Opinion: Backcountry thoughts: Glacier's system could use some work

Daylight savings time kinda marks the end of backcountry camping for me, at least until February or early March, when the days are rounding back into 11 hours or so and the snow is firmed up to where you can ski on it without sinking up to your hips.

Still, we might do a little if the weather is decent around Thanksgiving, mostly to photograph bighorn sheep in the rut.

But if the weather stinks you end up spending 15 hours of the day in a tent, which is no fun. Glacier has very few backcountry campgrounds where you can have a campfire and it’s a little tough to huddle around a cookstove and read a book.

Overall, I’d say it was a pretty good season out in the woods. I saw exactly one grizzly, a few black bears and a wolf.

Outside the Park we spent a lot of time in the Helena Lewis and Clark National Forest, either in the Bob Marshall Wilderness proper, or on the edges of it.

The most memorable was a trip along a gorgeous reef on the front, which was blooming with wildflowers. The backside of the reef, however, was a nightmare of jackstrawed trees over the trail.

Things seem to be getting worse in Glacier’s backcountry. I speak of human behavior, of course. We found garbage in pit toilets, macaroni floating in streams and one guy took a poop between my campsite and his in a campground that had a brand new, freshly dug pit toilet (this was summer 2023, but it seemed like something worth mentioning).

It is unpleasant, to say the least, to see an old man’s butt hanging out his pants first thing in the morning.

There were great people, too. In one camp I met this fella who talked pretty slowly and I thought he was another “eccentrics” you run into. But it turned out he’d hiked all the trails in Glacier, except for Porcupine Lookout; and most of them in Yellowstone as well. We had a nice conversation on a June evening that was windy and bitingly cold.

Of course July was too hot and for a couple weeks we didn’t do any backcountry trips at all, but August was pretty good and September and most of October were still too warm, but at least bearable.

I think the perfect day is one that occasionally comes in August that gets dark about 9 p.m. and light about 6 a.m., has a high temperature of 75 and a low of around 50.

You get one once in awhile and we came close a few times this summer.

Glacier’s backcountry permit system needs some work..The recreation.gov reservation system is convenient, but more than a few people get a reservation and never show up. On more than one occasion since the park went to Recreation,gov I’ve gotten to a camp that was supposed to be booked solid and was empty.

I guess I shouldn’t complain, since I’d rather camp in an empty campground than a full one, but it pains me to see a once-in-lifetime campground for most people empty because someone reserved it, then no-showed.

My initial theory was that people were reserving campsites just to get on the Going-to-the-Sun Road, bu this year folks didn’t need a reservation from the east side and I still had a very popular camp all to myself while a parade of other hikers went by. So I don’t know what’s going on, other than people just aren’t showing up, for whatever reason.

It also would be nice to get the mileage and elevation gain of a trip on the permit. The old system did that.

There was a lot of saber rattling from Montana politicians when it was reported by the Wall Street Journal that Booz Allen Hamilton, the firm that operates Recreation.gov for the Park Service under contract, was making about $17 million a year operating the site (through ubiquitous “service fees.”)

But it went nowhere. Have a good week.