Which way West Glacier?

When it comes to a vision for West Glacier, many folks endorse preserving the landscape and way of life that makes the community one of the most special places on the planet. They realize just how lucky they are to live in the Crown of the Continent and they want to keep it a special place.

To that end, the Glacier Park Gateway Project is an effort to do some pro-active planning for unincorporated town and surrounding neighborhoods as visitation to Glacier National Park has skyrocketed by 40 percent in the past eight years and is now hovering at or near 3 million annually.

That’s the population of Chicago, noted organizer Mary T. McClelland. McClelland and Sarah Lundstrom of The National Park Conservation Association successfully acquired a technical assistance grant from the Rivers, Trails, and Conservation Assistance program, the community assistance branch of the National Park Service, to create a plan for the town.

Led by Park Service landscape architect Patsy McEntee, two meetings were held last week to gauge public sentiment to the future of West Glacier, as visitation to the park could surge even further in the coming years, putting West Glacier at the epicenter of it all. One meeting was in Kalispell. One in West Glacier.

In Kalispell, a longtime West Glacier businessman warned that they should be thinking about 10 million visitors annually — a big number perhaps, but as the world human population blooms, not so entirely unrealistic.

At the meeting in Kalispell, most folks who attended didn’t actually live in West Glacier, but they did visit Glacier Park. Ideas at the Kalispell meeting tended to be more exploitive. For example, one individual touted a trolley service that would bring people to the Park. But at the West Glacier meeting, while folks thought public transportation was important, simply dropping trolley-loads of people off in places that weren’t designed to handle them was untenable.

Another man in Kalispell said he loved West Glacier and wanted to preserve it, but then in almost the same breath thought it should have an amphitheater so people could listen to live music. Others wanted businesses that were open all year long, even though in the past 20 years, nearly every attempt to do just that has failed.

West Glacier is a quiet place in winter, and residents said they wanted to keep it that way.

“We love September,” one resident remarked at the West Glacier meeting. September is the month when tourist traffic typically dies down.

The Kalispell meeting in general tended to go sideways at times, with suggestions that were all over the place and a conversation that was often dominated by just two or three people — one of which admitted he didn’t even have a driver’s license.

The meeting in West Glacier, which held the day after, was far more productive. Folks noted that there currently are some real problems.

For one, there isn’t enough housing for all the employees that work in town during the summer. Many workers are foreign nationals and they resort to living in campgrounds all summer, sleeping in tents.

Year-round rentals are also hard to come by, because most rentals are vacation rentals, and don’t rent to employees.

West Glacier residents also noted that there’s a distressing disconnect between the residents and the county — projects aren’t known about publicly until they’re already in the planning pipeline. Sometimes, there’s no notification at all.

For example, one resident said, they didn’t know a miniature golf course was going into town until the trees started to come down.

County planning director Mark Mussman, who attended the meetings, suggested that changes could be made to the Canyon Area Land Use Regulations. And that’s where at least some of this effort appears to be heading. CALURS is the governing document that regulates land use in the region, but it was written in the early 1990s and is in need of updating.

“We need to honor the vision of the CALURS plan,” said one resident. “Revisit it and improve it.”

To that end, Mussman encouraged people to attend Middle Canyon Land Use Advisory Committee meetings, which are usually held at the Tuesday of the month and are posted on the county’s planning website.

There was also a strong interest in preserving the historic structures in town and there’s an ongoing effort to write an updated history of West Glacier as well.

Climate change was also a topic of discussion at the West Glacier meeting. Since 2003, several large wildfires have impacted the area, including huge fires in 2017 and 2018.

Not only to fires impact the quality of life, they impact the flora and fauna, residents noted.

West Glacier is on the forefront of climate change, and creating a sustainable community that embraced recycling and leave no trace principles was paramount, folks said.

Residents, for example, don’t want street lights and amusement parks and tacky shops. They want dark skies where they can look up and see a billion stars. They want to hike simple trails, many of which are still quiet, despite the bustle on nearby streets.

Other suggestions were simple, but would make a long-term difference.

One woman suggested replanting some of the birch trees along the Going-to-the-Sun Road in town. The existing trees are old as they’ve died, they haven’t been replaced.

It’s details like that, and dozens more, that make West Glacier a special place, they said.

McEntee said the ideas generated from the meetings and meeting with other stakeholders, will be crafted into a more formal plan, with another round of meetings in June.

The hope is to have a final vision plan completed by this fall, she said. The groups will also look at possible funding sources for some of the ideas as well.