Purcell Mountain Lodge vs Mistaya Lodge

Purcell Mountain Lodge

Take Purcell if the party is mixed in abilities, ages or appetites, or if self-guiding matters to you.

• Purcell is the sociable one. Three storeys of timber on an alpine bench at the edge of Glacier National Park, ten rooms upstairs, and a separate two-bedroom chalet that can be taken self-catered.
• The terrain starts gentle in every direction, which makes this the one I send people to for a first backcountry trip.
• It rises to forty-degree lines and multi-summit days of up to two thousand vertical metres for parties who want them, and both guided and self-guided weeks run, which is rare in this category.
• In summer the meadows do the work the snow does in winter.
• There is no permit queue and no trailhead car park, because there is no trailhead. Access is the helicopter and nothing else.

Mistaya Lodge

Take Mistaya if the word "glacier" raises your pulse, and if published pricing earns your trust the way it earns mine.

• Mistaya is the alpinist's version. Fourteen guests in a red-roofed lodge at 2,040 metres in the Wildcat Creek basin, with glaciated ground straight off the deck and a sauna for what the glaciated ground does to you.
• Glaciated ground starts at the deck. There is no warm-up valley and no gentle first day unless you decide to make one.
• The lodge shares its basin with a private tarn. That is the whole neighbourhood: one building, one lake, and the ice above it.
• A seven-day summer week is $3,940 and the deep-winter week is $4,500. In a category fond of "enquire for rates", publishing the lot reads almost like a manifesto.
• Rooms are pine and bunks and a duvet, with the window doing everything a picture would be doing somewhere else.