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Glacier Park: The next century - Visitors, infrastructure needs rise while funding plateaus

By MICHAEL JAMISON

The Missoulian

August 19, 2008

WEST GLACIER - The trend lines look like graph-paper mountain ranges, high peaks crashing against deep valleys, all charting a rugged and difficult future.

Climbing Glacier National Park's steep statistical slopes offers panoramic views of what's going up - visitation, what's going down - structural maintenance, and what's leveled off on a wide and endless plateau - annual funding.

It is a fiscal landscape park managers hike into with considerable trepidation, here on the eve of Glacier's second century.

“We don't really have a lot of wiggle room in terms of annual budget,” said Lisa Towery, chief of administration. “I don't even know what 2009 will hold.”

This is rocky terrain. Visitor numbers chart sharply upward, as does the cost of doing business. Budget numbers, however, are flat as the wind-scoured eastern plains that stretch away from park heights in evening shadow.

“We've fared relatively well, in comparison to other agencies and departments,” Towery said, “but I wouldn't call our budgets robust.”

Her predecessor, Gary Brandow, was considerably less diplomatic in the months leading to his retirement. As recently as summer 2006, Brandow was using words such as “bankrupt” to describe the park's fiscal future.

After 40 years in the National Park Service, 30 of those in Glacier, Brandow estimated that the park's annual budget - about $13 million - was shortchanged by a full $7 million a year, putting the pinch on everything from backcountry trails to frontcountry visitor services.

“By the time we meet our fixed costs,” Towery said, “our salaries and fuel and so forth, that's about 86 percent of the total budget. Like I said, there's not a lot of wiggle room.”

There are, however, a lot more visitors demanding a lot more services.

In the first full year the park was a park, just 4,000 travelers came through the gates. A decade later, in 1920, about 22,500 tourists visited.

Glacier cracked the million mark in the late 1960s, and by 1990 was pushing on 2 million.

And despite a short-term downturn in 2008 - when wet, cold weather delayed the summer season and gasoline prices idled motorists - the long-term trend is one of remarkable growth.

It's visible, particularly, in the numbers from 2000 to 2007, which really chart the path into Glacier's second century.

During those years, visitation to all national parks combined increased about 3.7 percent. (A $2.3 billion organization, the Park Service accommodates about 275 million visitors each year.)

Yellowstone was up 11 percent between 2000 and 2007, Zion 10 percent, Yosemite 3 percent. A few of the big players - Grand Canyon, for instance, and Great Smoky Mountains - actually lost about 1 percent.

And then there was Glacier, up a stunning 20 percent in visitation from 2000 to 2007. Last summer, visitation hit 2,083,329, an increase of 6 percent in a single year.

“Glacier has been the hidden gem of the National Park Service for a long time,” said Will Hammerquist. “Now it's been discovered.”

Hammerquist, who works for the National Parks Conservation Association, figures there are lots of reasons for Glacier's relative popularity.

Montana, and the Flathead Valley in particular, are hot, with people flocking for fun and an outdoor lifestyle. Some of that, surely, must trickle through the park.

In addition, the Canadian dollar is, for the first time in decades, at par with U.S. currency, and the border park is again drawing northern neighbors south.

There is also a curious climate factor: “Because people,” Hammerquist said, “do want to see the glaciers before they're gone.”

For years now, scientists based in Glacier National Park have been emerging as world leaders in the study of climate change impacts to mountain ecosystems. The more they publish, the more they are interviewed, the more Glacier becomes a household word.

In September 2007, Backpacker magazine released a survey of readers, asking them which national park was most at risk from climate change. Glacier Park ranked No. 1, with 47 percent of the vote. Glacier Bay came in second, with 14 percent.

The same issue featured, not surprisingly, a long profile of the park scientists who have charted Glacier's receding ice, predicting a complete meltdown of Glacier's glaciers by 2030.

And the magazine even suggested taking a low-carbon-footprint vacation: Amtrak to Glacier, a week on the trail and in the tent, then Amtrak back home.

Visitor numbers now suggest that not a few “geotourists” - those outdoorsy sorts targeted by the state's tourism council - have tried that train-to-trail trip in recent years. Glacier, it seems, has become a destination for a world wanting to see America's iconic landscapes before they're gone.
All of which is sort of a headache for John Kilpatrick.

