“I think there's way, way more people coming in the winter than there ever were in the past,” Dave Mitchell said. And he should know. Mitchell is a ranger in Glacier National Park, and it's his job to greet all those folks, to point them in the right direction.
In 2000, about 7,500 people visited Glacier during the dark of December, he said. By 2005, that monthly total had jumped to about 9,600. In December 2006, visitation shot up to 10,772, a 12 percent increase over the year before.
That's 50 years of growing in seven years, and you can see it right here in Glacier Park.
“The increase in winter use has been as fast as the development that you see in the valley itself,” Monica Jungster said. She grew up here, inside the park, and now owns the Montana House gift shop, a stone's throw from icy Lake McDonald.
Last year, for the first time ever, she stayed open through the entire winter, “and it was way busier than I ever thought it would be. If you'd told me four years ago that winter would be this busy, I never would've believed you. Winter is now officially a business season for tourism.”
It happened for her almost by accident. After wildfires raged close by in 2003, she spent the next winter doing smoke restoration at the store.
“People kept knocking on the door,” she said. “They thought we were open.”
And so she opened, just for weekends in 2005, then full-time in 2006.
Midweek, Jungster might see a couple dozen customers. Weekends bring upward of 100 per day.
It might not be the mad rush of summer, Jungster said, but it's enough to make opening the door worthwhile. And so far, she said, she doesn't mind sharing the winter quiet of her home with a few more visitors.
“They have to be people of the same mind,” she said, “or else they wouldn't be all the way up here in the winter in the first place.”
Her guest book for a January weekend looks like it was prepared by Rand McNally.
Land O' Lakes, Fla.; Sheboygan, Wis.; Albuquerque, N.M.; Temecula, Calif.
She's seen customers from Brazil, from Russia, England, Australia, from Southeast Asia.
Many have come to ski at nearby Big Mountain resort or to visit family. Glacier remains more of a winter day trip than a winter destination, she said.
Which makes it perfect for locals, who undoubtedly make up the vast bulk of wintertime park explorers. Many come for the free ranger-led snowshoe trips, which track along the edge of McDonald Creek in search of signs of life. Many more come to ski the roads-turned trails, to snowshoe quiet forests, to take pictures and sit by the lake.
Not a few never leave their cars, idling the afternoons away.
“Business is awesome,” Brian Kelly said. “People are discovering winter.”
Kelly owns Eddie's restaurant and camp store, two doors down from Jungster's gift shop, and this year, for the first time, he's staying open through the winter. The restaurant is closed, but the camp store has cocoa piping hot and a big pot of chili on the burner, as well as other treats. It also has a toasty wood stove and lots of chairs, which fill every time a guided snowshoe hike returns.
“We get a lot of cross-country skiers and snowshoers,” said Susie Larson, who was working the till on a sunny Sunday. “And a lot of the people have Big Mountain ski tags on their jackets.”
It's 15 below zero outside, and she sells sweatshirts instead of T-shirts, winter wear instead of summer wear, sunglasses, mittens, cold-weather hats.
Kelly, who also owns Izaak Walton Inn on the park's remote southern border, said he's doing “full-on weekends” this winter, with as many guests as he can handle.
Next year he plans to rent skis and snowshoes from Eddie's, and perhaps explore a bed-and-breakfast-type lodging because “not everybody is a downhill skier. We offer an alternative in the park.”
Just outside the park, the Belton Chalet also is keeping winter hours, which was unheard of just a few years ago. And Glacier Raft Co. has added a year-round outdoor center and cabins, not to mention 10 brand-new kilometers of groomed Nordic ski track. They even have guides for Glacier's ungroomed wilderness backcountry.
“We've been working hard at attracting more visitors in the quiet beauty of the winter months,” said Sally Thompson, co-owner of the raft and outdoor company. The new ski trails are “part of that initiative. There's no doubt that we're more than just a raft company.”
Just as Glacier Park is now more than a summertime getaway.
“People are coming in big numbers,” Kelly said. “It's just a matter of time now. Glacier is certainly going to be a place people think about in the winter.”
Actually, they already are thinking about the park, despite the Arctic deep freeze.
“When I see these kinds of numbers, and it's January, February, March,” Jungster said, “All I can think is ‘What's the world coming to?' I've lived here all my life, and I never expected this.”
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