Before 1930, visitors going to Glacier National Park arrived on the Great Northern Railway at Belton Depot, where buckboards carried tourists over a nearly impassable road through swampy redcedar forest to the foot of Lake McDonald. A steamboat made the trip up the lake, and after a night at the Lewis Hotel, intrepid guests rode horseback into the mountain vastness. Genevieve Walsh Gudger described her first trip to Lake McDonald in 1900 as beginning half asleep when she was pushed off the train at Belton, then continuing along a slender ribbon of road where trees stood so close that her father, standing in the open coach, pulled white and brown moss from them for her, while the wagon moved over needles and moss so deep that the horses' hooves made only a gentle clop-clop as they sped along.