Glacier reaches 2.8M visitors

Last month continued to pile on to Glacier National Park’s record-breaking year, with more visitors entering the park than any November in the last three decades.

Glacier broke its 2015 record this September, and has already welcomed 20 percent more visitors than last year. To date, the park’s all-time record now stands at 2,828,451, according to National Park Service statistics published on Tuesday.

While the 30,823 visitors to the park last month represents just a tiny piece of the overall picture, it’s a dramatic jump from recent Novembers, which in the past decade average just over 16,000. The record 39,810-visitor month was set in 1983, which until 2014 also held the annual visitation record.

More than half of last month’s park-goers entered through the West Glacier entrance, totaling 17,409 visitors — in itself more than the overall November visitation in all but two of the last 10 years.

This year is the third in a row that Glacier has set a new record for visitation, and one in individual-month records were set six times. Five of those came during the busiest part of the year, from May through September. In July, the park saw 818,481 people crowd through its gates — the first time the 700,000 mark had ever been broken in a single month.