Mountains Without Handrails is as applicable today, maybe more so, than it was in 1980.

Forty years ago, I read Mountains Without Handrails: Reflections on the National Parks by Joseph L. Sax, a law professor and astute observer and student of America’s National Park System. I knew few national parks then and wondered what such a provocative title might mean. Now, after 40 years of exploring and studying the parks, I reread Sax’s book to see if his reflections back then might be relevant today. I think they are.

As Mountains Without Handrails was published in 1980, Ronald Reagan was about to be elected president of the United States, James Watt was soon to become Secretary of the Interior with all that his appointment portended for public lands, and Congress was putting the finishing touches on the Alaska National Interest Land and Conservation Act, the largest expansion of the National Park System in history.

The population of the United States that was a bit more than 226 million then, is around 330 million today. The National Park Service reported 220 million recreation visits to national parks in 1980, up from 168 million in 1970. Recreation visits in 2019 according to the Park Service were over 327 million. Globally human population was growing exponentially, up from 3.7 billion in 1970 to 7.6 billion today.

The situation was more people, more recreation, and more pressure on the system. Unlimited growth in all things was considered necessary and good. Mass outdoor recreation was becoming the norm, and Sax thought this posed serious challenges for the national parks and the National Park Service. “Recreation that is dependent on ever-increasing growth and impact for its satisfaction is unsustainable,” he wrote.

Mountains Without Handrails is a small book full of big questions and ideas about national parks. While Sax recognized that parks in the late 20th century were about more than recreation, he focused on how we experienced national parks then, and on how we might do so in the future. The central question he addresses is whether national parks should be dedicated to serving “conventional tourist demands” or to serving a more intense and engaged “reflective recreation.”  

He asks, “For whom and for what are the parks most important? Which of the faithful national park constituencies will have to be disappointed so that the parks can serve their ‘true’ purpose?”

Sax was inspired by landscape architect and national park advocate Frederick Law Olmsted who, as national parks appeared late in the 19th century, thought they should be places where visitors could “get outside the usual influences.” Sax found in Olmsted “a strong element…of republican idealism, a distaste for mass man unreflectively doing what he is told to do and thinking what he is told to think.” A national park, Olmsted thought, should be “a place to stir the contemplative faculty.” Sax agreed, well aware that the national park of 1980 was under siege by “mass man” to a degree Olmsted could hardly have imagined in the 19th century, and that “contemplative recreation” was not what mass visitors seemed to want, nor was the National Park Service advocating it.

Sax admits that he writes as a “preservationist,” that preservationists are “moralists,” and while recognizing all the difficulties inherent in changing the trajectory of recreational use of national parks late in the 20th century, he advocates for national parks “as they ought to be,” the title of one of his chapters.

“The idea is not that reflective recreation should consume all our leisure time,” he writes, “but rather that we should develop a taste for it, and that stimulating the appetite should be a primary function of national parks.”

What is needed is “a policy that encourages contemplative recreation as one publicly provided choice, separates it from ordinary leisure time activity, and requires a conscious decision either to accept it or reject it.” The National Park Service should not, he argues, simply be bowing to the demands of mass tourism but, in the parks, shaping that demand. They do this to some degree, he admits, but not as much as they should.

Sax was concerned that national parks have been commodified, the park experience for many now shallow and regimented, but there is an alternative, and thus the title “mountains without handrails.” Without the metaphorical handrails, visitors might bring more curiosity, a desire to be challenged, a willingness to engage with new, unknown, unexpected qualities of the place they are visiting.

Olmsted, says Sax, thought the key to a good park experience “is the presence of something capable of engaging, rather than merely occupying, the individual – a stimulus for intensity of experience for the full involvement of the senses and the mind.”

When Sax wrote Mountains Without Handrails, the post WWII automobile age was only 35 years along. The interstate highway system that made national parks easily accessible to anyone with a car was only two decades old. He could see the rising tide of mass visitation underway and a future where it would only continue to overrun the limited resources of the parks.

The trend toward catering to mass visitation threatened to limit the choices of how people could experience their parks.

“If we want authentic choices, we will have to make some compromises,” he writes, “for we can’t have places like Yosemite Valley both as an accessible place for a distinctive recreational experience and as a place to serve conventional tourist demands.”

Commodification of the park experience, he thought, was driven by too much entrepreneurialism in the parks, narrowing the visitor experience of them. Entrepreneurs are stimulating demand in order to sell stuff. “He makes his money from spenders and crowds, not from those who are seeking in a solitary way to find their own style," writes Sax.

He quotes a chief naturalist at Yosemite National Park who remarked that, “People used to come for the beauty and serenity. Those who come now don’t mind the crowds; in fact they like them . . . . They come for the action.”

