Glacier Park Aims to Complete Visitor Use Management Plan by Winter 2026

Drawing comparisons between preparing Glacier National Park’s long-range visitor use management strategy and baking a cake, Superintendent Dave Roemer says his planning team hasn’t even begun shopping for the final batch of ingredients. Rather, they’re still poring over cookbooks in search of the perfect recipe to solve the park’s long-term visitor use and transportation dilemmas, which have created flash points in recent years as annual visitation far exceeds the park’s capacity, especially along its 91-year-old alpine travel corridor.

Approaching the fifth consecutive season of a pilot program launched in 2021 — a period during which park administrators have applied a range of visitor-use management strategies, including restricting access through an adaptive reservation system — Roemer said public engagement remains critical as the planning team proofs the final product to determine its long-term feasibility.

“It’s not as though we have already baked the cake, or that we know precisely what we want to do and are just going through the motions with these exercises. We really want to hear from you,” Roemer said on Nov. 21 during a virtual town hall, detailing the steps remaining before the park can “move beyond the pilot program and finalize a plan.”

“We’re trying to spark the public’s creativity to help us shop for the right ingredients and bake the cake that we want to have here in Glacier,” he continued. “We want to hear from all of you about ideas to provide access in a way that protects park resources and best serves our visitors.”

The first in a series of virtual and in-person public meetings and open houses stretching over the next several weeks, Roemer said the overarching goal of the sessions is to help park officials envision how visitors should access and travel in the park in the future. The park’s visitor-use management team will use that feedback to complete the framework for a long-range visitor-use management and transportation plan, which they hope to have completed by early 2026.

According to their tentative planning timeline, park officials would begin refining the long-term strategies early next year and start conducting analysis under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) in the spring and summer. A public review of the plan’s environmental assessment would follow in the summer and fall of 2025.

“We will be aiming to complete the plan ahead of the 2026 season,” according to park spokesperson Gina Icenoggle, who said a 2026 summer pilot system is all but certain. “We will likely announce a 2026 summer pilot in November 2025, as we have been doing, so that people can plan for summer 2026 and not have to wait for our long-term plan to conclude.”

Icenoggle said planning will most likely conclude in January or February of 2026.

That means the timed-entry vehicle reservation system for summer 2025 that park officials unveiled earlier this month will be the penultimate reservation pilot since the park began experimenting with day-use reservations in 2021.

So far, that pilot program has included four phases of an adaptive reservation system, which park officials say has allowed them to test methods in each of the park’s three distinct valleys as well as along the Going-to-the-Sun Road corridor connecting the west entrance and St. Mary over Logan Pass. Although the Sun Road corridor is by far the most popular visitor destination, as well as the most problematic given its logistical constraints, Glacier’s 1-million-acre footprint consists of entry portals that are served by geographically disconnected road systems, requiring a nuanced management plan tailored to each of those districts and their unique characteristics.

“All these places in the park are distinct,” Roemer said Thursday night, describing the degrees of development distinguishing, for example, the bustling hub of shops and sites at Apgar Village from the unpaved, off-the-grid North Fork. “They have their own special qualities, and the goal is never to make all parts of the park as developed as Apgar or Lake McDonald Lodge. Each valley has something unique and it’s our mission to preserve the distinct values and the character of those unique areas of Glacier.”

The park’s visitor-use recipe has grown more complex over the past two decades as it tries to bake a bigger cake. In that time, annual visitation at Glacier National Park has increased from approximately 1.5 million to over 3 million visitors, most of them concentrated along the Going-to-the-Sun Road corridor and other front-country destinations during the peak season of June through September, creating severe congestion at the park’s most popular entrances.

When the park first introduced its managed access system in 2021, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, it was only in place at the West Glacier and St. Mary entrances, where the reservation period started at 6 a.m. and ended 5 p.m. That created a pinched-balloon effect and led to uneven pockets of congestion — park visitors caught unaware by the new vehicle-reservation policy would migrate to one of several unrestricted entrances, some of them hours away. Even so, by mid-morning the entrances would be overwhelmed and forced to close for the day.

Park officials learned from those missteps and adjusted the system to include the North Fork in 2022, while also narrowing the hours during which reservations were required, from 6 a.m. to 4 p.m. That allowed visitors without a reservation to take a sunset drive along the Sun Road or enjoy an evening hike. Last year, the reservation requirements were expanded to include Many Glacier and Two Medicine, but the hours were pared back to 3 p.m., easing any sign of gridlock on most days except during that brief period just after the requirement is lifted.

