50,000 people hiked the Hidden Lake Trail last year, in July alone

Glacier National Park’s high country trails are seeing tens of thousands of visitors a month, according to data presented from a group of researchers during talk last week.

While recently released figures show that visitation is slightly down in the park this summer as compared to 2017, the group’s studies show that visitation in park has risen significantly over the life of the park, and there doesn’t appear to be an end in sight.

Citing a graph of steep peaks and valleys showing park visitation over the seasons, Clemson researcher Wayne Freimund, who has been studying the park since the mid 1990s, said summer continues to be the most popular time in Glacier.

“I consider this graph to be the EKG of the park, and the blood pressure seems to be rising,” he said. “There does seem to be a little bit a spreading of the seasons, we are seeing a little more visitation in May and June and in September and October, but the lion’s share of the big increases are still happening in July and August.”

According to Freimund, the first comprehensive trail study was done in the park in 1988 and found that Avalanche Lake received roughly 30,000 visitors annually while the park as a whole had 1.8 million come through its gates. Fast forward to 2017, when the park saw 3.3 million visitors, and Avalanche Lake Trail was traveled by 42,000 hikers in the month of July alone.

Since the group began monitoring parking lots and trails in 2005, it has seen a steady increase in traffic — an increase that began to skyrocket in 2012.

“We hovered around that 1.8 million number for a while, then in 2012, things started ramping up,” Freimund said. “A lot of things were happening over time that we weren’t really paying attention to and once we started putting these trail and road counters up, it became explicit that there is a lot of change happening right before our eyes.”

The group monitored 20 trails in 2017 and the numbers were staggering. In the month of July, Hidden Lake Trail saw 50,000 visitors, Avalanche Lake Trail 42,000, Highline Trail 30,000 and Iceberg Lake Trail had 20,000 visitors.

While those numbers are high, Freimund says the park could see even higher figures.

“As high as those numbers look, the average day at Hidden Lake was 1,600 people, but the maximum day was over 2,000. Somehow, we got 400 more people up that trail on one day, so you could conceivably put that many up there every day. If the pressures that are driving more people to Glacier continue, we probably will see even higher numbers,” he said. “ We are seeing a bit of a decrease this summer so far, so maybe we are seeing a bit of a lag coming off the Find Your Park campaign or maybe gas prices are keeping some people away, but when you look at that graph, generally when those visitation numbers surge up, they don’t go back down.”

According to University of Montana researcher Douglas Dalenberg, the trails are not the only places seeing the strain of increased visitation. Parking lots are filling up faster than ever. According to his observations, the Logan Pass parking was full by roughly 9:30 a.m. in 2017, almost two hours earlier than it was in 2013. There were 20 days when the parking lot had to be closed between 8 and 9 a.m. Of the 65 days monitored at Logan Pass in 2017, there were parking lot closures on 53 days.

“You can see the impact and increased stressed on management because the closures mean there is a lot of work to be done,” Dalenberg said.

In another study, the Crown of the Continent Research Learning Center is partnering with Glacier National Park and the Forest Service to gather data on river usage on all three forks of the Flathead River in the area as the groups begin work drafting a new Comprehensive River Management Plan to guide their stewardship of the river in coming decades.

While only preliminary numbers are in from last summer’s pilot monitoring, researcher Iree Wheeler says that the Flathead saw as many as 350 vessels per day between July and August of 2017. Using trail cameras placed at 12 locations across the three rivers, the group aims to record even more detailed information this summer.

“We are hoping to have rich, detailed information to help in the formation of the new river management plan,” Wheeler said. “It is an ongoing process, but it is pretty exciting.”

So what is causing this spike in visitation? Neither the researchers nor the park have an answer.

“As Glacier National Park, we do zero marketing. We really don’t market the park other than the world of social media. That’s a new dynamic that has emerged over the past few years that really has taken over what any single entity could do,” Park Superintendent Jeff Mow said. “There’s very much a conscious effort by some entities, not all, to not even talk about Glacier in the summer months, so we are not sure why visitation has risen so much.”

“The craziness we are seeing here is happening throughout the Rocky Mountain parks. We are not exactly sure why. We know that overall, the numbers are generally going to go up. I don’t see any reason to believe this 50-year pattern of growth is going to change,” Freimund added. “I think the answer to all of this is going to be in some sort of hybridization of public transit and visitor management plans. A lot of smart people are working hard on this.”