EDITORIAL: Fires don't diminish Glacier allure

It was a mind-boggling spectacle Tuesday as a monstrous smoke plume rose high in the sky from the Thompson Fire in Glacier National Park.

The fire’s furious expansion grew the fire to more than 11,000 acres and the impressive pyrocumulus cloud rose to an altitude of 40,000 feet.

Observers might have thought that all Glacier Park was on fire, but that was not the case.

In fact, the fire — while massive — covers barely 1 percent of Glacier’s million-acre expanse.

And it’s burning in a pretty remote area of the park that receives relatively few visitors compared to more popular areas served by roads and denser concentrations of trails.

Those popular areas — and plenty of trails — are still very much open for people to enjoy.

Even the east-side section of Going-to-the-Sun Road that a few weeks ago was lined with fire is open to travelers.

Fire closures, to be sure, have affected several trails in Glacier Park, but the vast majority of the park’s 734 miles of footpaths still are open for hikers.

One way to look at it is that watching the Thompson Fire burn is just one more tourist attraction for Glacier.

Soaring state tourism

Montana’s stunning outdoors has also been instrumental in the growing popularity of state parks this year.

Through June, visitation was up 21 percent over the same period in 2014. More than 1 million people had entered the parks during the first half of the year.

The growth this year follows visitation records for each of the preceding three years as well. Clearly, Montana’s outdoors is a magnet for tourism in a big way.

In Northwest Montana, a lot of the most popular state parks are those located on Flathead Lake. District manager Amy Grout said that the increased park usage has been quite noticeable.

“We’ve had weekends where our day-use parking area was so full that people had to park outside and walk in. I can’t remember that happening before.”

That might mean a little inconvenience when we want to have a picnic or go swimming, but the boost for the local economy is important to all of us.