This Glorious 88-Year-Old Bus Used To Carry People Around A National Park, Now It Can Be Yours

One of the greatest ways to enjoy the best of what America’s lands have to offer is to pay a visit to a national park. Words cannot describe the natural beauty to be found from coast-to-coast, and while you can visit a park in your car, the experience from an open-top tour bus is hard to beat. Two of America’s national parks have been running iconic vintage buses for 89 years and now one of them can be yours. This is the White 706, and it’s one of the coolest classic cars you can buy this year.

The world is a beautiful place. You can travel to perhaps a million locales and still find enchanting charm. If you like to take in marvelous landscapes here in America, I cannot recommend sights like the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone enough. If you get the chance, leave your car behind and ride in something that allows you unrestricted views. If you’re visiting Yellowstone National Park or Glacier National Park, you can take a tour in some real pieces of history.

About 90 years ago, the National Park Service ordered over 500 buses to be used in parks around the country. Amazingly, 33 of these buses still remain in service at Glacier National Park while eight more operate in Yellowstone National Park. This 1937 White 706 is the real deal and served Yellowstone for decades. Now this iconic bus can be your open-top classic car.

An Enduring Icon

The bus you see here today was created for a specific purpose. Glacier National Park’s Going-to-the-Sun Road was completed in 1933 as one of the first roads in any national park built specifically for car traffic. It’s a 51-mile stretch passing next to glacial lakes, alpine forests, and huge sheer cliffs in Glacier National Park. The road would also serve as a template for roads in other parks. While Going-to-the-Sun Road is an easy paved drive today, the road surface was unimproved back then. Cars and tour buses have been allowed in the national park system since 1914, but by the 1930s, the parks wanted specialized transport.

Hemmings writes that Ford, REO, GMC, and White were challenged to build a bus that could survive the rough roads while safely carrying passengers. White won out above the rest with a bus that performed the best.

The White 706 wasn’t a particularly hot truck. You were looking at a 318 cubic inch 16A flathead inline six-cylinder engine made just 94 horses, or about the output of my smaller 1948 Plymouth Special DeLuxe. However, the White made good use of all of those horses in its gearing. A White 706 could confidently climb through Glacier and other parks at a leisurely speed of 20 mph. That’s not to say the buses could go much faster, as they were geared for a top speed of 35 mph.

The gorgeous design of the 706 buses is attributed to Count Alexis de Sakhnoffsky, White President F.W. Black, and Herman Bender of the Bender Body Company. The front end was styled by de Sakhnoffsky while everything else was handled by Bender. The buses had a roll-back top for open viewing and up to five passenger doors on the right side.

In addition to the funky door situation, the buses were built with oak wood frames to support their bodies. The parks also painted their buses their own colors, with Yellowstone going with yellow and Glacier choosing red after the mountain ash berries found in the park.

These buses, each of which cost the parks $5,000 in 1936 cash ($115,098 today), would go on to become rockstars. NPS would end up ordering more than 500 of these buses between 1935 and 1939, and they served the Yellowstone, Bryce Canyon, Rocky Mountain, Mt. Rainier, Zion, Yosemite, and Glacier National Parks for decades. According to Xanterra Parks and Resorts, the operator of the lodges in the national parks, the buses were a bit weird.

The buses earned the nickname of Red Jammers because of the sounds the buses’ unsynchronized transmissions made when their drivers slammed them into gear. Apparently, these transmissions were so notoriously noisy that not even double-clutching made the clatter go away. The noise these buses made is apparently more charming than annoying, however.

Xanterra also shares some awkward facts including how, until the 1970s, the drivers were college-aged men usually seeking law or medical degrees. In the early years of buses in the parks, women were discouraged from sitting at the front of these buses for fear that the men driving the buses would be distracted. It wasn’t until the 1980s that a Red Jammer had a woman behind the wheel, and the Jammers were exclusively manual-shift machines until 1989.

