Glacier’s new superintendent hits the ground running

By CHRIS PETERSON

Hungry Horse News

The last time Glacier National Park superintendent David Roemer was in the park was back in 2003. He was part of a burned area emergency response team, mapping wildfires in Glacier.

It was a historic fire year and Roemer was cooped up in a basement everyday.

He managed to get up to Logan Pass — once — while he was here.

Fast forward 19 years later and he can get a much better look around. He even has an office with a window.

But like 2003, there’s still plenty of issues in the park. For example, when he moved here with his family from California, finding a home wasn’t easy, even at a superintendent’s salary and with equity in his California home.

He thought, “If I’m struggling to (buy a home), how is someone who is just starting out in their career? … It’s a big issue for our employees.”

The housing crunch and staffing woes have had an impact on the park this summer. The Avalanche Creek campground didn’t open this year due to lack of staff to run the large and popular camp.

In addition, Roemer said the park hasn’t had enough staff for entrance stations, which has had an impact on fee collection.

In the longterm, he said he’d like to explore possible solutions with other federal agencies like the Forest Service to possibly come up with additional employee housing for both agencies outside the park.

Building more housing inside Glacier is difficult, due to space constraints and other issues, like historic districts.

Roemer comes to Glacier from his most recent position as the deputy superintendent at Redwood National and State Parks. He also recently served in details as acting superintendent at Carlsbad Caverns National Park, at Redwood, and at Big Thicket National Preserve.

He has a master’s degree in environmental studies from the University of Montana.

He’s been at the helm of Glacier for about seven weeks now. He said that for the most part, Glacier’s reservation system for the Going-to-the-Sun Road and the North Fork has gone fairly well.

“Visitors that obtain passes are, for the most part, able to find parking,” he said. Though he also noted coveted spots at Logan Pass and other areas can still be hard to come by.

The park also is seeing a “balloon” effect, where people who can’t get on the Sun Road go somewhere else, like Two Medicine or Many Glacier.

The Many Glacier Road this summer typically closes for a few hours every day because the valley fills with visitors.

He said park managers were planning on submitting a survey to employees on how the system could be improved.

Would that mean reservations for Many Glacier or Two Medicine?

“I think everything’s on the table,” he said as the park looks to refine visitor use regulations over the offseason.

He noted there was a lot of overall dissatisfaction with recreation.gov by the public. The website is the portal to not only Sun Road reservations, it’s also the portal to get auto campground reservations in the park. Next year, it’s supposed to be the portal for backcountry campground reservations as well.

He said there’s ongoing discussions in the Park Service on how to improve the site. He said he knows his ranger and planning staff would have issues if the site simply gives backcountry users in Glacier a permit to camp, without any person-to-person education beforehand, like the park does now.

“Above me there will be a lot of discussion about how to make it better and more consistent among the national parks,” he said.

As far as staffing, he said the park could always use more rangers. He said he’s been impressed with how the staff at the Glacier really cares about the park and its resources.

On the subject of climate change, he sees the park as being both a place that can lead by example and teach people about the impacts of climate change.

On the subject of the Inside North Fork Road, he said right now most of the feedback he’s received favors keeping the middle section of the road — from Camas to Logging Creek — a hiker-biker experience, rather than reopening it to vehicle traffic.

He he also noted that once the park finishes its bridge projects — which include repairs to bridges on the road — they’ll likely go through a public scoping on process on future road use.

He noted the road is still maintained for vehicle use in the event of an emergency, like a wildfire.

He said he supports the Blackfeet effort to restore bison herds on the east side, which, presumably, would migrate back into the park.

Bison haven’t been in Glacier nearly 150 years, but they’re still a key piece of the park’s ecological puzzle.

Their return isn’t so much a park-led effort as it is a tribal effort, he noted.

“It aligns perfectly with the long-term public interest we should strive for everywhere,” he noted.

He has experience working closely with Native Americans at other parks. In Redwoods, he worked with the Yurok Tribe there to restore condors to that park along with a host of other conservation organizations.

Those projects are what he enjoys.

“Personally, it’s the most rewarding area to work in,” he said.