Inholder responds to story

The Aug. 19 story (Landowners could get snowmobile access to properties in Glacier National Park) framed winter access to private homes inside Glacier National Park around snowmobiles. For the 50 families who own property within the park, the question is more fundamental: whether we can reasonably reach our own homes, by modern motorized means, like any other property owner in Flathead County.

Most of that property was homesteaded before the park existed. When Congress created Glacier in 1910 it wrote protections for those families into the enabling act itself. Section 1 preserved the right to the “full use and enjoyment” of the land, and Section 2 barred the secretary of the Interior from making rules inconsistent with it. 

That was no afterthought. The legislation had been voted down twice, and those protections were the condition on which the park was created.

What we are seeking is the ability to reach our homes on the roads that are already there. Sometimes that means a car or truck. Sometimes it means clearing the snow. Sometimes it means a snowmobile, depending on the snow and what a family drives.

This is transportation, not recreation. We are not asking to ride the backcountry, to travel off the existing roads, or to build new ones, and we are not asking for commercial use. We want a practical way to get from the gate to the front door.

Federal regulation already permits the Park Service to use snowmobiles inside Glacier for administrative purposes, not merely for search and rescue. And at Grand Teton National Park, the federal special regulations expressly provide snowmobile access routes to private inholdings, reserved for landowners and their guests. Glacier’s own regulations contain no such provision. 

We are asking for nothing that has not already been written into law for another park, and nothing the Park Service does not already have the authority to do itself.

The families who live inside Glacier are also among its most committed stewards. We are here in every season and every year, not only in August. We watch for fire, help defend our homes and nearby Park Service structures, and pack out what others leave behind. We have cared for this ground longer than the Park has existed.

We are among the very few American citizens whose own government prevents them from reaching their homes by motor vehicle for part of the year. We pay property taxes like our neighbors, and we too should have reasonable year-round access to our homes.

Nothing has been decided, and we know the park has work to do before anything is. We are grateful to Superintendent Dave Roemer for listening and taking the question seriously, to the Park Service staff working through it, and to our federal delegation for its support. We look forward to continuing the conversation.

Jack McFarland Polebridge

He submitted this guest opinion on behalf of the Glacier Landowners Association.