Indianz.Com > News > Montana Free Press: Popular national park deals with COVID-19 challenges
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‘A summer like no other’
While visitation is down, Glacier National Park faced unprecedented gridlock after the Blackfeet Nation closed the park’s eastern boundary. Officials say the season offers lessons for the future.
Monday, September 21, 2020
Montana Free Press
While summer officially starts on June 20, most people in northwest Montana would say it doesn’t really begin until Glacier National Park’s Going-to-the-Sun Road is open. When the 50-mile alpine highway through the park did finally open on the morning of July 13,
the parking lot at Logan Pass was nearly full at 5:30 a.m., a stark sign that this was not going to be a normal summer in the beloved national park.
Managing a national park that attracts more than 3 million people annually from around the world is never an easy task, and it was even harder during a global pandemic that has upended normal life and
sparked renewed interest in outdoor recreation, said Superintendent Jeff Mow.
“This has been a summer like no other, and I hope it stays that way,” Mow said, adding that the summer of 2020 could provide lessons for the future as the park faces ever-increasing visitation.
Glacier
closed in late March
as COVID-19 cases began to increase in Montana and nationwide.
When it reopened to the public on June 8, one of Mow’s top priorities was to make sure the Sun Road, a major tourism draw, was plowed and open to traffic. But the Blackfeet Nation threw a curveball at that plan in late June when
it announced it would close its border to the park
for the remainder of the summer, cutting off access to popular areas like Many Glacier and Two Medicine Valley, essentially closing half the park.
Mow said the tribe’s decision to close the eastern border was a “surprise.” Park staff had to change gears and figure out how to do something that had never been done before: open and operate the Sun Road from only one end. On July 13, the road opened from West Glacier to Rising Sun (about 6 miles west of the eastern boundary), where cars were turned around. Adding to the challenge of keeping traffic moving through the park was the fact that there were no public shuttles or Red Bus tours, both of which were canceled due to the impossibility of keeping people socially distant on those vehicles. In July and August, it wasn’t unusual for park officials to restrict access to the Sun Road and other areas as tens of thousands of people descended on a partially closed park. There was only one campground open in the entire park during those two months — Fish Creek Campground, with 178 campsites — and all visitor centers were closed.
While the travel industry as a whole has taken a hit from COVID-19, anecdotal evidence suggests that many people opted to take road trips in 2020 to visit outdoor destinations they deemed relatively safer during a pandemic. A University of Georgia study reported a surge in RV sales and rentals in 2020. Not long after the Sun Road opened, park officials considered utilizing emergency powers granted by the Interior Department to implement a ticketed entry system. Mow ultimately decided against using the system to limit the number of cars in the park because he said it would be hard to implement with the season already in full swing (although he admits such a system would likely have prevented hundreds if not thousands of visitors being turned away at the gate over Labor Day weekend, because they would have known ahead of time whether they could get in). In July, traditionally the park’s busiest month, 453,977 people visited Glacier, down 48.4% from the same month in 2019, according to data from the National Park Service. In August, the first full month the Sun Road was open, visitation was down 40.5% from the same month a year earlier. But those numbers don’t tell the full story. In August, 365,352 people passed through the park’s western entrance in West Glacier, down just 0.2% from the previous year. A little farther north, at the often-overlooked Camas entrance along the North Fork of the Flathead River, 43,842 people entered the park, a 46.7% increase over the previous August. And at the Polebridge entrance, visitation was up 23.4%. “We were really busy, there’s no doubt about it,” said Will Hammerquist, owner of the Polebridge Mercantile. “Having the east side of the park closed was a different dynamic.”Tourism-dependent businesses say their location on the Blackfeet Nation makes them uniquely vulnerable to the economic impacts of the #Coronavirus. They are asking the state of #Montana for assistance. #COVID19 https://t.co/3WweGhkSos
— indianz.com (@indianz) August 19, 2020
Mow said the experiences of 2020 will undoubtedly guide park managers’ decisions in coming years, especially as visitation rebounds. One thing he thinks might help is improved communication between park officials and visitors about acceptable behavior in the park and what roads and parking lots are open or closed at any given time. The latter is particularly challenging because there is limited cell service in the park, but Mow thinks there are creative solutions to be considered. The park is also looking at how it manages the Going-to-the-Sun Road. In 2019, it released a long-awaited corridor management plan that called for permitted parking and expanded shuttle service, among other changes. The park is still considering how it would implement the plan, and lessons from 2020 will likely color those conversations. But ultimately, Mow said, the problems posed by increased visitation in the park and the region as a whole can’t be solved entirely by park managers. “How to deal with these big crowds is an issue that is bigger than the park itself,” he said. “The Flathead Valley and the surrounding areas need to help respond to this.”“It’s not a risk worth taking. It’s lives versus dollars”: The Blackfeet Nation will keep the eastern entrances to the popular Glacier National Park closed amid rising numbers of #COVID19 cases in #Montana. @GlacierNPS #Coronavirus https://t.co/maMvoJYKSK
— indianz.com (@indianz) July 1, 2020
Justin Franz is a freelance writer, photographer and editor based in Whitefish. Originally from Maine, he is a graduate of the University of Montana’s School of Journalism and worked for the Flathead Beacon for nine years. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, Seattle Times and New York Times. Find him at justinfranz.com or follow him on Twitter @jfranz88.
Note: This story originally appeared on Montana Free Press. It is published under a Creative Commons license.
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