Glacier National Park just completed a record-breaking summer for visitation and the park is on pace to have the busiest year on record, according to the National Park Service’s statistics office.

It was so busy at times that motorists were waved through the West Entrance station because of backed-up traffic.

Glacier had 675,119 visitors in August, the most ever for the month. In July, there were 699,650 visitors, a record high for that month.

June was not a record-setter, largely due to rainy weather and Going-to-the-Sun Road being closed for most of the month. But the combined visitation of 1,708,843 for the three months of summer 2014 topped the previous high of 1,673,811 visitors in 1983.

Visitation for August was up 7.8 percent from the same month last year. So far this year, total visitation of 1,885,265 people is up 5.7 percent over last year. 

That number is tracking ahead of the 1,809,339 people who entered the park during the first eight months of 2010, which the park touts as its busiest year on record. Full-year visitation in 2010 was 2,200,048.

Denise Germann, Glacier’s public affairs officer, said park employees didn’t know they were experiencing a record-setting summer while it was underway, but they knew it was busy.

“It was definitely noticeable ... I think everybody could feel it. It was one of those summers that was just extremely busy. And that was with all aspects of the park,” she said. “With increased visitation comes an increased workload, and that increased workload was across all divisions of the park.”

Glacier Superintendent Jeff Mow confirmed that traffic backups at times were so severe at West Glacier that visitors were being waved through the entrance gate without fee collections.

“That did occur and it occurred on several occasions,” he said, explaining that the Montana Department of Transportation regards it as an “untenable situation” when traffic is backed up all the way into the town of West Glacier.

“We are forced to wave folks through,” he said, adding that those visitors are very frequently contacted later on, elsewhere in the park, and they end up paying.

“It shouldn’t be perceived as a huge economic loss in terms of entrance fees,” he said.

Mow recalled one day when ALERT helicopter flew to the park four times for emergency response, something that is apparently unprecedented.

He said the park’s chief ranger was flagging down park employees and enlisting their help with search and rescue operations related to the ALERT response.

“We find ourselves dropping what we might normally be doing to take care of an acute situation,” he said.

Germann could not attribute the busy summer to any one thing.

“I think weather plays a big role in visitation, and we had some spectacular summer days this year. And we are also building up to the centennial of the National Park Service in 2016, and perhaps that plays a role,” she said.

Mow said he has been in contact with Waterton Lakes National Park in Alberta, where visitation also was “definitely up.”

Mow said “there’s a perception that a lot more people from the Calgary area are coming further south than they have in the  past.”

Other factors related to Glacier’s busy summer could be that there was no road rehabilitation work on Going-to-the-Sun Road west of Logan Pass for the first time since that project got underway nearly a decade ago.

The number of visitors entering the park’s busiest entrance at West Glacier was 292,679 in August, compared to 274,753 visitors during the same month last year.

There was construction work east of Logan Pass that caused limited parking at key trailheads along Sun Road, but that didn’t appear to inhibit visitors. There were 157,830 visitors entering the park at St. Mary in August, compared to 156,973 during the same month last year.

Reporter Jim Mann may be reached at 758-4407 or by email at jmann@dailyinterlake.com.