Burgeoning tourism, employee housing among Glacier's 2022 challenges

Editor’s note: This is the third in a series of stories that look ahead to what’s on tap for Flathead County in 2022, including local government, transportation, entertainment, Glacier Park, education, nonprofits, and fish and game issues.

With annual visitation numbers approaching record levels in the final weeks of 2021, retiring Glacier National Park Superintendent Jeff Mow is certain of one thing — the future is uncertain.

With only days remaining on the job, Mow took a few moments last week to look forward to what challenges the Crown of the Continent will be facing entering 2022, including the possibility of many employees returning to the park after nearly two years working mostly from home.

“The Department of the Interior has been hesitant to call what comes next as a ‘return to work,’ but that’s what it is. There are very few people in the offices these days as we continue what I would call tele-working,” Mow said. “With Covid being what it is and how we are doing business these days, we know we are not going back to the way it used to be. We’ve been doing everything over the computer for the past two years. If we brought everyone back into their offices today, we would collapse our IT system. We wouldn’t have the bandwidth to support all of the online meetings.”

While a return to work would be a welcome development for the understaffed park, such a move would bring problems of its own along with it, none more troublesome than the prospect of bringing in seasonal workers to an already overtaxed housing market.

“There are so many things that are out of balance right now because of Covid. Housing is a huge issue for our seasonal workforce right now and we are very much a seasonal park. We are still not sure how we are going to overcome that issue,” Mow said. “We are used to seeing a list hundreds of names long for our seasonal positions, now they tend to only be dozens of names long. We are going to have to be part of the evolution of housing in the area. We will not have much of a choice.”

WHILE THE park has been dealing with staffing issues, visitation has continued at record or near-record levels in 2021, including smashing the 2016 September record of 482,000 visitors with 710,661 this year and a new record of just under 156,000 in October.

As of Nov. 1, the park’s visitation in 2021 sat at 3.22 million, a 96% increase over a Covid-affected 2020 and on pace to break the all-time record of 3.3 million set in 2017.

“Covid has already forced us to do things differently. We haven’t done guided hikes or walking tours or evening programs the same as we have in the past. We have some campgrounds in the park that have not been open in more than two years and we are still breaking visitation records,” Mow said. “Even before the pandemic, outdoor recreation was on the rise and was beginning to overwhelm some of our public lands. Glacier, because it is just so visually stunning, really drew a lot of people and will continue to do so.”

In an effort to combat overcrowding in the park, Glacier instituted a ticketed entry system for the Going to the Sun Road for the first time in 2021, drawing mixed reviews from local residents and businesses but effectively curtailing the number of visitors on the road during the busy summer season.

While the ticketed entry system forced the park to turn more than 300,000 visitors away from the Going to the Sun Road in 2021, Mow says the decision allowed visitors with tickets to enjoy a park experience more like those in years before overcrowding left the corridor’s parking lots perpetually full.

“The ticketed entry system has allowed us to provide an experience more like it was five years ago without the giant crowds on the Going-to-the-Sun Road,” Mow said. “Even so, we are still on the cusp of another record-breaking year for visitation to the park. That’s kind of wild to think about.”

With visitation numbers expected to continue to rise in 2022, the park has plans to not only bring back the ticketed entry system, but also expand it to include the Polebridge entrance to the park.

Through Nov. 1 of 2021, the park had seen visitation to Polebridge up nearly 10,000 over 2020 with an increase of more than 20,000 people going through Camas.

Tickets will be required from May 27 through Sept. 11, 2022, with Sun Road tickets being valid for three days while Polebridge tickets are good for one day. A full week-long ticket to drive the Sun Road will not be available.

“Hopefully, we have learned to do some things differently to correct for some of the unanticipated things we saw with the ticketed entry system last year,” Mow said.

THE EXPANDED ticketed entry system will not be the only change visitors will see in 2022. The park has also installed a new entrance station on the Camas Road, just north of Fish Creek Road, that will have visitors pay when using the Camas Road to reach Polebridge for the first time in nearly 20 years.

Visitors will also have to contend with continued efforts to maintain and upgrade the park’s infrastructure, including a project to rehabilitate up to a dozen bridges and even a project to replace the bridge over North McDonald Creek, which will begin in the spring.

Other changes park visitors will see in 2022 include the possible return of bison to the Glacier National Park ecosystem as the Buffalo Program of the Blackfeet Nation has plans within a year or so to release a herd of at least 75 or 85 bison to land in the Chief Mountain area of the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, with freedom to wander onto their native land, now Glacier National Park.

Visitors could also see a reduction in number of sightseeing aircraft over the park as the park and the Federal Aviation Administration continue to work on a proposed Air Tour Management Plan would effectively cap the number of permitted flights over the park at current levels, enable the park to set no-fly periods and better define acceptable routes for chartered planes and helicopters. The proposed plan would eventually phase out all sightseeing aircraft over the park, in accordance with the National Parks Air Tour Management Act of 2000, which aims to reduce noise and impacts to wildlife from sightseeing tours.

OTHER PROJECTS include the possibility of improved cell phone coverage inside the park as well as a number of scientific studies being conducted in collaboration with the Glacier Park Conservancy.

In addition to the new projects being taken on by the park in 2022, Mow says there is also continued dedication to projects and concerns that the park works on every year.

“In the eight years I have been here, I would say the wildfire has been the most dominant form of climate change we have seen in this park. We always have to be prepared for it,” Mow said. “We also focus a lot on the issues of social equity and working with the indiginous tribes in the area. I think Glacier has really been on the leading edge of that. We have some great working relationships that we have built that we need to continue cultivating.”

In addition to all of these changes, there is yet another issue facing the park in 2022: who will replace Mow as the permanent superintendent after his retirement at the first of the year?

The National Park Service announced recently that Kate Hammond will be stepping into the interim position beginning in January as the park looks for a permanent superintendent. With Pete Webster serving as the acting superintendent for eight months of 2021 while Mow fulfilled a detail as acting director for the Alaska region of the National Park Service, the park could see as many as four people having filled the superintendent’s position in a 12-month period once the permanent replacement is named.

“I won’t call next year a return to normal, but things will eventually settle down. We will just have to see what that is going to look like. If things don’t start to return to normal, we will just have to adapt to face that challenge, just as we have always done,” Mow said.

Mow said that, as always, there will be changes in the park this year, but he trusts that any changes will be made in the best interests of everyone.

“It’s all an ongoing process of learning what works and what doesn’t. We have to recognize that we might do something and make mistakes. We have to learn when to not do things again and when to do them differently,” he said. “What we are trying to do here is risk management. We are trying to figure out how to do the right thing, knowing full well that we don’t have infinite amounts of money, infinite budget or infinite staffing. We have to prioritize and realize there are some things we do that will have risk involved. We just have to juggle the resources we have and do the best we can.”

Reporter Jeremy Weber may be reached at 406-758-4446 or jweber@dailyinterlake.com.