Despite fires, businesses near Glacier Park said they had a good year

Despite wildfires and weeks of smoke, businesses that rely on Glacier Park tourist traffic said they had a good year, all things considered. A quick start to the summer didn’t hurt. June was warm and dry and the Going-to-the-Sun Road opened nearly a full month earlier than it did in 2014.

“It was an excellent year,” Glacier Highline Adventure Park owner Chris Fisher said. This was the first year the park, which offers a walk-in-the-treetops course in Coram just a few miles from Glacier, was open. Fisher said thousands of people went through the Park.

He said they’re already expanding the facility.

“We’re building a kid’s course beneath the main course,” he said. They’re also adding a climbing wall and a giant swing. He said the smoke from the fires certainly hurt business once it rolled in, but it wasn’t a deal breaker.

“We certainly couldn’t ask for more for our first season,” he said.

Corrie Holloway of Glacier Wilderness Guides and the Montana Raft Co. said the fires complicated their business, but it was a permit problem more than a people problem.

The company offers guided hikes in Glacier National Park as well as rafting on the Middle Fork of the Flathead. The hiking trips were complicated by fires because normal routes were closed down and the company had to try to get backcountry permits for other locations. Clients on guided hikes go about 8 miles a day, which means they can’t do long traverses to other camps if one is closed. But still, the impact was minimal, Holloway said.

“We weren’t that badly affected,” she said.

On the rafting end, low water didn’t make for much whitewater, but the company doesn’t market the trips as big whitewater adventures anyway, catering the trips as family excursions. With hot sunny days most of the summer, the river was a welcome refuge.

In fact, Holloway said they were still booking trips in September nearly everyday.

Monica Jungster, the owner of the Montana House in Apgar, also said it was a good summer. She’s no stranger to fires in Glacier — she witnessed the 1967 Garden Wall Fire when she was a teenager and has seen every fire in the Park since. The fires of 2003 were far worse, she noted. They closed down the key west entrance for weeks. The Reynolds Fire, by contrast, closed down the east entrance for about a week and people could still access the high country of Glacier even when the fire was burning.

She said the fires had some impact on business this year, but overall it was a good summer. The Reynolds Fire, she noted, will grow back. They all have, eventually, though it takes decades. She recalled the Garden Wall prior to the fire was a big conifer forest. Today, it is primarily birch, cottonwoods and small conifer trees.

“It takes 40 years,” for an area to grow back, she said.

She takes a realistic view, noting that fire is part of the landscape and other places are sure to burn in the future.

“It’s kind of an interesting place to live,” she said.