Ray Djuff has spent more than 50 years chasing down the human history of Glacier and Waterton Lakes national parks — and he’s not slowing down. The 70-year-old historian, who tended bar at the Prince of Wales Hotel as a college student in the 1970s and turned patrons’ offhand questions into a lifelong research habit, has a new book out: “A Glacier Gallery,” co-authored with Scott Tanner and Bill Lundgren and published by Farcountry Press.
Djuff’s path to becoming one of the region’s most trusted sources on park history started almost by accident. Hired as a busboy at the Prince of Wales in 1973, he was quickly promoted to bartender, a job that meant fielding everything from “what time do they let the animals out?” to genuinely hard questions about the hotel’s construction that no one behind the bar could answer.
On his days off, he started knocking on doors around Waterton, piecing together the hotel’s story from residents who remembered it being built. A 1977 trip to the National Park Service archive in West Glacier, followed by a research trip to the Minnesota Historical Society’s Great Northern Railway collection, opened up a deeper vein of material than he expected.
That research habit outlasted a journalism career (stints at the Fort McMurray paper, the Calgary Sun and the Calgary Herald) and a second act as a cheesemonger after a 2012 layoff. Along the way, often working with collaborator and editor Chris Morrison, Djuff produced a run of books that became standard references for anyone digging into the parks’ built history: “Prince of Wales Hote”l (1991), “High on a Windy Hill” (1999), “View with a Room: Glacier’s Historic Hotels & Chalets” (2001), and, most recently, “Glacier’s Reds: The Quest to Save the Park’s Historic Buses” (2024), a history of the park’s iconic White Motor Company touring buses.
“A Glacier Gallery: True Tales and Hidden History,” marks a new collaboration, teaming Djuff with fellow historian Tanner — a longtime friend who has called Djuff’s work on the red buses “the Bible” of the subject, and who brings his own expertise in Great Northern Railway and Glacier tourism history — and Lundgren, whose family ran the West Glacier Mercantile for decades. Together the three have assembled 66 essays digging into the park’s stranger corners: mysterious gravesites, railroad lore, fishing tales, curious legends, and the enormous spring ritual of clearing the Big Drift along Going-to-the-Sun Road. The book is illustrated with 218 rare photographs and illustrations, offering what its publisher, Farcountry Press, calls a browsable alternative to the standard Glacier guidebook.
For Djuff, the appeal of the work has never faded. “I’ve acquired a lot of useless knowledge that every once in a while becomes pretty useful,” he said last year — a line that’s proven true again and again, from tracking down the original Sperry Chalet blueprints after the 2017 wildfire to puzzling over a century-old signature scratched into the Belton Chalet’s foundation. At 70, he says his problem isn’t finding new material; it’s living long enough to finish everything he’s started.
Djuff will be in the Flathead Valley this fall for the book’s launch. A release party is set for 5:30 p.m. on Friday, Sept. 18, at the Glacier Art Museum (formerly the Hockaday) in Kalispell, followed by a signing the next afternoon, Sept. 19, at the Kalispell Barnes & Noble.
“A Glacier Gallery: True Tales and Hidden History,” by Ray Djuff, Scott Tanner, and Bill Lundgren (Farcountry Press, 2026, paperback, 152 pages, $25.95), is available from booksellers nationwide and directly from Farcountry Press.