New St. Mary radio tower OK'd

A new CenturyLink radio tower has been approved for the St. Mary area of Glacier National Park.

The microwave tower and antenna were approved by National Park Service Intermountain Regional Director John Wessels.

The replacement tower will not be a cell tower and will not provide cell service; there are no cell towers in the park, according to a news release from Glacier.

The tower will upgrade existing infrastructure and provide digital subscriber line broadband Internet service to the greater St. Mary area as part of a Montana Public Service Commission requirement mandating CenturyLink to upgrade communications capabilities at its rural exchanges.

The tower also will support National Park Service radio communications equipment.

Currently, the greater St. Mary area is limited to cellular modem and satellite technologies for Internet services.

CenturyLink’s tower must be located inside the park because the new system will need to be hard-wired to the existing CenturyLink equipment building, which has been in the St. Mary developed area since 1955.

Due to concerns raised by park management about additional communications infrastructure within the park, and to avoid placing an additional tower in the Divide Creek flood plain, the new tower will replace the existing National Park Service radio tower.

 CenturyLink will build and operate the tower. It will be an approximately 80-foot tall, three-legged, steel lattice structure with a 6-foot-diameter microwave dish. Construction will take approximately three weeks.

The decision document is available online at http://parkplanning.nps.gov/StMaryTowerFONSI.