Longtime Whitefish outdoorswoman and community promoter Jan Metzmaker was named the Tourism Ambassador of the Year on Monday at the Governor’s Conference on Tourism in Kalispell.

State tourism leaders handed out a half-dozen key awards for outstanding tourism projects and campaigns. Metzmaker was the only local winner, although the Polebridge Mercantile was a finalist in the Gateway Community category and the city of Kalispell was a finalist for Outstanding Film Community.

Metzmaker has been an integral part of Whitefish and Glacier National Park organizations for decades.

She spent seven years at the helm of the Whitefish Convention and Visitor Bureau and before that was the first executive director of the Glacier Fund, an organization dedicated to raising money for park projects.

Her love of Glacier Park goes back to the early 1970s, beginning with summer jobs during her college years.

She was a maid at Lake McDonald Lodge and, in 1972, a member of the park’s first female trail crew.

“You couldn’t get me out of the place,” Metzmaker said in an earlier Daily Inter Lake interview.

After graduating with a degree in sociology in 1973, Metzmaker spent the next nine years as a May-to-October park employee, winding up as operator of the water-treatment plant on the west side.

“It was a tough job,” she recalls. “There was a lot of hiking.”

Luckily, she liked a lot of hiking.

In 1983 she earned her master’s degree in environmental studies from the University of Montana.

She and her husband, Pete, were part owners of Glacier Guides for a time and she spent many summers working as a hiking guide in Glacier National Park.

During her time as a Whitefish City Council member, Metzmaker was among the city leaders who pushed for the resort tax that passed in 1995. She also advocated for Whitefish’s dark skies ordinance and other zoning ordinances that have helped preserve Whitefish’s small-town character.

Metzmaker’s career also included a year-and-a-half stint as a field officer manager for U.S. Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont.

Much of her work as director of the Whitefish Convention and Visitor Bureau was done seemingly behind the scenes, working with Amtrak, Glacier Country, Whitefish Mountain Resort and the state of Montana to leverage precious promotional money to boost visitor numbers.

“Most people don’t see the work we do because it’s out of the area,” she said in an earlier interview, alluding to the various trade shows she attended in places such as Chicago, Seattle and Portland.

During her time with the bureau, the organization saw its budget increase from $49,000 to more than $450,000 through increased membership, bed tax revenue and revenue from the city of Whitefish’s tourism promotion assessment.

Metzmaker has volunteered for a wide range of organizations and projects, from the city’s weed committee to the Flathead Basin Commission. She was an integral part in the 2010 Glacier National Park centennial celebration and received the coveted national Volunteer of the Year award from the National Park Service for that event as well as Tourism Partnership of the Year Award in 2011 for the centennial committee.

Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by email at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com