Peak Season Underway in Glacier Park, Boosting Congestion and Ranger Responses
The influx of tourists has led to traffic restrictions at two park entrances as well as an increase in emergency response calls
By Micah Drew
The fourth consecutive year that Glacier National Park (GNP) has required vehicle reservations for park visitors is well underway and park officials are already mining early-season visitation data and cataloging encounters with the public to determine the pros and cons of the pilot program’s latest iteration.
The ticketed entry system restricts access to the North Fork, Many Glacier and the West Entrance of Going-to-the-Sun Road (GTTSR) with the goal of relieving congestion seen in recent seasons as the park’s popularity has soared.
“Overall, we feel we have this year dialed in better than any year with the pilot program,” GNP spokesperson Gina Icenoggle told the Beacon on Friday. “We used to have to restrict traffic in West Glacier, and we haven’t had to do that since starting the reservation system. The vehicle reservations have shown they alleviate traffic restrictions, which creates a better experience for visitors.”
Each year, park officials modify the pilot program to address feedback from visitors and local community members, with each new configuration easing some aspects of the program even as new challenges develop.
This year, the Two Medicine area located in the southeast corner of the park has emerged as the latest hotbed of congestion.
According to Icenoggle, reservations routinely did not sell out in 2023, leading park officials to manage it as an open-access area this summer. To preemptively offset the surge in visitors to which park administrators have grown accustomed after easing restrictions, they also removed the St. Mary entrance from the reservation requirement, a strategy they hoped would help absorb the pressure.
Despite the precaution, during the first 12 days of July, park officials restricted traffic into the Two Medicine Valley for between one and three hours on five separate days.
“Some days everyone just decides it’s a great day to go to Two Medicine,” Icenoggle said, adding that the whole reservation system boils down to a numbers game. “Once all the parking spaces are taken up, they have to begin restricting traffic. Again, it’s an experiment. We tried leaving St. Mary open to balance Two Medicine, but the jury is still out on how it all plays out for the season.”
Despite reservation requirements on the opposite side of the park, traffic restrictions have also become more prevalent in the remote North Fork section of Glacier, specifically along the unpaved road to Bowman Lake. Icenoggle said this is the first summer since the area has required a reservation that traffic restrictions have been needed, an anomaly park officials suggested could be tied to road construction work in the area. If cars are halted at the construction zone and then released simultaneously, the concentration of motorists can exceed the carrying capacity of the primitive, narrow road leading to Bowman Lake. Even if the road to Bowman Lake is closed, visitors to the North Fork can still access Kintla lake to the north, or Logging and Quartz lakes along the Inside North Fork Road.
Another altered aspect of this summer’s vehicle reservation system is the daily release of tickets in the evening for next-day entry as opposed to a morning release, as in years past. Icenoggle said that, once July hit, visitors have been nabbing up all the available reservations, but doing so over a longer period of time each night.
“We’re not seeing them sell out in two or five minutes like we have in the past,” she said. “We’re not quite sure why — maybe because people feel like they can always go around to St. Mary — but it’s drastically different than in previous years.”
Visitation to Glacier peaks in July and August with around 1.4 million tourists passing through the entrance gates over the two months. Along with the annual influx of tourists comes a corresponding jump in calls to dispatch.
Glacier has already seen the shroud of tragedy with two drowning fatalities last weekend and a third in June. Drowning is the most common cause of death in the park.
In 2022 there were seven fatalities in the park, the highest number of visitor deaths since 1981. Icenoggle said “no rhyme or reason” can be attributed to the number of accidents in the park each year.
“I do think that this year we were much farther into the season before snowmelt showed up and the rivers and streams began running high and fast. I think that may have taken people by surprise and folks might not be familiar with the dangers of how rivers run in Montana,” she said.
Under the current heat wave, Icenoggle said calls related to dehydration and heat exhaustion have begun to tick up, and visitors are reminded to limit hikes during the heat of the day and bring plenty of water for hikes like the Highline Trail, a popular point-to-point route from Logan Pass along the Continental Divide. Due to the trail’s length and orientation, hikers often reach the most exposed sections of trail during the hottest parts of the day. Rangers respond to the highest number of heat-related incidents along the Highline Trail.
“It might seem to some people that this is an unusual year as far as accidents go, but it’s really on par with what can happen in Glacier National Park,” she said. “That being said, it does feel like rangers are seeing a more constant demand.”
Among the potential hazards in Glacier National Park is an encounter with one of the park’s roughly 1,000 grizzly bears, though incidents of contact between visitors and bears are rare occurrences. Park staff routinely close campgrounds and trails if there are reports of high bear activity in the area and have extensive management plans in place to reduce conflicts.
All visitors should understand bear safety practices, including hiking in groups, carrying bear spray, and ensuring all food and garbage is secure whether in the park’s frontcountry or wilderness areas.
There has been one incident with a grizzly this summer, which occurred when a Glacier Park trail crew member encountered a sow with cubs and received a bite on their hand. It was the first bear encounter with an on-duty park employee in 40 years, according to Icenoggle. The employee is currently recovering from their injury.
“The quick actions of the trail crew member and teammates prevented the situation from escalating and becoming life threatening,” she said. “They used their training and responded quickly to give immediate medical attention, use their comms and get their team member out.”
Before this incident, the last injury caused by a grizzly bear in Glacier Park was in July of 2020 when a Kalispell woman crashed into a grizzly bear while trail running on Huckleberry Lookout and received minor injuries.
