Page 12 - Nov 2015 Volume 9, Number 11

THE VANISHING JEWEL: Flying to and Touring Glacier National Park
By Matthew McDaniel
Part 1
In cruise flight, we had reached the halfway point across the expansive width of Montana. The smoke that had been looming ahead, obscuring the western horizon in a thick and dingy haze, was now upon us and reduced forward visibility to almost nil. Peering out the side window and downward, the terrain features were visible as though looking through yellow stained-glass in need of a good washing. Extreme drought had parched most of the western United States throughout 2015, contributing to a deadly wildfire season. The Pacific Northwest was particularly hard hit, with Washington and Oregon experiencing their most destructive wildfire
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Just upstream from the impressive McDonald Falls, McDonald Creek is a shallow, winding stream of ice-cold glacier watch. The rocky shores and many trails and paths to them give ample opportunity to explore off the beaten path without wandering too far from it.
seasons ever. I’d been watching the Park Alerts, NOTAMs, and fire-related TFRs for a couple weeks, hoping the fires threatening Glacier National Park (GNP) would soon be contained. After all, this might be my one and only opportunity to visit Glacier as a tourist, and the kids were at great ages to do so. Most importantly, the old axiom that you can always go next year because the mountains aren’t going anywhere, does not apply to GNP. The park is best known as one of the few places to see true glaciers in the continental United States, yet those glaciers are disappearing at an alarming rate.
You Can’t Get There from Here
It would be an understatement to say that GNP is remote. Nestled on the Canadian border, in northwestern Montana, Glacier adjoins Canada’s Waterton Lakes National Park. Waterton is in the extreme southwestern corner of Canada’s Alberta Providence, bordering British Columbia. Both parks are quite distant from any significant population. The closest sizable city to GNP is Kalispell, Montana (population: 21,000), about an hour’s drive from the west park entrance. Those entering the park at the east gate most often come through Great Falls, Montana (population: 60,000), nearly a four-hour drive away. My family and I had been trying to get to Glacier for years.
I’d gotten a taste of the area a few times when piloting charter flights into Kalispell and Great Falls. While both airports have airline service, neither are served by anything larger than regional jets. That translates directly into high airfares for the minimal number of airline seats to choose from. Driving from our Wisconsin home would take roughly 24-hours non-stop. Taking a train would be wonderfully scenic (both the east and west park areas are served by train), but the distances were still too vast for us to cover in the allotted time. Airlining into Great Falls would cost us almost an entire day in the park, due to the long roundtrip drive. Paying the expensive airfare into Kalispell, also required us to fly from the Midwest to the West Coast, then back east to Montana (not exactly the most time-efficient routing). For those reasons, combined with its short tourist season and our personal time commitments, we’d missed the annual window for visiting GNP year after year. That frustration was only exasperated by our knowledge that the glaciers were melting away faster with each passing year. There was only one reasonable solution for a pilot and his family: General aviation to the rescue!
Gateway to Glacier
We decided that flying ourselves into Kalispell’s Glacier Park International Airport (KGPI) would be the time-saving solution we required. Our route inbound would take us just south of the park across the Lewis
DECEMBER 2015