Glacier National Park needs just 5,334 visitors to break its annual attendance record set last year.

An estimated 71,297 people entered the park in October, for a total of 2,333,194 recreational visitors this year.

Last year was Glacier’s busiest of all time, but 2015 has remained on pace to set yet another record since early this year, after last winter’s pittance of snow and a warm spring allowed officials to open the popular Going-to-the-Sun Road on June 19.

Overall visitation through October was up 1.6 percent from last year.

West-side entrances to the park had a slight increase overall in October, with 25.3 percent more people passing through the Polebridge entrance and the West Glacier entrance up 6.4 percent.

On the park’s east side, the Two Medicine entrance had less than half the visitation of last October, and Many Glacier was down 72 percent. However, St. Mary was up 63.4 percent.

Goat Lick registered 645 visitors, compared with just 50 the year before.

Total overnight stays in October were up 225 percent from 2014, evidence of the unusually long summer throughout the region this year.

Yellowstone National Park had already broken its yearly attendance record by the end of September, and had for the first time hit 4 million visitors when the monthly numbers were released earlier this month.

In a meeting with the editorial board at the Daily Inter Lake last month, Glacier Superintendent Jeff Mow noted that the wildfires and thick smoke in Glacier from July through early September took a toll on visitation to the park, which by June was 25 percent higher than in 2014.

After the busiest June and second-busiest July in history, August visitation in Glacier had dropped 14 percent from the previous year.

“People redistributed themselves accordingly in the conditions. ... My counterpart in Yellowstone would say they all went there — they saw a 19 percent increase overall for the summer,” Mow said.

“I got the sense that he was fairly exasperated over that, because it was a very busy summer in Yellowstone, and I think, gosh, that could have been us.”

Reporter Sam Wilson can be reached at 758-4407 or by email at swilson@dailyinterlake.com.