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Glacier National Park among top 10 most-visited national parks

Glacier National Park
Many Glacier Map
Posted at 2:00 PM, Mar 16, 2023
and last updated 2023-03-16 16:00:23-04

GLACIER NATIONAL PARK - If you visited Glacier National Park in 2022, you certainly weren't alone.

Nearly 3 million people visited and the park ranked in the top 10 most visited parks in 2022, hosting 2,908,458 recreation visits.

The highest on record was in 2017 when 3,305,512 guests visited the park.

Park spokeswoman Gina Kerzman says they are expecting another busy summer.

"We expect it to be right up there, around 3 million visitors. We continue to have a steady flow of visitors coming into the park, which makes managing the vehicle capacity more and more important. We have more people and more cars than we have places to put them," Kerzman said. "We just have more and more people that are being exposed to the outdoors that want to participate in the outdoors and Glacier is a great place to come for that."

Visitation was down by about 5% less in 2022 than in 2021, but despite that, Kerzman says 2021 was the second best year on record, with 3,081,656 logged visitors that year.

"It could be a number of reasons why it was down, but 5% less than your second-best year is minimal," Kerzman said. "Fuel was expensive last year, we had lots of wet weather in the springtime. Even with those, it was another busy year with lots of visitation all through spring, summer, and fall, and we're expecting it to be that way this year."

Kerzman added that there will be construction in the park up until about mid-May including an ongoing project along the Going-to-the-Sun Road.

She also said that to help spread out visitation, guests can come to the park without a reservation before 6 a.m. or after 3 p.m. Kerzman says people can enter the east side of Glacier National Park without a pass up until July 1. The West Glacier entrance will require reservations starting on May 26.