Mow lends more clarity to Sun Road resos

Glacier National Park superintendent Jeff Mow last week further clarified some of the details of a proposed ticketed entry system for the Going-to-the-Sun Road corridor this summer in a Zoom meeting with the public last week.

Glacier staff expects to have a final decision in the coming days, as the park could see a double whammy this summer — record visitation coupled with U.S. Highway 2 pavement work.

It could add up to large traffic jams that Glacier is trying to avoid.

As such, the Park Service is looking to implement a ticketed entry system whereby 70% of the tickets to drive the Sun Road for a week would be available up to 60 days in advance

and the other 30% would be available two days in advance.

Hikers and bikers would not need a ticket, neither would park inholders, people with a campground reservation or lodge reservation, and Native Americans.

Folks arriving before 6 a.m. would not need a ticket and after 5 p.m. they would not need a ticket.

All other park roads and entrances would not require a ticket.

Tickets would cost $2 in addition to the regular entrance fees.

The proposal would require tickets from Memorial Day weekend through Labor Day. It would not extend into next season — at least not at this point. Further analysis this fall would determine whether the Park would continue the system. The recently released Sun Road Corridor Management plan does allow for it, however, after the park does further analysis.

The reasoning for the reservation system is the Park is becoming overcrowded.

Visitation at Glacier National Park grew 40 percent between 2015 and 2017. In July 2017, visitation hit more than 1 million in a single month. Total visitation that year was 3.3 million, the highest on record. In 2019, Glacier recorded the second highest year for visitation with just over 3 million visitors.

At its peak, the Sun Road sees about 5,000 vehicles daily.

Mow said Glacier plans on setting up staff and stops in Columbia Heights and other locations to

warn traffic ahead of time that if they don’t have a ticket, they can’t get on the Sun Road at peak hours.

They’ll work with the Montana Department of Transportation on using the large informational signs along the highway as well.

Mow said the park wasn’t trying to keep people from entering the park, it just needed to round off the spikes in visitation, which typically happen from late morning to early afternoon everyday in July. Visitation typically drops a bit in August.

He couldn’t, however, say how many tickets would actually be available on any given day. That number would depend on whether the road was open to Logan Pass, or not.

When it’s open to the pass, the Sun Road is a through-route. But when it’s closed, the west side becomes a bottleneck at Avalanche Creek.

Mow also indicated that the free shuttle service could also go to a reservation

system. Previously he said it would likely operate at 50% capacity.

Mow said he’d like to see the park do a more integrated transit system, working with other transit systems outside the park.

The meeting was well attended, with nearly 400 participants.

Glacier is already seeing robust visitation numbers, as people choose domestic travel due to the pandemic.

January visitation was up 70%, December up 86.3% and November was up 46.8%.

The actual number of people is fairly low, however. November was up about 9,000 more visitors; December about 13,000 and January about 7,000.

February, which was cold, was actually down 5% over last year, seeing about 900 less people.