Recapping Blockade at Glacier Park

This story was collected as part of a 2023 open call for submissions. It is one of 17 stories that were selected to be published.

By Daily Flathead News Staff

July 4, 2051

Glacier National Park is now entering a third month of forced closure by protests. Climate activists from the group, Sky Rise, have been blocking access to Going-to-the-Sun Road since May 11th of this year. Park superintendent Ren Yi Mow says the situation is being evaluated on a day-by-day basis and that their response is being coordinated at the national level.  

On Thursday, the activists erected a new sign at their blockade that reads, “Forward with Change!” A statement released in late May by Sky Rise’s national office said that the group is protesting the U.S. government’s failure to halt climate pollution and the National Park Service’s climate engineering program. “Until the National Park Service ends its violent and destructive climate engineering projects, and the government fully upholds their promises to decarbonize, we will be stopping all access to select National Parks around the country.” 

The government had pledged to halt all of its climate pollution by 2050. Previous reporting and estimates from a Freedom of Information Act request show that only a fraction of the pledged reductions have been made. 

Under pressure to preserve the park’s glaciers, superintendent Mow has spent years resisting decarbonization, instead pushing climate engineering solutions like artificial snow supplements. In 2048, the park service began seeding clouds with potassium iodide to increase snowfall over the park. Sky Rise and other environmental activists opposed the park’s climate engineering as too dangerous and pointless if not paired with rapid and complete decarbonization. 

In the spring of 2049, a heavy rain-on-snow event caused massive flooding and killed 31 people, all of them members of the Blackfeet Tribe on the east side of the mountains. Though the link between cloud seeding and the floods remains uncertain the scientific consensus is that the climate engineering programs contributed to the disaster significantly. 

In response to the flooding, Glacier’s superintendent has supported a liberal rebuilding package but had also continued cloud seeding last winter and has continued to stall decarbonization efforts. Without forewarning, Sky Rise blockaded the park entrances this spring.
Protests blocking access to other national parks have been less successful than the action at Glacier. In a high profile escalation, after the first week of protests, law enforcement were able to disrupt the blockades in Yellowstone National Park, Yosemite National Park, and Grand Canyon National Park.

In addition to Glacier, access to at least two other large parks–Zion National Park in Utah, and Everglades National Park in Florida–remains blocked by protestors. 

Geography has proven to be the protestor’s strongest ally. Their most successful blockades have been at parks with singular “in and out” roads with campgrounds at their entrances. These campgrounds provided staging areas for protestors to assemble without alerting park officials. The narrow roads with no alternative routes into the parks were easy to block from the protestor’s campground strongholds. 

In Glacier, protestors posing as regular tourists filled the Apgar and St. Mary campgrounds over the course of a week. They shuttled in supplies, stockpiles of food, camper trailers, a water pump truck, and even an ambulance, all without alerting park managers.  

In the early hours of May 11th, in an action apparently coordinated at several national parks by the leadership of Sky Rise, the protestors moved approximately two dozen cars and trucks from the Apgar and St. Mary campgrounds onto the east and west sides of Going-to-the-Sun Road. They parked the vehicles perpendicularly across the road just past the road’s intersection with the campgrounds, thoroughly blocking further vehicle access up the road. Protestors removed the wheels of the parked vehicles and apparently took them away from the area to inhibit moving the cars. Due to the steep nature of the terrain around the blockade, forging alternate routes does not appear possible.

Since the blockade was formed after 1:00 am on May 11th, no law enforcement officers were on duty and it remains unclear at what time officials first responded. At some point after sunrise, they arrested eight protestors who had welded the Apgar gate shut and locked themselves to it with chains and six protestors who had done the same in St. Mary. 

At that time, park staff appear to have been unaware the campgrounds were occupied by more Sky Rise activists. By noon, hundreds of protestors had overwhelmed law enforcement and assembled at their blockades at each end of Going-to-the-Sun Road. 

Over the course of the next several days law enforcement and protestors clashed multiple times and hundreds were arrested. However, as of July 1st, the Apgar campground, with 194 individual campsites, appears to still be occupied by more than a thousand protestors. The St. Mary Campground, with 148 sites, is estimated to have at least several hundred protesters still occupying it. On the evening of May 14th, superintendent Mow transferred the response to the protests to a national incident command team and direct confrontation was suspended. 

According to sources inside the park, law enforcement have attempted “siege tactics” by turning off water and electricity to the campground. However, given the campgrounds’ multiple pit toilets and close proximity to Lake McDonald and St. Mary Lake, these efforts have been unsuccessful. A source inside the Apgar camp has claimed that with solar panels, a water pump truck, and several U-Haul trailers filled with non-perishable food, the protestors are prepared to maintain their blockade through the winter, if necessary. 

Blink here to launch a virtual tour of the blockade on your glasses.