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Glacier Park Infrastructure Stretched Thin Among Record Crowds

Superintendent Jeff Mow says visitors should expect heavy park traffic, wait times

By Molly Priddy
Glacier National Park. Greg Lindstrom | Flathead Beacon

It’s another booming year for visitation in Glacier National Park, with summer crowds pushing the park’s infrastructure and transportation systems to the limit with no slowdown expected in the near future.

Roughly 2.36 million visitors made their way into Glacier Park in 2015, setting a new all-time record that surpassed the previous record set only a year earlier in 2014, when 2.32 million people visited.

And 2016 looks as though it will continue this trend, with overall visitation for 2016 so far through June up 8.7 percent compared to the same time in 2015.

While park administration is excited to see more people visiting Glacier, the influx is stressing the existing infrastructure system.

“We anticipated that we would see things that we had never seen before in this park with that visitation,” Glacier Park Superintendent Jeff Mow said in an interview last week. “In preparation for that, we looked at what can we do to build some depth into our organization.”

But even those preparations weren’t enough, Mow said. The best illustration of the park’s conundrum is the free shuttle bus system that drives people up Going-to-the-Sun Road with stops along the way.

The shuttle system was created as a way to reduce traffic on the already busy Sun Road. Mow said that, as of last week, all the buses were in good repair and out on the roads, without any left in reserve.

“We’re really being stretched to the limits,” he said. “Everything’s working, everything’s maxed out, but right now nothing is broken. We’re not being thrown for any major loops.”

Mow said the park experienced some of the hiring woes occurring elsewhere in the Flathead Valley when it came to finding enough bus drivers, adding another challenge.

But at this point, the biggest issue is the sheer volume of people on the park’s roads. Mow said the demand for access to popular areas of the park, such as the Avalanche Lake trailhead and campground, has caused new behaviors in visitors.

While visitors have historically tended to park down Going-to-the-Sun Road when the Avalanche parking lots are full, Mow said the precariously parked cars – which look like they’ll tip over given the grade of the ditch next to the road – are stretching longer down the road than ever before.

“The landscape design staff who worked so hard on the rehabilitation of Going-to-the-Sun come back here shaking theirs heads, saying, ‘We would have never thought people would have parked there,'” Mow said.

Margie Steigerwald, spokesperson for Glacier Park, said visitors who can’t find parking on Logan Pass are now driving down the Sun Road, parking wherever they can find a spot, and walking up the narrow, alpine road, sometimes in large groups, presenting a major safety problem.

“We’re seeing things on the ground that demonstrate that we are well beyond the design of the Going-to-the-Sun Road in terms of its facilities, in terms of where people can park, using the restrooms, the lines for the shuttle buses,” Mow said.

Apgar Village parking, along with the visitors’ center, is typically full, she said, and some people have reported wait times of up to two hours for the free shuttles.

At this point, Mow said, the conversation must turn to managing visitors’ expectations when it comes to Glacier Park. People will board a plane on the promise of driving up to Logan Pass, he said, but they should also learn to expect large crowds and long waits in an otherwise wild place.

“As we move forward, how do we help people with those expectations?” Mow said. “If people know they’re going to be sharing this with a lot of people, that’s OK if they expect it.”