Yellowstone National Park visitors sound like an unhappy lot, judging by comments they provided to consultants.

They find other visitors are rude and even "stupid," there are too many bad drivers on the roads who either speed or stop in the middle of the road to watch wildlife, it's too expensive to stay in the park, ranger-led hikes are a thing of the past, and there are "not enough wild animals." 

The litany of complaints collected during 2016 -- and released Thursday as part of the park's Visitor Use Study -- perhaps shouldn't be too surprising, considering that a record 4.25 million people toured Yellowstone last year. But at the same time, the complaints reflect a growing problem facing park managers: How many people are too many?

Yellowstone managers know they have a people problem. Earlier this summer, they opened a gravel parking lot near the Fairy Falls Trailhead to take the pressure off the parking lot for Grand Prismatic Spring in the Midway Geyser Basin.

Yellowstone is not alone, as you've read in the Traveler many times in the past. Glacier National Park officials in Montana are asking visitors for patience this summer and putting a time limit on parking at Logan Pass. Zion National Park staff is considering a reservation system to gain entry to the park in southwestern Utah. Yosemite National Park is experimenting with parking reservations, and Acadia National Park managers are considering reservations, visitor quotas, building more parking lots, and other alternatives to better manage crowds.

For many, the solutions likely won't be implemented quickly enough. Zion officials are taking public comment on their reservation proposal, Acadia is just digesting public comments on the problem that park faces, and Yellowstone officials see a couple more years of studies before even identifying potential solutions.

"This is our first step in building a strong foundation of information, and more information we have to gather really has to deal with resource impacts," Yellowstone spokeswoman Morgan Warthin said Thursday evening.

While Yellowstone officials know park resources are being impacted by crowds of visitors, they want to collect more focused data on the extent and type of damage, she said.

Taken randomly, comments that visitors provided the consultants from Resource Systems Group, a Vermont-based firm that worked with Park Service personnel and Washington State University staff in gathering and crunching the data, reflect a great deal of unhappiness with visiting what arguably is the crown jewel of the National Park System.

Among the complaints:

• A lack of wolf and bear sightings
• Unsafe drivers
• Not enough law enforcement or traffic enforcement
• A lack of ranger-led hikes
• Too many Asian tour groups
• Crowded trails
• High prices for lodging, dining, and Wi-Fi
• Expensive camping
• No separate bike paths along roads
• Dirty, smelly restrooms
• No cell phone reception
• Lack of accessible trails
• No free shuttle service
• Wildlife jams on the roads

"Two-thirds of the visitors think that parking is a problem, and over half think that the amount of roadway traffic and congestion are problems," Ms. Warthin said. "And over half of visitors think there are too many people in the park."

Very possibly much of the problem at Yellowstone, and other parks in the system, is that while visitation has grown in leaps and bounds for many parks, staffing levels have not, as this chart demonstrates:

While annual visitation to Yellowstone National Park has grown significantly since 2000, full-time staff has not/NPS

And yet, the Trump administration wants to cut the National Park Service payroll by roughly 1,200 employees. Whether Congress goes along with that proposal remains to be seen. Also yet to be seen is a plan for how Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke intends to reorganize his department, including the Park Service, in such a way that staffing and funding cuts don't further impact the visitor experience in the National Park System.