GLACIER NATIONAL PARK, Mont. — The late July storm broke over the valley like a wave over the prow of a ship. Hikers, emerging from the forest, dashed across stretches of lawn as lightning cut across the darkening sky. Couples in canoes awkwardly zigzagged their way toward the dock as thunder rumbled overhead.

In front of the Many Glacier Hotel, picnickers packed up lunches and scurried toward the first open door.

Inside, a hastily built fire filled the lobby with the scent of burning pine. Wet shoes and socks lined the hearth and in time, not an empty sofa or chair could be found.

A small girl opened her palm to reveal a handful of hail, which was now bounding off the deck.

A man in his mid-40s shared a chocolate bar with his ponytailed daughter. A girl fell into the pages of her novel. Someone pushed a trash can beneath a leaking skylight, and over by the piano one guest stood, violin poised, and began to play "Music of the Night," for the strangers and friends that suddenly filled the room.

The rain and hail lasted two hours that afternoon, but no one seemed bothered. At the Many Glacier Hotel, where storms and bears and rugged expanses of mountainous beauty abound, the communal experience is a welcome, if temporary, respite from the call of the wild.

My wife, Margie, and I stayed here last summer during a 10-day trip to Glacier National Park. We planned to divide our time on the eastern side of the park in a district known as Many Glacier and at the Prince of Wales Hotel in the Canadian township of Waterton. I had come here to tell the story of a man returning to the park after being attacked the previous summer by a grizzly on one of its trails.

Confident that encounters like his are the exception, I extended our stay to sample a vacationer's summer experience of Glacier and discovered that the park is a glorious combination of the raw and the cooked, the wild and the civilized, a place where the hand of man is surprisingly at home in a world teeming with predators and untrammeled nature.

BACKBONE OF THE WORLD

OK, I admit it: I was beat. By the time I finished the 12-mile roundtrip trek to Grinnell Glacier, my dogs were barking. It was my first full day in Many Glacier, and I was hiking with a group that included Johan Otter, the survivor of the bear attack.

Described as a moderate climb — a 1,600-foot gain over six miles — the trek to Grinnell Glacier is one of the most popular in the park, and we felt safe. As we slowly ascended the switchbacks above Lake Josephine, calling out "Aaa-ooo" to keep any unseen bears at bay — always best to make a lot of noise when hiking on these trails — the Grinnell Valley spread out before us.

Steep mountains with jigsaw patches of snow near their peaks cradled turquoise lakes. Meadows of wildflowers lapped against copses of alder and forests of elfin spruce. No wonder hikers think of Switzerland when they see these vistas.

More than 20,000 years ago, an ice sheet covered this part of northwestern Montana so deeply that only the tallest mountains were visible, rising like islands in a frozen sea. The pressure of the ice carved the horns, aretes, cirques and hanging valleys for which the park is known.

Blackfoot Indians called this stretch of the northern Rockies Miistakis, the Backbone of the World. Naturalist George Bird Grinnell named it the Crown of the Continent, a title fitting both the park's location and its mountains' majesty.

Nowadays, however, its glaciers are getting all the attention.

Toward the end of the 19th century, explorers documented more than 100 glaciers, some covering nearly 1,000 acres. Five years ago, there were 37, and today, 27. By 2030, scientists predict, they all will be gone.

As we ate lunch, rested and watched waterfalls drop into the lake at the base of Grinnell Glacier, we felt humbled to know that perhaps we were watching snow that had turned to ice from before the time of Lewis and Clark slowly disappear.

LAST FRONT PORCHES

Many Glacier Hotel stairs came easily after the trail to Grinnell Glacier. Our room had a stone fireplace and a balcony overlooking the lake. Afternoon sun and a strong breeze streamed through the open windows.

Towering on the eastern shore of Swiftcurrent Lake, the hotel overlooks the Grinnell and Swiftcurrent valleys, each green with forests of lodgepole pine and each shadowed by the Continental Divide in the distance. In the still of the morning, the reflection in the lake picks up the near-perfect symmetries of the adjacent valleys.

