Glacier visitation 20 percent ahead of last year
<p>Jerry Gamble, of Las Vegas, Nev., looks at a helicopter as he takes pictures on the Going-to-the-Sun Road just east of Logan Pass on Friday. (Aaric Bryan/Daily Inter Lake)</p>
Glacier National Park is still on pace to eclipse last year’s visitation record by about 20 percent, although October statistics indicated a leveling out of crowds once the park wrapped up its busiest summer in history.
The park officially broke its 2015 record of 2.3 million visitors in September, and is on track to welcome more than 2.8 million people by the year’s end.
Last month, 74,972 visitors entered the park — an above-average total, but far from the month’s record 107,925 visitors that came to Glacier in 2003. This year’s exceptional turnout included five individual-month records from May through September.
As is typical in October, most of last month’s visitors entered the park at the West Glacier entrance, where overall visitation is up 9.1 percent this year.