He's in charge of maintaining the park's infrastructure - its roads and bridges and buildings - including Glacier's 350 structures listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

“If we rely on our base funding,” Kilpatrick said, “then we're pretty much treading water.”

Base funding - that annual $13 million the park gets to keep things going - isn't keeping pace with visitation. Nor is it keeping pace with the cost of living. In fact, even before gasoline prices skyrocketed, Glacier was losing purchasing power at about 7 percent per year.

“This year,” Towery said, “we definitely haven't been able to capture all our fuel costs.” In addition, “every time we have a vacancy, we review it carefully - do we really need this position?”

In fact, the politicians with the purse strings have been cinching down on base funding for years, slowly replacing that one big pot of firm money with a whole bunch of little soft money pots.

It's a shift that began about a bit more than a decade ago, Brandow said before retiring, and already it has been felt in the park.

“Citizen scientists” now conduct research here, and management is careful not to call them “volunteers,” lest they be required to provide training, oversight and radios.

A 2003 report showed Glacier in need of 64 full-time law enforcement officers. The park had 36.

Used to be, park rangers led multiday backcountry trips. Used to be, rangers rode the rails between East Glacier and West Glacier. Used to be, more campgrounds offered running water. Used to be, the park conducted systematic scientific work, inventorying and monitoring natural and cultural resources.

But it's hard to do all that when no one knows how much soft money might be available year to year.

Up at Logan Pass, crews are working hard to rebuild aging Going-to-the-Sun Road. The project's cost is estimated at more than $300 million, but only $82 million is in the bank.

(And although a historic lack of maintenance money is a big reason the reconstruction is even necessary, there's no promise of future maintenance funds once the rebuild is complete.)

Over at aged Many Glacier Hotel, part of the renovation is complete, but now Kilpatrick is awaiting word on the tens of millions he'll need for wiring and plumbing and mechanical work inside.

“We're hopeful,” he said. “We think we might be in line for funding in 2010 or 2011.”

But he can't be sure, and that makes it hard to plan, hire contractors or allocate crews.

The good news, Kilpatrick said, is that Glacier Park competes quite well for what soft money is available. The bad news is that's evidence of how great the needs are here.

“Finding money,” he said, “is probably the biggest part of my job.”

The second biggest part is triage.

“You try to focus on the things that present the most hazard,” Kilpatrick said. “Beyond that, there's just so much it's hard for me to be specific. It's a notebook full, a big three-ringed binder.”

His maintenance backlog alone, he said, might be pushing $400 million, “but it's hard to know, because prices have gone up so much in the last two years.”

And, of course, it doesn't really matter if it's $200 million or $400 million or $600 million, because there's nowhere near that kind of money available.

Between firm money and soft money, Kilpatrick has about $6 million a year to work with, not counting big projects such as the Sun Road or Many Glacier Hotel.

“So you do the math,” he said, “Divide six into $400 million, and that's how long it's going to take to fix everything that needs fixing in this park.”

It is perhaps a sign of the times that Kilpatrick and Towery, both operating without much wiggle room, appear reasonably grateful.

“Compared to other land-management agencies,” he said, “I think the Park Service has fared very well.”

“We're definitely doing well in comparison,” Towery agreed.

Thing is, the crunch is bigger than the parks. In 1965, 22 percent of the federal budget was available for discretionary spending in places like parks. In 2003, it was 8 percent and shrinking.

So Towery's encouraged that for the 2010 fiscal year she won some special soft money from a special soft pot, to be used for visitor and employee safety projects.

And recent years have seen slight but welcome increases in funding for the park's fleet of 150 vehicles, each of which must last 50 years or more under the current replacement budget.

“It's a narrow avenue,” Towery said of the special funds, “but it's an avenue. The biggest problem is we have to compete every year, so it's hard to know what the future holds.”

In fact, the only thing anyone seems to know about the future is that it's more expensive there, with more people and more demands, and no sign of increased base funding.

Reach reporter Michael Jamison at 1-800-366-7186 or by e-mail at mjamison@missoulian.com.

Workers stand on one of the retaining walls being rebuilt on a section of Going-to-the Sun Road last month. Glacier National Park has struggled to keep up with a backlog of infrastructure maintenance. Photo by TOM BAUER/Missoulian