This reminds me of a comment recently attributed to an Arches National Park ranger that people don’t mind the lines and the crowds at the park; they are used to them. If that is so, these current realities make Sax’s point.

The solution to this, Sax suggests, is what he calls “unbundling” recreational demand. Such a policy recognizes that the range of recreational preferences is legitimate, but all sorts of recreation cannot and should not be satisfied in national parks. Demand for “intensive-use activities” and what he calls consumptive forms of recreation can be satisfied elsewhere on public or private lands.

He cites the example of demand for Sitka spruce from Olympic National Park for critical wartime needs during WWII. Logging in the park for this timber was stopped by analysis that showed that the critical resource could be found elsewhere. Similarly, Sax argues, “intensive use” forms of recreation in national parks should be discouraged in national parks if desire for them can be satisfied elsewhere. “The strategy is to increase the burden of proof that there is no alternative except the use of parklands.”

For if urbanized recreation continues to grow at present rates, a commitment to meet it could well overwhelm any effort at compromise, even with the best efforts to implement the Olympic park approach and to separate different kinds of preferences. If the policy proposed here is to succeed, it will have also to moderate total demand for the kinds of conventional recreation that are most in conflict with it. The most serious practical problem in meeting current recreational demand is presented by those activities that are highly consumptive of resources: high-powered vehicles that require a great deal of acreage; noisy motors that create conflicts with other uses over a large area; hurried visits to a multitude of places, creating crowded conditions; uses that exhaust large quantities of energy and demand substantial development of facilities.

Land-management agencies like the Park Service and Forest Service are faced with “competing intuitions” for control, regimentation, security and comfort, and at the same time “a taste of adventure,” solitude, and a “testing of skills.” These agencies, Sax suggests, offer the illusion that visitors can have all of these at once through conventional mass visitation.

Visitors must be lured out of their vehicles, he argues. They may be reluctant, but rewards await those who venture out. He observes, for instance, that if novice backpackers get through the uncomfortable stages of learning how to prosper in the wild, “There is often a dramatic revelation that the woods are full of things to see – for those who know how to see them.”

But the park experience for many is a brief touch and go, a photo from a prescribed viewpoint and on to the next park. Little effort goes into understanding the reason the place being visited is special and there is only superficial engagement with the values for which the park was established.  The ORV, he says, “has become a symbol of speed, power, and spectacle … one kind of symbol, just as the motor-home recreational vehicle has of another – that of the passive visitor, unable to leave home and its comforts behind, sitting watching TV in the midst of the nation’s most magnificent country.”

He echoes Ed Abbey when he writes that, “Places become much bigger when we are on foot, and a slower pace enlarges the material on which to expend our leisure.”

Sax raised many difficult questions in Mountains Without Handrails and didn’t have answers to all of them, admitting their difficulty. Trends in national park use reflect societal values. They are the people’s parks and the people have a right to visit them if not at any time and with a right to do anything they please in them. America is urbanized and people are used to crowds, so perhaps they don’t mind park experiences not unlike their urban experiences. Theme parks offer mass entertainment and many people liken national parks to such places. People love their vehicles and the perceived freedom they provide.

There is, Sax notes, “The notion that commitment to democratic principles compels the assumption of unlimited abundance and a rejection of the possibility of scarcity” which he casts as “one of the familiar misconceptions of our time.” Suspicion of government and regulation is rampant, regarded by many as bent on reducing their freedom. Government agencies often seem to think it their mission to please everyone, which is not possible. Many people think public agencies’ mission should be to do what the people want and not try to shape what they want. All of this raised in Sax considerable empathy for “the bureaucratic Solomon” who has “to divide the baby,” which would of course be the National Park System.

Forty years after the publication of Mountains Without Handrails it seems that, despite some hard work by the National Park Service “to divide the baby,” the situation Sax feared is upon us. Many of the parks are being overwhelmed by a huge surge in visitation. Admittedly the National Park System is more diverse than it was when Mountains Without Handrails was written, and larger than it was then. Not all parks, even in the Lower 48 are crowded, and some established as wilderness parks, like the North Cascades National Park Complex, are not as overwhelmed by visitors as Acadia, Arches, Yosemite, Yellowstone, Glacier, Grand Canyon, and Rocky Mountain, among others.

Still, the “intensive recreation” that concerned Sax has become more the norm than “contemplative recreation.”

