It’s March. Time to play I Want To Visit Glacier Bingo, brought to you by recreation.gov and your federal government. To play, just log onto your computer at precisely 8 a.m. Mountain Time exactly 120 days before you’d like to visit Glacier National Park. For example, if you would like to visit the Park on July 10, you need to be at your computer with your browser loaded at 8 a.m. on March 12. Select the date you’d like to visit, and then wait for the Soviet-era website to serve you a pop-up warning that says, “We are experiencing heavy traffic at this time, please click refresh to try again.”
You don’t see warnings like this when you visit Amazon or the New York Times, because those outfits want to do business with you, so they use real web servers. The Park Service apparently uses computers that were discarded by the IRS in 1990. Just be patient, load three different web browsers, and try clicking refresh on all of them at once. Be advised that this may make traffic even heavier, but you might get lucky. If you don’t like computers or can’t wrap your ahead around the new reservation system, phone numbers are available that no one ever answers.
In the old days, a visitor needed only a National Parks Pass to enter Glacier, but then 3 million people tried to visit every summer, and park officials decided that something had to be done. Oh, to be a stinkbug on the wall during that meeting.
“We need to regulate vehicle traffic.”
“I agree, but if we really want to cut down on traffic, we need to make sure that the system is complicated and almost impossible to explain, that way most people will give up trying to understand it and not visit. What did we call it last year?”
“Glacier Park Ticketed Entry.”
“Okay, first, let’s change the name. That always throws them off. This year, let’s call it Glacier Park Vehicle Reservations.”
“That will cause mass confusion. People are going to think that they need a National Parks Pass, a ticket for entry, and a vehicle reservation.”
“Exactly. They’ll say, why bother, it’s too confusing.”
“I like it. But what about people who drive up from Tulsa with four kids and two dogs and are so naive that they think they can visit a national park just because they have a National Parks Pass?”
“Don’t worry, park employees and a small army of volunteers will be on hand to explain how the new complicated system works, even though it is now too late to make any use of that system.”
“That might make people mad. Can’t we give them some hope? How about if we release two-thirds of the reservations 120 days in advance, but we reserve one-third of the reservations and sell them exactly 24 hours in advance?”
“Yes, then park employees and volunteers can tell the family from Tulsa to use the new recreation.gov mobile app to obtain a vehicle reservation, which will allow them to enter the park the following day.”
“Mobile data is available in West Glacier?”
“Of course not, and by the time the people from Tulsa find cell service, they’ll log on, and the pop-up will say, ‘We are experiencing heavy traffic at this time,’ and they’ll go back to Tulsa.”
“I love this!”
Regulatory ingenuity at its finest, and Flathead County should take notice. How many ways are there into the Flathead Valley? It should be easy to have a kiosk at each entrance. Start by requiring a Flathead Valley Pass, and if the traffic still keeps coming, institute a vehicle reservation system and sell two-thirds of the tickets on a rolling 120-day advance reservation system that is almost impossible to explain.
If people drive all the way from Des Moines without obtaining a vehicle reservation, they can go back to their motel in Missoula or Great Falls and try for reservations that are sold at precisely 8 a.m. one day in advance. If they follow the instructions to the letter and are real computer ninjas, they’ll see a splash screen featuring the new Flathead Valley Motto: “We Are Experiencing Heavy Traffic At This Time. Visit Bozeman!”
Richard Dooling lives outside of Whitefish and his work can be found at dooling.com.