Smoke can't obscure park's beauty

Neither heat, nor smoke nor the obstacles of road construction, apparently, can keep visitors away from Glacier National Park.

Some impressive numbers were released this week from National Park Service statistics crunchers. Those numbers show that visitation to Glacier through July is up 11 percent at almost 1.2 million people.

For July alone, visitor numbers were up 5.7 percent over last year (and some places such as St. Mary were up a whopping 22 percent over last year).

The positive visitor numbers were in spite of several factors that could have dented tourism: A late opening of Going-to-the-Sun Road on July 1, the beginning of the long-term Sun Road reconstruction project, nearby fires that have sporadically clouded Glacier's skies with smoke, and even record hot weather during July.

Visitors apparently understood that Glacier Park was an oasis of recreation largely unaffected by the proliferation of massive fires burning all across Western Montana. And the high country of Glacier was a good place to get away from the oppressive heat at lower elevations.

Optimism springs eternal at the U.S. Mint.

At least, that is the obvious conclusion as the mint rolls out yet another version of the dollar coin. This time around it is the presidential history coin.

We suppose that those who are lucky enough to ever see one of the coins will have a chance to learn who the presidents were, when they served and in what order. That's no doubt a good thing, though we think you could make a case for teaching it in elementary school instead.

But the fundamental problem with the dollar coin is not that it isn't interesting enough. The Sacagawea coin was quite stimulating from a historical point of view, but you couldn't use it in a vending machine.

That, we submit, is the primary hindrance to a more general circulation of dollar coins. It's a shame vending machine operators don't make the necessary conversion because more and more things sold in vending machines are approaching a dollar in cost, or already exceed it.

Short of that, the main reason to purchase the new dollar coins will be to fill out coin collections. Not a bad reason, but hardly enough to ensure that the coins will find any more success than the unlamented Susan B. Anthony dollar.