If you hope to see Avalanche Creek at Glacier National Park this summer, you might need a ticket to travel the Going-to-the-Sun Road/Rebecca Latson file

A confluence of road construction and a renewed thirst for nature and national parks could lead to ticketed entry to the Going-to-the-Sun Road in Glacier National Park in Montana this summer. While no decision has been made yet, Glacier Superintendent Jeff Mow sounded like such an approach will be necessary to manage traffic trying to head up the Sun Road from West Glacier.

"What we saw last year was pent-up demand for travel to Western national parks, one, because travel overseas was very limited, (and two) the Canadian border has been closed for almost a year," Mow said last week during a phone call. With much the same scenario heading into this summer, the superintendent expects continued interest in the outdoors in general and visiting his park specifically.

"In two days it will be a year that the Canadian border has been closed," he said Thursday. "It's focused a lot of travel on national parks, and if our east side hadn't been closed last year, we think we would have been at record levels last summer. We weren't, but the activity levels that we did see in the park, in the parts of the park that was open, was right up there with record levels of activity on our trails and parking lots and the entrance gate activity."

That increased visitation last summer led at times to closure of the West Glacier park entrance because traffic was backing up onto U.S. 2, the main highway that runs past West Glacier and along the southern border of the park to East Glacier. With ongoing construction in and around the park scheduled this summer, and expectations that Glacier will be a much-desired destination again, Mow wants to avoid traffic backing up onto the highway.

Glacier's glorious scenery might have lured a record number of visitors last year if not for Covid restrictions/Rebecca Latson file

"We are looking at doing things very differently this year. We're having a lot of conversations with the community about potentially doing ticketed entry this summer at Glacier," he said. "Even though it was a thought we looked at last summer, to deal with some of those closures, we put it aside last fall."

But during the winter months the superintendent heard that airlines were adding flights into Kalispell, Montana, the western gateway to Glacier, more than "we had ever pre-Covid," he said.

"That's an indicator of the increased growth of new residents to the area, as well as the levels of visitation that we're expecting this year. Combine that with all the road construction, 40-minute delays just getting to the west entrance due to construction, the fact that we had so many closures of the west entrance last summer, and so if we have them again we're just backing people up into a construction zone. That's kind of the worst case scenario. So we're looking at doing ticketed entrances."

A plus this summer, though, will be access to Glacier through the eastern side of the park and the Blackfeet reservation. Last June the Blackfeet closed that access to prevent the spread of Covid from park visitors to the reservation. But since vaccines arrived earlier this year, the reservation has succeeded in inoculating most of its members, the superintendent said.

"Just yesterday the Blackfeet tribe voted to concur with our reopening of the east side of the park, so that's huge in terms of thinking how the park would operate (this summer)," said Mow. "They're feeling good about their situation, vaccination rates there, the Blackfeet tribe believes they are at 90 to 95 percent of eligible residents on the reservation have been vaccinated. For a vulnerable population, that gives them huge confidence in reopening the reservation for recreation."

Driving concerns last year among residents of the 1.5-million-acre reservation that is adjacent to the national park in northern Montana was that they have higher rates of cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and chronic respiratory disease than for state residents outside the reservation. Their rates of obesity are about 10 percent higher compared to other state residents, and the average lifespan is about 15 years shorter than for white Montanans, according to a Community Health Assessement conducted in 2017.

In short, tribal members are at a greater risk of developing complications from Covid-19 than the general population. Early last year the Blackfeet Nation lost Leland Ground, an elder and former councilman, to complications from Covid-19.

Something other than managing traffic that park staff likely will be more focused on this summer is watching for first-time visitors to a national park. 

"As we've seen with travel associated with the pandemic and the demand for outdoor recreation, we're seeing demographic audiences that have in some cases little or no experience being on trails or in the backcountry," Mow said. "The indicators of that are garbage, human waste, peope bringing dogs into the park. All those things that we actually haven't really had to talk about for a while."

"It's like Leave No Trace. We have to go back to the basics," he said. "It's great to have new audiences and it's great to have people discovering the outdoors, but boy, they need a little education to do it properly."