Abandoning trails in Glacier Park

Here is an example of how Glacier Park is letting trails go and then later be abandoned in the Park. In prior decades the Park had over 1000 miles of trails. Now they say there have 700 miles of trails and they are fine with that. And now with the Obama administration in office they are seeking for 95% of the Park be classified as wilderness. Wouldn't that mean no new trails - or even reactivating old trails that have fallen into disuse?

When checking the Park's trail status report I came across the following in the description. This is the same as what the forest service is doing in the forests. They remove bridges and culverts and eventually the trail/roads fall into disuse because of the difficulty in using them and then they are abandoned. Looks like Glacier Park may have this in mind for this trail to Trout Lake.

Camas Creek Drainage

North Fork Road - Foot of Trout Lake/ 7.0 mi.

Initial clearing scheduled for: complete 7/30/09. Snow Cover: N/A Trees Down: 200, 07/14/2009 per U.S.G.S.

Bridge adjacent to Rogers Lake was removed in September 2005 and will not be replaced. Ford is upstream of old bridge site but not recommended for hikers until later in summer when water is slower moving.

Now you may say 700 miles of trails sounds like plenty, but consider the number of people who use the Park, and that quite a number of hikers average over 200 miles of hiking on those trails each year and you can see with less miles of trails, the trails remaining in the Park will get overused. Then the Park will limit the number of hikers on the trails.

Park's summer busiest in 15 years

Glacier National Park just finished its busiest summer in 15 years, tallying 1,473,250 visitors through its entrance stations in June, July and August.