Glacier looks to have transportation plan done by 2026

Glacier National Park hopes to have a long-term transportation/visitation plan by winter 2026, park officials said during a virtual meeting with the public and stakeholders Thursday evening.

But beyond that, Park officials often deferred or simply didn’t answer specific questions about the plans for summer 2025. To be fair, some of the options are still being worked out, but other questions simply received a nod in agreement from the park that yes, there are problems.

Still, the park wants to have a concrete plan, rather than “pilot” plans it’s had since it first rolled out a reservation system in 2021.

“We’re getting out of the cycle of annual pilot plans,” superintendent David Roemer said.

He likened the process of a long-term plan to baking a cake.

“We’re looking at the cookbook right now,” he said.

Roemer said he met with Montana’s congressional delegation last summer to talk about the need for a better shuttle system.  Ideally, the park would have an internal system fed by an external system that could bring visitors to the park. Having said that, Roemer said the external system would likely have to turn a profit or at least break even.

Glacier will try out a circular shuttle system in Many Glacier this summer to drop folks off at trailheads and other areas, as there’s construction in the Swiftcurrent Valley, which trims off a fair amount of parking.

Facilities manager Jim Foster it will likely take about six shuttles, but he held off on releasing exact details on how it would work, as the park is still working out the logistics.

“It’s literally on the drawing board on how to develop this shuttle,” Foster noted. “We’re trying to make it as simple as possible.”

Glacier is also considering a similar system for Two Medicine, which would take four to eight more shuttles.

Right now the park has 37 shuttle buses total, with cost about $1.8 million a year. Glacier is working with business students from Carnegie Mellon University on surveys of local businesses to gauge how an external shuttle system might work.

As to the timed entry system being implemented this summer, the park didn’t have specifics on how it would work, other than to say people would still use Recreation.gov website and the blocks would show up when a person went to make a reservation.

But Glacier officials are seeing a fair number of no-shows, particularly when visitors make a reservation 120 days out. What that no-show rate is, exactly, park officials didn’t reveal, other than to say it’s being worked into the system. People can still get reservations for the west side the evening before, as they’re released at 7 p.m.

That system worked pretty well, Roemer noted, with most folks being able to get a reservation in the short advance.

“The ability to get a ticket was not difficult,” he said.

Still, Glacier is trying the timed entry to try to even the flow of visitors and avoid long lines that extend out of the park and up Highway 2 at the west entrance on a busy morning.

Timed entry up the North Fork would also ease parking problems at Bowman and Kintla Lakes.

They also extended the reservation system through most of September because Glacier is seeing a surge of visitors in that month. In turn, it trimmed the reservation requirement in the spring to mid-June, as the Going-to-the-Sun Road isn’t open over the pass most years anyway.

Park officials also floated some other ideas, like a shuttle requirement for hikers in the alpine areas, permits to hike certain trails and reservations for some parking lots, like Logan Pass.

An overarching theme, which often gets overlooked in these conversations, is protection of the resources, like the landscape and wildlife, the very things people come to see in the first place. That is of paramount importance, Glacier officials noted and a charge of the Organic Act, the legislation that created the Park Service in 1916, which reads:

“The (Park) Service thus established shall promote and regulate the use of the Federal areas known as national parks, monuments, and reservations hereinafter specified by such means and measures as conform to the fundamental purposes of the said parks, monuments, and reservations, which purpose is to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.”