Glacier National Park will be a century old next year, and park Superintendent Chas Cartwright wants one special present.
"With the upcoming centennial, I can't think of any better birthday present than to formally designate these lands as wilderness," Cartwright said.
"President (Richard) Nixon forwarded that recommendation to Congress 35 years ago," he said. "So it's truly a matter of unfinished business that has been sitting in the lap of Congress since then."
Wilderness designations have been a contentious issue in Montana for decades, but Cartwright said it makes good sense in Glacier Park.
"I don't hear any disagreement that the primary value of Glacier is its primitive backcountry that provides some of the finest wilderness experience in the world," he said.
And it wouldn't really change anything for tourists, he added.
"Most of the park is recommended wilderness, so we manage it as if it were wilderness," Cartwright said.
"But our management now is by policy," he said. "Wilderness designation would be permanent."
As it stands, a future superintendent could create a new management policy that would allow the park to develop the North Fork of the Flathead River, he said, perhaps putting a highway into Polebridge and building a large lodge in what's now a scenic, rustic village.
"I think it's valuable for superintendents to have stricter sideboards on what's OK and what's not OK," Cartwright said.
He noted that Waterton National Park just to the north across the Canadian border recently designated much of its park as wilderness for many of the same reasons.
"The reality is that a wilderness designation would not change how we maintain our chalets or build our trails or fight fires," Cartwright said. "We will accommodate all existing uses, and we can codify that into law."
Cartwright proposes designating 975,000 acres of Glacier's 1,013,594 acres as wilderness.
"All the primary roads that transcend the park have been cherry-stemmed out of the proposal. Not just roads, but all the developed areas have been drawn out of the wilderness," Cartwright said. "Even our backcountry chalets are outside the boundaries."
So are the lakes, which means a boat with a small motor would be legal for use on Bowman Lake, for instance.
Additionally, the park's current policy is to let wildfires burn unless they threaten human life or physical structures.
"All our development is outside the wilderness area, so our first order of business would be to protect all our facilities - public and private," Cartwright said.
Ultimately, the wilderness designation would add one more layer of protection, he said.
"A park is already protected, but it's not permanent protection," Cartwright said. "A wilderness designation would make that permanent."
