The Little Chief creaks and groans as another load of passengers settles in for a tour of St. Mary Lake in Montana’s Glacier National Park. You would be groaning a bit, too, if you were 99 years old and still working every day.But don’t worry. Despite their ages, Little Chief and her sister, Sinopah, are in fine shape for another season of showcasing this magnificent part of the country.The National Park System and its concessionaires operate more than 100 boats and ferries throughout its 433 units. Most simply move people to and fro, like ferries to places the USS Arizona Memorial in Hawaii or the Statue of Liberty in New York. But others are a part of the story, bearing witness to and showcasing unique components of the American landscape.About the time that Glacier became a national park in 1910, John William Swanson moved to the region and soon developed a reputation as a master boatbuilder. In 1920, he opened his first boat concession in the park and in 1926 built the Little Chief. By 1938, he sold the concession to Arthur Burch.The Glacier Park Boat Company is now operated by the third and fourth generations of the Burch family, making it the oldest family operated concessionaire within the national park system. Three of the boats ̶ the Little Chief, the Sinopah and the DeSmet, all built by Swanson ̶ are now on the National Register of Historic Places.“Swanson’s beautiful old boats are a direct link to the early days of Glacier National Park,” wrote James Hackethorn, operations manager for Glacier Park Boat Company in documentation for the National Register. “Today’s visitors are able to climb aboard a launch and have the same experience as those first tourists many decades ago.”Each September, the boats are drydocked to make any necessary repairs. Many aspects of the boat, including the seats and the keel, are original. The Coast Guard inspects the boats each spring.In summer 2026, look for boat captains to appear in historic costumes and for special postcards and posters commemorating Little Chief’s and Sinopah’s 100th birthday.
The Ranger III on Lake Superior
The Ranger III is not your ordinary tour boat. At 165 feet long, 34 feet wide and 650 gross tons, it is the largest piece of moving equipment owned and operated by the National Park Service.But you need a big boat to manage the spring ice and November gales of Lake Superior. That’s where Isle Royale National Park is located in Michigan, just 5 miles from Thunder Bay, Ontario, and about 70 miles from Houghton, Michigan, in the Upper Peninsula. It is one of the least-visited national parks, in part, because weather conditions close the park from Nov. 1 to April 15 each year.Come spring, the Ranger III carries everything from outhouses and diesel fuel for the generators to construction supplies to repair whatever damage Mother Nature did to facilities over the harsh winter.The rest of the season, the Ranger III makes the six-hour, 76-mile journey from Houghton twice a week, carrying up to 128 passengers.A trip on the Ranger III is not a glamorous outing. Motion sickness is a possibility. Passengers must bring their own food and drink. There is no Wi-Fi or cell service, so bring a book, a deck of cards or just enjoy the oceanlike view of Lake Superior.
It’s the mules that make the canal boats so much fun. Of course, they are historically accurate and a necessary part of the story of Chesapeake & Ohio Canal National Historical Park outside of Washington, D.C. But they can upstage the historic boats a bit with their floppy ears and fuzzy noses.This national park is more than 180 miles long but just a few miles wide at the most. It commemorates the effort envisioned by George Washington to connect the Chesapeake Bay, via the Potomac River, to the Ohio River. Although the canal never reached the Ohio, it transported tons of resources and goods along the route and facilitated westward expansion.The first section opened in 1830; the last boat ceased operation in 1924. At its height, about 550 boats operated on the canal. Among the products that traveled the canal were the timber and bricks used to build the U.S. Capitol.Today’s visitors travel on the Charles F. Mercer, a replica of a 58-foot single rudder packet boat. These were smaller and usually carried mail, small freight and a few passengers. Work scows were up to 90 feet long and hauled coal, grain and limestone.What they all had in common was the mules. Gravity took the boats toward the Chesapeake Bay, but mules walked along the bank on a tow path, pulling the boats and the loads back upstream.
