Saint Mary Campground, Glacier National Park — Hotel in Browning

If you want to experience nit picky volunteers who freely walk through your campsite at early hours of the morning and any time in the day for their "inspections", you've come to the right spot. ||||We camped here Jun 17,18,19 with 8 adults and 3 children. We had booked it in advance and were told that we would be ok having 3 tents on the site they gave us. Here's the problems. ||1. Despite camping in the place and manner they instructed on booking, we were cautioned by a volunteer that we had too many tents on the site twice a day every day. We would have been happy to rent the site next but were told it was ok - evidently it wasn't ok. ||2. The sites don't lend to having the rv door open to the table and fire area. So as is common I did a u-turn and put my rv in the opposite direction. This too resulted in a caution every day twice a day that I was not conforming to the rules. Fire egress being cited as the reason.||3. Unsupervised food prep. While initially setting up, my daughter was feeding her children when it started to rain, so they all retreated to the tent for a few minutes. They received a caution that they had left bear attractants on the table. I guess it wasn't good enough that they were only 20 ft away in the tent for 10 minutes.||4. We went to bed late on our last night and inadvertently left some used pie cookers out, and the fire was showing some steam from it (it was not stone cold). At 730am, a volunteer came right through our camp, under the awning inspecting things and then proceeded to knock on the rv and yell for us to come out. He woke up 3 children including a baby. While I appreciate we had broken a rule, it was not an emergency and did not require our immediate attention in that manner. He was extremely officious and very heavy handed. ||||What I am hoping to get across is that this campground has people running it that are not caring about you having a great time but are more concerned with enforcing rules (which for the most part are important) but the manner in which they officiate them is atrocious and needs addressing. ||||I don't mind people enforcing rules, but there is a nice way to do it and there is the way this was done. I also think that from the get go, we were targeted for the number of tents which then drew attention to us and got us more in trouble. We only put three tents on the site cause they said it was ok when we booked. I parked the RV in the way I did and was told it was going to be ok so long as I drove it out the right way - but clearly these two issues attracted attention and caused them to do what seemed like target us forever after. ||||I WILL STAY AT THE KOA NEXT TIME DESPITE THE EXTRA COST, I'LL TAKE THE NOISE AND CROWDING OVER THIS...

Stayed in St. Mary's for five nights. Getting reservations was a nightmare. Started trying to get them six months from our dates and ended having to book several sites and patchworking together our five days. In the end (mostly due to picking up some cancellations), we stayed our first night in C76 and then the rest of the trip in C106. We had a pickup and a 21' travel trailer. The first site was a little tight, but the second fit just right. We also have a beautiful view and it was close to the restroom. The sites are very, very close to each other and there are little to no trees. The bathrooms were some of the best-kept campground bathrooms I've ever been in. They were clean, stocked and warm at night. The showers in the campground were unavailable due to some construction. Luckily we had a shower in our camper, otherwise, you'd have to go to Swift Current or into town. You can easily walk to the St. Mary's visitor center from the campground. It's also on the GTSR corridor so we could drive on it anytime we wanted. The ranger programs each night were informative and nicely done. It was also a quick trip to get gas or groceries or firewood. No firewood sold at the campground. I would have liked to have gotten reservations at Many Glacier campground, but that was impossible. St. Mary's wasn't private and felt more like a parking lot, but it was worth being in the park. We didn't really spend much time in the campground anyway. Also - be prepared. There was a couple (not sure if they were paid employees or volunteers), but they would walk around the campground several times a day and hand out warnings. We left an unused table cloth on our table and they took it away and put it in the bear box. They left us a note cautioning us to not leave one out because it could have food smells. We understood and didn't take offense. Just know that they were serious about the bear safety in the campground. And one last thing - there are no hook ups at the park. There is a dump station and there were generous generator hours in every loop but A. You could run your generator from 8 - 10 am, 12 - 2...

Our family of five camped at St. Mary's for four nights in July, and it was the perfect location for us to explore Glacier National Park. We were driving in from the east so that made getting to our campsite the first day in Glacier very easy. We camped at A34 which although tight with our larger tent worked great, and I was thankful it was nicely tucked in with trees nearby so we didn't experience the wind as much as those campers in the more meadow area across the street. The dumpster and bathroom were close (like just next door) to our campsite, but we had no trouble with noise from either one. Only on our last morning did we hear a cleaning crew at the bathroom, and this was after 9 am. We found the other families and campers at St. Mary's to be very respectful and quiet, and we loved the campground hosts. They shared great information with us, answered questions, and generally were just great people. My youngest son enjoyed the ranger program he attended in the campground, and all of us enjoyed that it was a short walk to the river where we stood on the bridge to enjoy the scenery and look for animals. We did get to see a beaver at the river, plus a fox or two (or the same one twice) near our campsite. There are a few showers in loop C which we didn't attempt to wait in line for. Not having an available shower was the only downside after several days of hiking and camping, but we knew...