HELENA, Mont. — Hotels and campgrounds in Glacier National Park are flooded with calls from worried tourists canceling their reservations or asking whether the Montana landmark will stay open as a wildfire sweeps through a popular part of the park.
Hotel owners are trying to talk callers out of changing their plans, while Glacier officials emphasized that only a small part of the 1,718-square-mile park is closed as the flames chew though parched conifer-topped ridges on its eastern side.
The blaze has shut down nearly half of the heavily trafficked Going-to-the-Sun Road, and officials were helping reroute tourists planning to visit attractions along the roadway to other scenic areas, park spokeswoman Denise Germann said.
“I think what we’re offering visitors is a completely different experience throughout the park,” Germann said Friday. “So many people rely on the Going-to-the-Sun Road, but you and I know there is so much more to Glacier.”
Kelsey Utterback, a 19-year-old University of Iowa student, had planned to stay at the Rising Sun Campground when her family visits from Chicago in two weeks. The site has been evacuated, but they’re still planning to go to Glacier, she said. They’re looking at campgrounds on the park’s western side, far from the blaze.
“Right now, we’re just worried about when the fire will end,” she said. “We don’t really want to go when it’s still out there, but it’s kind of easier for us to change our plans considering we didn’t make any reservations.”
The fire was unchecked and estimated at 6 square miles Friday, though fire spokeswoman Jennifer Costich said new information would soon provide a more accurate size. Some 300 firefighters dug fire lines, cleared debris and tried to stop the blaze from spreading northeast to populated areas.
Blazes also are chewing through other drought-stricken areas of the West, threatening homes and forcing evacuations in California and Washington state.
Glacier National Park was having a banner year before the first plume of smoke rose Tuesday. It is the 10th-most-visited park in the National Park Service system, despite its remote location. Top destinations such as the Great Smoky Mountains and California’s Yosemite National Park enjoy proximity to denser populations.
Visitor numbers from the first part of 2015 showed Glacier was on track to beat last year’s record of 2.3 million tourists. But the main tourist season, measured from the June 19 opening of the scenic Going-to-the-Sun Road until its planned closure Sept. 20, is a brief 13 weeks.
Any disruption in that window can hurt the tourism-driven businesses around the park that took in $193 million from visitors last year.
At the center of it all is the 50-mile Going-to-the-Sun Road, which cuts through the park’s stunning alpine peaks. Twenty-one miles of the road is closed, including at Logan Pass on the Continental Divide, where some of the park’s most-hiked trails begin.
