This week’s travel dream: Driving the Continental Divide

At Logan Pass in Montana, you can watch the water flow in three directions: toward the Atlantic, the Pacific, and the Arctic.

The iconic American cross-country road trip has always been one that goes from east to west, said Heather Smith MacIsaac in Travel + Leisure. I wanted to experience the sweep of our nation from a different perspective, by driving north to south along “America’s spine.” I would trace the Continental Divide, the “mighty invisible line that runs along the top of the Rocky Mountains and determines whether water flows west to the Pacific or east to the Atlantic.” Beginning at the Canadian border and ending in New Mexico, I plotted out a 2,000-mile route “that followed it as closely as pavement would permit.”

Hours after I got off a plane in Kalispell, Mont., I was cruising down “one of the most celebrated highways in America.” Montana’s Going-to-the-Sun Road has spectacular panoramas of cedar forests, glacial lakes, and windswept alpine tundra. It weaves through Glacier National Park and passes the Divide at 6,646-foot-high Logan Pass. There, “at the crown of the continent,” I watched water flow in not two but three directions—toward the Atlantic, the Pacific, and the Arctic. The rest of Montana was a “honeypot” of forest and fertile plain, ending in the great national parks of Yellowstone and Grand Teton.

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