Wildfires return to Glacier Park
A wildfire destroyed structures and forced evacuations Monday from the busiest area of Montana’s Glacier National Park, as officials in California prepared to reopen Yosemite National Park following a two-week closure at the height of the summer season.
Glacier’s Sprague Creek campground was closed and evacuated, a day after a fastmoving fire triggered the evacuation of dozens of guests from the historic Lake McDonald Lodge last Sunday night.
Park officials said in a statement that structures on the north end of Lake McDonald were lost, but they did not provide details on the number and type. The fire grew to between five and 10 square kilometres by Monday afternoon.
Crews were expected to stay on scene through the night to protect houses and other structures from the flames.
A second campground and private residences inside the park’s boundary also were evacuated and a 48-kilometre stretch of the scenic Going-to-the Sun-Road was closed to traffic. The road, with breathtaking views of the park’s mountainous interior, is a major draw for tourists.
Wildfires flare up regularly at many of the large national parks that dot the U.S. West, often burning in densely-forested, backcountry areas where their effects are limited. This year’s blazes threaten to have a magnified impact coming at the height of the summer tourist season.
“It just completely exploded. Yesterday we were watching it grow all day, and now it’s so smoky you can’t see anything,” said Kyersten Siebenaler with Glacier Outfitters, which rents boats in Apgar, a small community at the south end of the lake.
The outfitting company was trying to help tourists who evacuated find places to stay on the east side of the park, where it was not as smoky, Siebenaler said.
More than 400,000 visitors last month passed through the west entrance of Glacier, near McDonald Lake. August is typically just as busy, and a protracted shutdown of part of the park could hurt the tourist-driven local economy.
Yosemite was scheduled to reopen today after being largely closed since July 25 because of smoke from fires in remote areas.