza, not wings, so we went to pick ours up…but it’s a very quick drive).
It’s more of a hike to some of the other big draws on this side of the park; we went to the Two Medicine area one day and that was a good 45 minute drive (over the aforementioned scary-with-a-trailer road). The late opening of the Going to the Sun Road meant we had to cancel our plans to explore the Many Glacier area, but that would have been a half hour drive in another direction.
So all in all, another Glacier National Park-adjacent KOA, another winner!
Next up: all the stuff we did on the east side of the park
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