Park's summer busiest in 15 years

The Daily Inter Lake

Glacier National Park just finished its busiest summer in 15 years, tallying 1,473,250 visitors through its entrance stations in June, July and August.

That was the highest summer visitor total since 1994, when 1,509,689 visitors entered the park during the peak season.

For the first eight months this year, Glacier has had 1,630,137 visitors - 11.5 percent more than the same period during 2008.

The big numbers came despite long-term reconstruction work on Going-to-the-Sun Road and partly because for several weekends the public could enter the park for free.

The August visitor count of 541,997 was 5.4 percent more than in the same month last year. The busiest month this summer was July, with 603,681 visitors entering the park, a 15 percent increase over the same month last year.

In June, there were 327,572 visitors.

The surge of visitors was reflected in busier campgrounds throughout Glacier.

Park officials have noticed a 12.6-percent increase in the number of overnight stays for the first eight months of the year. Tent camping in frontcountry campgrounds was up 9.6 percent.

Recreational-vehicle camping was up 23 percent (from 71,652 to 88,383) and backcountry overnight stays were up 56 percent (from 22,776 to 35,598) so far this year.

Glacier's busiest summer on record was 1983, when 1,673,811 people entered the park over the three-month period.

The park has revised the way it calculates visitors since then. For most of the last decade, visitor statistics for all national parks have been calculated by the Denver-based National Park Service Public Use Statistics Office, rather than by the individual parks.