With its white trim and brown siding and the diamond-and-cloverleaf patterns cut into the balusters on the decks and balconies, the Many Glacier Hotel is a rugged kind of gingerbread. In the lobby, 20 Douglas firs, each 30 inches in diameter, rise four stories and support timbers of nearly equal girth. Nothing here is too perfect, too clean or too well-matched, giving the hotel a rustic ease.

The Many Glacier Hotel and the other lodges inside the park are "the last front porches in America," said bellman Jason Snow, stepping in one morning from the porte-cochere. "In the evening, people talk with each other. Strangers go hiking with each other; they have dinner together."

Later in our stay, after taking a tour of the hotel, I spoke with Joanne Reid, who first visited Many Glacier in 1956 and spent two seasons working in the hotel's dining room. She had returned with an Elderhostel group.

"I think people come to Glacier and are changed," she said, describing the park's allure. "There is the sudden realization that if you don't get off the deck and outside, you'll miss something bigger than yourself, something really grand, mysterious and powerful. It's both humbling and rejuvenating."

With 700 miles of hiking trails, Glacier is an open invitation to wander. One afternoon, Margie and I joined a group for a ranger-led wildflower hike.

Toward the end, we came to a lake, and standing on its banks, looking west, we saw a bull moose in the shallows, his back to us, grazing among the underwater reeds. With binoculars, we watched him slowly submerge his huge head deep into the water and then rise up, reeds in his mouth, water, silvery in the light, dripping off his antlers and from his slender beard.

AFTERNOON TEA IN THE WILDERNESS

If the Many Glacier Hotel is toast and coffee, the Prince of Wales Hotel is afternoon tea. We packed our bags and set out for Canada. The two-lane highway passes through magnificent grasslands and swaths of aspen and cottonwood groves. Chief Mountain, a lone edifice at 9,000 feet, towers above the plain.

Straddling the Continental Divide, Glacier and Waterton Lakes National Park in Canada share a 19-mile border. Seventy-five years ago, both countries decided to unite their parks and create the Glacier-Waterton International Peace Park. Originally meant to commemorate peace and good will between the two countries, the designation today allows for an easy exchange of science, study and resources.

We zipped across the border without a hitch and stopped at an overlook to gaze upon the Waterton Lake and the circle of mountains that dwarfs the streets and homes of Waterton. Even from a distance and amid such a setting, the Prince of Wales Hotel is conspicuous.

Seven stories tall, with broad decks and rows of windows, the hotel opened in 1927. On arrival, our beverage of choice was a blend of black and green teas, and as we waited to be served in the lobby, at a table set with white linen and china painted with scenes of English gardens, we gazed through picture windows at Waterton Lake and the mountains rising above it.

Feeling slightly out of place amid such luxury, we asked our tartan-clad server how she reconciled the experience of high tea in the presence of this austere wilderness.

"But this is no pinkie-up high tea," Lynlee Spencer said, reminding us that there is no dress code. "The people who have high tea here are just as likely to be coming in from the mountains. It's like the world nowadays. You can enjoy rap music and Mozart at the same time, can't you?"

The morning stillness was stunning. To the northeast, out over the prairie, fog hung low beneath the towering cliffs.

RECALLING THE MESSAGE

We had reserved a spot on the International Peace Park Hike, an eight-mile trek from Waterton, down the western shore of the lake, to Goat Haunt, a ranger station in the U.S., where a boat would pick us up and take us back to Waterton. The sun was crisp, clear and warm.

We met our American and Canadian ranger guides at 10 a.m. There were 21 of us, some from as far away as Hawai'i and New England. The trail along Waterton Lake makes an easy elevation gain, and at various overlooks we stopped to listen as the rangers shared their knowledge of the park, its plant life and geology. The hike is as much a nature hike as it is a lecture on the meaning and merits of this international park.

At our last stop, a ranger invited us to be quiet, to sit still and take in the moment. As I leaned back and watched the clouds, white and silvery in the bright afternoon sun, drift above the forest in a sea of blue, I thought back on our week at the Crown of the Continent.

That summer, one year ago, the news of the day focused on Israel's war in southern Lebanon and our own battles in Iraq, and suddenly the meaning of this wilderness and the promise of a peace park became clear.