The core question is, for whom and for what purpose have national parks been established. The oft-quoted National Park Service Act of 1916 states that “the fundamental purpose of the said parks, monuments, and reservations…is to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein and to provide for the enjoyment of same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.” Two years after this legislation, Interior Secretary Franklin K. Lane wrote to founding NPS director Stephen Mather, as the infant agency struggled to define how it was to carry out this mandate, as follows:

Every activity of the Service is subordinate to the duties imposed upon it to faithfully preserve the parks for posterity in essentially their natural state. The commercial use of these reservations, except as specially authorized by law, or such as may be incidental to the accommodation and entertainment of visitors, will not be permitted under any circumstances.

So, the challenge was clear from the very beginning – how could the NPS, without impairing park values, provide for the “enjoyment” of the parks by the American people. At this stage, park proponents were touting park values like inspiration and education as well as recreation, but the push was on to garner more public support for the parks, so consummate salesman that Mather was, he did everything he could to tout national park recreation and increase visitation. He was successful, and to this day, with ups and downs along the way, visitation has grown. Note Lane’s emphasis on “commercial use” even back then, for early park proponents saw national parks as alternatives to commercial exploitation. In Sax’s view, too much commercialism had crept into the national parks decades after Lane’s declaration about it. Commercialization and commodification of them continues today.

At the end of Mountains Without Handrails Sax offers A Policy Statement: The Meaning of National Parks Today in which he presents four principles that he thinks should influence national park policy:

• The parks are places where recreation reflects the aspirations of a free and independent people
• The parks are an object lesson for a world of limited resources 
• The parks are great laboratories of successful natural communities 
• The parks are living memorials of human history on the American continent

Elaborating on the first principle, he observes that national parks “are places where no one else prepares entertainment for the visitor, predetermines his responses, or tells him what to do.” The park experience, he says as did Olmsted before him, should be creative, rising from the needs and values of the visitor.

Building on this, he reflects on the second principle that “(T)he quantity of resources the visitor needs to consume shrinks as he discovers the secret of intensiveness of experience, and his capacity for intense satisfaction depends on what is in his own head.” Furthermore, “parks can perform their function without being used up at all.” The last two principles recognize the fact that parks are for more than recreation.

Some might find an inconsistency in Sax’s contention that a “free and independent people” should be able to choose how they experience national parks with his argument that the government, as the National Park Service, should encourage one type of recreation over another. He addresses this by arguing that national parks cannot be all things to all people, and when their needs can be met in places without the resource protection values inherent in the very concept “national park,” they should be.

Sax proposes an approach to managing recreation in national parks that offers a way for the National Park Service to meet the competing demands of its mandate to “conserve” and to “provide for the enjoyment of” as dictated by the National Park Service Act. Advocate and manage for, he urges the National Park Service, a form of recreation that is more intensive and less impactful on the visitor and the resources than is the norm today. This was a radical suggestion in 1980 and is more radical today, especially in a time of a divided American society and an element of society the protests any government intrusion on what they perceive to be their individual rights. The only way to change recreational behavior in national parks seems to be regulation. Education might help, but it alone will not do the job.

Difficulties and resistance aside, is there any alternative? Park visitation cannot grow forever unless parks grow in tandem, which they cannot. The mantra of bigger, faster, and more dominates our society but, as Sax says, is not sustainable in the national parks, or in society at large for that matter.

The value of looking back at Sax’s analysis is that it reminds us that if we  wish to have national parks in which the “scenery and natural and historic objects and wild life” are protected and sustained, and in which there is an opportunity to choose one’s recreational experience, some tough decisions must be made, and sooner rather than later. I recognize that in establishing wilderness parks like Olympic and North Cascades and the vast Alaska parks, a step was taken toward providing for the contemplative recreation Sax espouses. And while all parks are not inundated with visitors, Sax’s point is that what is needed is a philosophy of national park recreation that, while being flexible and contextual, is guided by a different set of principles than that of the recent past.

I reread Sax months ago and started writing this essay before the outbreak of COVID-19 struck the world, closing national parks which are now reopening despite health concerns for visitors and staff, and changing tourism globally in big ways and perhaps into the future. At the same time, the current federal administration seems to measure success in its management of everything in term of money and has no scruples about envisioning a National Park System that brings more revenue, profit, and provides opportunity for more, not less, commercialization. (As I write in late May, for instance, a proposal has recently been floated to privatize all national park campgrounds.)

This is perhaps an inopportune moment to revisit Joseph Sax’s ideas given the political tenor of the times, but urgency demands that some serious thought be given to the long-term future of this American institution before it is overwhelmed and the values for which it was established lost or damaged beyond repair. As Americans forgo foreign travel during this pandemic, the prospect of even more visitors to national parks increases the urgency of the situation.

Joseph Sax gave us lots to think about 40 years ago, and we need to pay even more attention to his ideas today.