So that took me on a long rabbit hole that included reading case law and a 1985 MA thesis on the 1895 Agreement by which the Blackfeet sold the eastern part of their reservation, excepting the hunting, fishing and timber rights, but those rights were nevertheless taken away with the creation of Glacier National Park in 1910 on said land.
But yes... that's where we are at. We just had a very nice Memorial Day weekend in the park. There have only been two nice ones in my memory - this year with the reservation system and last year when it was closed.
Every other one involved hours and hours of deadlocked traffic. The basic question is: should NPS let a certain number of lucky people (capped at average June 2019 levels, which many people already considered too crowded) have a nice experience, or have a free for all where everyone can get in until such time as all roads are jammed and an extra 25% of people are in the park, but everyone is miserable?
There are other considerations too. Frustrated visitors during 2019 crowds assaulted shuttle bus drivers. A ranger I know was almost run over by an impatient driver (not like an accident - the ranger was standing in the lane you would turn into if taking a left turn and motioning the guy to go straight, and he took the left turn and gunned it and tried to run the ranger over who barely avoided being run over).
Ambulance response times between the ambulance location and Curry Village (about a mile; less than 10 minutes on a bike) was already over an hour on weekends this April.