In 2024, park officials adjusted the rules again, removing St. Mary and Two Medicine from the reservation requirement. Visitors were still able to procure vehicle reservations 120 days in advance on a rolling basis, but the booking window for next-day entry shifted to the evening instead of the morning, allowing the public to access the recreation.gov website starting at 7 p.m. In 2024, the vehicle reservation season for the West Entrance of Going-to-the-Sun Road and the North Fork began May 24 and ended Sept. 8.

During the 2025 summer season, park visitors will encounter another change as park officials debut a timed-entry component to the reservation pilot. Like this year, visitors will be required to make reservations to access the park at the West Entrance and the North Fork between 7 a.m. and 3 p.m. Now, however, visitors will also choose a time block in which they can enter the park. Multiple time blocks will be available and, once the visitor enters Glacier, they can remain in the park for as long as they like on the day of their reservation. The vehicle reservation season for 2025 will also move back several weeks, extending from June 13 to Sept. 28. Additional information will be made available on the program before advance reservations begin on Feb. 12, 2025, according to park officials.

“Throughout all of these changes that we have been implementing year after year after year, which we have tried to announce early enough so that people know what’s coming, we have been collecting information and data to inform our long-term plan,” Roemer said. “And we have been learning all the time.”

That learning curve has been steep, Roemer said, but so too has the growth chart for visitation. For example, after lifting its ticketed-entry requirement on the Going-to-the-Sun Road on Sept. 9, Glacier went on to record its busiest September in history, according to visitation data, clocking 602,339 visits that month. The data also revealed that 3,004,613 visitors had passed through Glacier’s gates in the nine-month period through September, amounting to the most visitors recorded in that time frame since 2017, when the park set its overall visitation record (3,321,319 people) and registered 3.206 million people before October.

“It’s a changed environment out there,” Roemer said.

To help adapt the public’s visitation patterns to that changing environment, Roemer on Thursday night introduced a long-range planning team to the public that included Susie Sidder, Glacier’s program manager for visitor use management, and Maureen Finnerty, a Denver-based visitor use management specialist with the National Park Service.

With next year’s pilot program, Sidder and Finnerty said they hope to see the concentrations of visitors meted out more evenly while they continue to explore other parkwide management strategies, including adjustments to the reservation system, expanded shuttle systems, parking and infrastructure improvements, and better communication and trip planning. Sidder said future changes to the visitor-use plan could include parking reservations, shuttle-only access requirements, and even activity permits, which would be required on high-use trails to reduce congestion and improve turnover.

Those site-specific strategies could be useful at places like Bowman and Kintla lakes in the North Fork, Sidder said, while the park may also consider expanding visitor-access opportunities along the Inside North Fork Road. A circulator shuttle between Two Medicine and East Glacier could help further relieve congestion, while a shuttle system is also being considered for the Swiftcurrent Valley next summer, when a pair of utility and road-repair projects will limit parking and trailhead access.

“We have learned a lot by piloting solutions, listening to feedback, and adapting on an annual basis. Now, we want to start the conversation of what a long-term plan looks like at the park,” Roemer said.

The public can visit the visitor use management project website to submit input. The site also provides a summary of key issues, project goals, the history of visitation, transportation and vehicle reservations in the park, and the initial ideas for the park’s long-term plan. 

Glacier officials will continue to host virtual and in-person public meetings to allow for public feedback.

Virtual Public Meetings 

The planning team will host another virtual presentation of the plan with a moderated question and answer time.

Dec. 16: Virtual meeting from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. Join by following the link at: https://parkplanning.nps.gov/MeetingNotices.cfm?projectID=118357. 

In-Person Public Meetings

The park planning team will host a drop-in style opportunity to speak with park staff about issues related to the plan. Please note, there will be no formal presentation or recorded public comment opportunities at these events.

Dec. 2: Open house from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. at the Residence Inn Downtown in Missoula.  

Dec. 3: Open house from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. at the KwaTaqNuk Resort & Casino in Polson. 

Dec. 4: Open house from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. at the Cedar Creek Lodge in Columbia Falls. 

Dec. 5: Open house from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. at Blackfeet Community College in Browning. 

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