Record crowds flock to state parks

It’s shaping up to be another record-breaking year for Montana’s state parks, and the six park units along the shores of Flathead Lake are no exception.

Dave Landstrom, the parks manager for Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks Region One, said visitation to Flathead Lake State Park during the first half of 2016 was up about 6 percent from the same time last year, with campgrounds and parking lots filling up at an unprecedented rate.

That’s on pace to once again break the park’s all-time visitor record set by the 281,000 people who came to Flathead Lake State Park last year.

“We haven’t experienced a reduction in visitation in a quite some time,” Landstrom said. “It’s been a steady increase. ... The challenge is just maintaining a quality visitor experience and keeping the facilities and campgrounds well maintained.”

Flathead Lake State Park has the second-highest level of use in the state park system, although it is managed as a collective of six separate park units: Wayfarers, West Shore, Big Arm, Yellow Bay, Finley Point and Wild Horse Island.

The trend is consistent across the state park system, which announced last week that the first six months of this year had already seen 1.3 million visitors to Montana’s 55 state parks — a 23 percent increase over 2015’s record crowds.

Landstrom said the increased visitation to Northwest Montana’s state parks is especially notable given the night-and-day contrast between the hot, sunny start to last year’s summer and the colder, windy weather that lingered into July this year.

Even on weekdays, Flathead Lake State Park’s campgrounds are averaging 90 to 95 percent full while parking lots have been routinely filling up by midday. A mild winter also helped boost day use at the beginning of the year, Landstrom said, with far more fishing and day use than normal.

Weather fluctuations aside, the annual increases in state park visitation have remained consistent in recent years, although most of the attention has focused on the parallel trend in Glacier and Yellowstone national parks.

And as with the National Park Service, Montana’s parks are struggling to keep up with the steady increases in demand as more people discover the Treasure State each year.

“An increase in visitation doesn’t necessarily come with an increase in manpower, so we’re stretching our staff pretty thin and we rely a lot more heavily on volunteers,” Landstrom said.

The state budget provides virtually no funding to Montana’s parks, which instead operate on a budget derived mostly from user fees and federal grants. July marked the start of a new fiscal year for the agency, the first in which it has begun phasing in a funding formula tied more closely to visitor use.

Flathead Lake State Park is among the four highest-priority state parks under the new budget system, and while its only boost in resources this year was 10 hours per week for staff, Landstrom said he’s lucky to have even that modest increase.

“That’s how powerful that is to us, the manpower that we break down into hours,” Landstrom said. “We’re sucking up those hours when they come and putting them on the ground as soon as we can.”

Along with infrastructure, he said additional staff is the number one need for Flathead Lake and the region’s other parks.

Flathead Lake State Park Manager Amy Grout oversees a skeletal staff to manage the six units scattered around the lake. Along with a park ranger and a maintenance person, each unit has just two employees responsible for handling all the day-to-day operations in the park while answering questions and helping the thousands of visitors entering the gates.

“On Wayfarers on any given hot, sunny day, there’s maybe three people in the park to manage traffic, pick up trash, keep restrooms clean and serve visitors, and they are hopping from dawn ’til dark,” Landstrom said.

He added, “We’re running hard, for sure. Thank God we love the work.”

Reporter Sam Wilson can be reached at 758-4407 or by email at swilson@dailyinterlake.com.