Cap traffic on Sun Road

Glacier National Park and more appropriately the National Park Service seems hell-bent on ruining the visitor experience on the Going-to-the-Sun Road. This historic and magnificent road no longer provides for a pleasant national park experience at the peak of the summer. It’s time the NPS set a daily or hourly cap on vehicle number in order to protect the road and park resources “unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.”

Every local knows that at the peak of the tourist season (the best time to visit Glacier) you’d be better off staying far away from the Sun Road. It’s a 50-mile traffic slugfest.

You’re lucky to get a parking place at Logan Pass. All the parking places and trails from Apgar to St. Marys are full and overflowing with people. The shuttles are full and wait times stretch into hours. You can’t escape the sight or sound of people along the spectacular Highline Trail.

Bottom line, visitor numbers along the corridor have degraded the visitor experience and park resources, and it’s going to get worse.

Enter the National Park Service’s proposal to fix the problem. The “Going-to-the-Sun Road Corridor Management Plan Environmental Assessment” proposes to shoe-horn more people into parking lots by “re-striping” and adding more parking places, paving the Avalanche Lake trailhead, and turning the Highline Trail into a one-way foot traffic lane, among other fixes. All with absolutely no assurance of funding.

While these and other proposals might cram in more people, and squeeze more cars into places like Logan Pass, the net effect will be to simply compress more people into places already seeing the impacts of too many people.

The proposed plan isn’t a plan at all. It’s a put-off-for-tomorrow-what should-be-decided-today excuse. Shame on the National Park Service.

With so many Americans concerned about government spending, this is one place where America can improve things by spending less. There’s a much less expensive solution than spending millions on new infrastructure and perennial management costs.

Put a cap on it! Glacier National Park has yet to determine the “carrying capacity” of the Sun Road corridor. That is, what’s the limit on number of cars and people that will restore the visitor experience, protect wildlife, and reverse the wear and tear on park resources?

It’s time the National Park Service addressed the core problem, and proposed a reasonable cap on the number of vesicles on an hourly or daily basis. Simple. And everyone will benefit.

Roger Sherman, Whitefish