No answers, just concerns

Many changes have taken place on the North Fork in the 69 years I have been here. Probably the most profound change has been the North Fork Road. In the late 1940s and early ‘50s, the Inside Road in Glacier Park and the North Fork Road were nearly identical. Both were just barely better than the wagon roads built by the homesteaders and Flathead County.

By the end of World War II, plywood production boomed as the servicemen returned and new housing was in demand. This provided a demand for spruce logs. Then, the spruce bark beetle hit the North Fork and logging boomed.

As a result, logging income funded a rebuild of the North Fork Road in the mid 1950s to accommodate more than 100 logging trucks per day hauling logs to mills in the valley. This created a horrible dust cloud and the loggers paid for oiling the road to keep the dust down.

We all know what happened next. From harvesting over 100 million board feet per year, we now harvest about 20 million feet per year on the entire Flathead Forest. Reduced logging meant no more dust abatement on the North Fork Road, most mills have closed, and literally thousands of jobs disappeared.

Now it appears we are moving into a new era where tourism is the big industry. Unfortunately, many of the new jobs are low-paying and as tourism increases so does the possibility of loving our natural resources to death.

Take Glacier Park. Even in late September, there are lines at the Belton entrance. Never mind that the entrance is apparently managed to be as inefficient as any government agency. Parking at Logan Pass is a mess, getting a permit to camp is becoming more and more difficult and time consuming and still visitors keep increasing.

Best of all, the Park, rightfully, is not building more and bigger campgrounds to clutter the natural beauty along with parking lots and motels. It is no wonder more folks are going to Polebridge to enter the Park. Polebridge entries look to be up about 20 percent for the third year in a row.

All of that means more pressure on the National Forests and the North Fork River. Sooner, I believe, than later we will have to say enough is enough.

I can see the day when you have to pay to launch your boat or camp. Check out Big Creek campground and look ahead to the same thing everywhere.

Worse, in my mind, will be paying for a permit to float the river and having to plan what day a month in advance to just get a permit. Worse yet, have to enter a drawing in hopes of getting a permit.

More of the same could happen to fishing and hunting. Increased cost of licenses to pay for access or environmental concerns caused by too many people spreading too many noxious weeds?

I have no answers just concerns. Sometimes I think I’m getting old at a good time, but I’m still glad I’m younger than G. George Ostrom and can still envy his luck in picking his first wife.

Larry Wilson’s North Fork Views appears weekly in the Hungry Horse News.