Glacier got a grand total of 35 White 706 buses, of which 33 have remained in service since the mid-1930s. These buses also had other, more serious purposes aside from driving around tourists. They were also emergency evacuation vehicles in case of fires or floods in the parks. Of the original 35 buses to have served Glacier National Park, one bus was destroyed beyond repair in a crash while another was stricken off of the roster and preserved.

The buses at all of the other parks were retired during the 1960s and the 1970s. Yellowstone had 98 buses and they were also retired. However, Xanterra bought eight surviving buses and had them restored, putting them back into service after spending a whopping $1.9 million.

The Red Jammers of today look like the buses of old, but they’re anything but. By the 1990s, all of the White 706s in the Glacier National Park fleet had around 600,000 miles under their wheels and stress cracks were found in their chassis. The park was going to just retire the buses but then, Ford came around and donated over $6 million to upgrade these buses. Now, they ride on Ford E-450 chassis and have modern 5.4-liter Triton V8 power. The same goes for the Yellowstone buses as well. These buses can run on propane, but they mostly use gasoline. These buses were supposed to get hybrid drivetrains, but the funding for that project didn’t materialize.

This 1937 White 706

That brings us to the White 706 on your screen here and it’s a weird one. Now, you’ve probably noticed how I said that all 35 Glacier National Park buses are accounted for. So, why is the White 706 on your screen a Glacier National Park bus? Well, it isn’t. This bus started life working for Yellowstone National Park, so it would have been painted yellow when it was new.

This bus was sold in an undated auction in the past for $275,000. Now it’s up for grabs again during a Mecum auction on Saturday, March 22. Mecum’s description says:

Since the completion of a comprehensive restoration by Historic Flight Foundation and Glenn Vaughn Car Restorations that focused attention on factory details, this 1937 White 706 Glacier National Park tour bus has covered about 250 miles, primarily in parades and other special events, largely proving its durability and reliability. The rebuilt and detailed 318 CI flathead inline 6-cylinder engine is linked to a 4-speed manual transmission and has been fitted with an updated carburetor and refurbished engine accessories.

The wood frame was inspected and replaced and repaired where necessary, and the massive body has been refinished in a Ripe Mountain Ash Berry and black, mimicking the appearance of the stock buses in service in Glacier National Park, Montana. The wheels are finished in the same Berry color and feature a bright center cap and huge blackwall tires. The brightwork was rechromed, repolished and restored. Inside, the seat frames were blasted, rechromed and reupholstered with brown upholstery. The faux wood interior panel was refinished, the gauges were rebuilt and the canvas top seals out the elements or lets them in if desired for open-air touring.

This bus was one of 41 examples put into service at Yellowstone back in 1937. As the story goes, when Yellowstone retired this bus it was sold as surplus and ended up stored on a farm near Spokane, Washington.

Other notes include an electric fuel pump, Goodyear tires, and a correct White 318 straight-six with a manual transmission. In other words, this bus is more period correct than the Red Jammers that currently operate in Glacier National park. Though, amusingly, the existence of this replica leads to one of those jokes where more copies of a car can appear at a car show than were ever built.

It’s also a little odd because the buses that served Yellowstone remain famous, too, and this is the real deal from 1937. But I guess that shows just how iconic the Red Jammers are that a museum would restore a rare Yellowstone bus into a Glacier bus. Sadly, Mecum doesn’t say if the bus was given any better gearing during its restoration. Being limited to just 35 mph would limit the appeal of this rig.

If you’re interested, click here to check the auction listing.

If previous auction data is anything to go by, someone is about to spend mega bucks on this bus later this month. But this is one of the cases where I could see why. Many generations of Americans have seen these buses in national parks, and the wonderful machines continue to wow even today. Glacier National Park is still running its 33, so if you want one of your own, this is basically your only choice. But my, what a spectacular choice it is. This is easily one of the coolest buses ever built and a great piece of American history.