zozeppelin wrote: ↑Thu Aug 26, 2021 10:03 am
...August 25th (yesterday) the trail status page updated to acknowledge the issue: "Currently these links are not working. We hope to return them soon."
In this day and age, I'm not sure how it's possible to have a website go down for almost 2 weeks, in peak season. Hackers? Server died with no backup or mirrors? At a minimum put a manual update out there or on facebook or twitter or something...
zozeppelin,
I too am pretty frustrated by the lack of information regarding backcountry campsite "availability".
I have noticed that most of the URL's associated with Glacier NP's website begin with
www.nps.gov/glac/
while the missing web pages start with
www.nps.gov/applications/glac/
I've been using these missing pages for at least 15 years - I remember scoring a 3-day trip in 2006 as a result of using the advance availability page. To the best of my memory, these pages physiclal appearance haven't changed in all that time. I can't speak to whether the URL's have changed over the years.
I wouldn't be surprised if the server that hosts these "applications" didn't undergo a operating system upgrade (security?) that didn't play nice with this ancient software. I would speculate that there isn't the money and/or manpower available to fix whatever trainwreck happened a couple of weeks ago.
The only weird thing with that theory is that I always got the impression (via personal observation) that the backcountry offices uses these same basic tools (obviously with ability to edit the data vs. read only) to manage backcounty permitting. So how are they doing that if my scenario is correct?
...and, as noted in another post, they had a similar - but much shorter - outage earlier this year. Somehow they got that duct-taped back together for a little while.
Regardless, if all goes well I will be in the backcountry office on the afternoon of September 1st. We'll see how fast I can think on my feet. HA!
Best regards,
Scott