EDITORIAL: America to NW Montana: Thumbs up

A record year for Glacier Park, the busiest year ever for Glacier Park International Airport and all-time record visitation at Montana State Parks.

That must mean Montana — particularly Northwest Montana — is pretty popular with the traveling public.

No doubt there are other record-setting numbers from last year, but these three pretty much sum up a banner year for tourism.

Glacier Park’s record year (which followed the previous busiest year in 2014) is particularly impressive when you consider the park’s visitor season was beset with some fiery and smoky challenges.

Not only did the Reynolds Creek Fire shut down Going-to-the-Sun Road in July, but then other fires in August contributed palls of smoke over the east side of Glacier.

Despite that, enough people flocked to Glacier to put it over the top for visitors.

A national campaign urged people to “find their park.” Evidently many of them did.

And more may be ahead: This year is the National Park Service 100th anniversary, which may well portend continued busy times in Glacier.

You can still be a winner

Whew, the pressure’s off.

None of us here at the Daily Inter Lake won the massive $1.5 billion Powerball jackpot, although it wasn’t for lack of trying. Of course no one in Montana won either, but three winning tickets were sold elsewhere, meaning that some people’s lives will be changed forever — for better and very possibly for worse.

For the rest of us, it’s life as usual... but there have been some changes. If you own a convenience store somewhere in a Powerball state, for instance, you probably enjoyed a surge in business over the last few weeks. Congratulations.

If you are a state government that is a Powerball partner, your coffers just got a bit fuller, and depending how you are using that revenue, the lives of your state’s citizens may have gotten a tad easier.

Maybe more importantly, a lot of us had the opportunity to think about our lives, who we are, and who we want to be, and to realize that money is just a small piece of the puzzle. Being a better person, or having a better life, doesn’t start with a billion dollars; it starts with a commitment to being a better person.

Dreaming big is important, but being a good person is much more so.