Five years after Glacier National Park first introduced a ticketed-entry system to handle ever-increasing summer crowds, the park plans on eliminating the at-times controversial system.
At least that’s what the superintendent said during a chamber of commerce meeting late last year. Since then, despite promises that details would be announced soon, the National Park Service has remained mum about what the busy summer season will look like in Glacier.
“There’s definitely some confusion,” said Sarah Lundstrum, Glacier program manager for the National Parks Conservation Association, an independent nonprofit that supports national parks.
The ticketed-entry system was first launched in 2021, when the park faced a perfect storm of rising visitation and summer construction projects both inside and just outside the park that threatened to wreak havoc. Former Superintendent Jeff Mow noted that it was actually the state of Montana that requested a ticketed system that year because of a major construction project on U.S. Highway 2 near West Glacier and the concern that traffic would back up for miles when the park became overloaded with visitors (which happened on multiple occasions the previous year, sometimes forcing park officials to close the entrance).
That first year, the ticket system was only used on the Going-to-the-Sun Road between West Glacier and St. Mary. In 2022 and 2023, the system was expanded to include other areas, like Polebridge, Many Glacier and Two Medicine. Since then, the system has been tweaked further, and last year, the park used a timed-entry model, where visitors who wanted to enter the west side of the park between 7 a.m. and 3 p.m. had to get a ticket and show up at a specific time.
“It has been a learning process, and every year has been a little bit different,” Mow, who retired from the Glacier in 2022, told Montana Free Press.
The reservations and ticketed-entry systems haven’t always been popular. In 2023, Montana Rep. Ryan Zinke called for changes to the system after meeting with local business owners who complained it was hurting tourism in the area because visitors were struggling to get tickets. But Mow said that as tweaks were made, the system became more popular as people grew accustomed to it and came to enjoy less congestion in the park.
But in December, during a Columbia Falls Chamber of Commerce meeting, current park Superintendent Dave Roemer said Glacier National Park intended to eliminate the ticketed-entry system in 2026. According to the Daily Inter Lake, Roemer said one issue with the timed system was that more people were driving to Logan Pass at night, which is not ideal for safety or for Glacier’s wildlife.
Roemer added that the park was considering instituting reservation systems for parking at Logan Pass, a common choke point, and for the Sun Road shuttles, which are popular with hikers.
But since Roemer made those comments in December, the National Park Service has said little about its plans for this summer. MTFP has reached out to a park spokesperson multiple times since December to request details on its plans for a ticketing system, but has received the same canned response each time.
“The National Park Service continuously reviews Glacier National Park’s pilot operation programs to determine adjustments for the following year,” the spokesperson wrote. “Visitor use data, gate counts, congestion monitoring, traffic operations, and feedback from the public and gateway communities help inform strategies the park uses to manage congestion, shuttles, parking, and visitor access. We will update the public once a decision for the 2026 season has been made.”
In previous years, Glacier Park announced its plans for the following summer as early as November or December.
Glacier isn’t the only park where there’s uncertainty surrounding the ticketed-entry system, or possible lack thereof. Multiple parks across the West have not announced whether they plan to use a ticket system. In the case of Mount Rainier National Park, it announced online that it wouldn’t use it, then backtracked, stating it hadn’t made a decision, according to SF Gate.
Cassidy Jones, senior visitation program manager for the NPCA, put much of the blame for the confusion around the ticketed-entry system on NPS officials in Washington, D.C., and the Trump administration.
“The administration is really putting parks in an impossible position, and the visitors are the ones who are going to suffer for not having information,” Jones told SF Gate.
Zak Anderson, executive director of Explore Whitefish and the Whitefish Convention & Visitors Bureau, told MTFP that he and other tourism officials are eager to communicate what the park plans this summer. He also emphasized that he believed Superintendent Roemer and other officials at Glacier were doing the best they could “despite a lack of communication coming from Washington.”
“We’re still waiting on the National Park Service, and I think that to a certain degree the park superintendents are waiting on Washington,” Anderson said.
