A Senate subcommittee is to explore the issue of over-crowding in national parks/NPS file

Overcrowding in parts of the National Park System, a growing issue since the National Park Service marked its centennial in 2016, has gained the attention of the U.S. Senate's Subcommittee on National Parks.

On Wednesday morning the senators are scheduled to hear from Park Service managers as well as the National Parks Conservation Association and the executive director of the Whitefish (Montana) Chamber of Commerce.

Specifically, the subcommittee wants to hear about "(T)he impacts of overcrowding in our national parks on park resources and visitor experiences, and to consider strategic approaches to visitor use management."

The witnesses scheduled to provide testimony include Michael Reynolds, director of Interior Department regions 6, 7, and 8 (previously known as the Intermountain Region of the Park Service); Acadia National Park Superintendent Kevin Schneider; Kristen Brengel, senior vice president of government affairs for NPCA; and Kevin Gartland, executive director of the Whitefish Chamber of Commerce.

In prepared remarks released Tuesday, the executive director of the Outdoor Recreation Roundtable, an umbrella organization for the outdoor industry, stressed the need to address "unsustainable visitor pressures on the National Park System."

"After all, our national parks are only as healthy and memorable as the support we provide them, and our shared American outdoor experience is only as equitable as those who can access it," wrote Jessica Turner. "Many of these issues — overcrowding in some places, and lack of green space and access in others — have been growing for years and the pandemic has exacerbated their impacts."

ORR's suggestions to the subcommittee included the need to:

• Provide real-time visitation information for park travelers and businesses that rely on those visitors.
• Involve businesses that operate in parks in developing reservation systems for parks.
• Ensure that reservation systems are equitable for "communities without reliable internet access like those in rural America, as well as low-income, tribal, and/or communities of color."
• Provide financial support for gateway communities that are trying to cope with infrastructure needs created by the increased visitation to parks.
  "The visitation trends over the last few years have picked up in a dramatic way that rural communities’ well-intentioned strategic planning can’t always catch up to," Turner told the Traveler in an email Tuesday. "Over the past year in particular, almost entirely domestic travel and increased remote work opportunities via COVID-19 means that many are experiencing overload on their systems that they can’t catch up to. Social media is a new force that concentrates visitation in iconic places. Add in fiscal policies that have restrained local governments to retain revenues or cut income taxes and a lot of places just don’t have the bandwidth to keep up."
• Promote less-visited national park destinations.
• Boost interpretive staff in the parks.

Wednesday's Senate subcommittee hearing, set for 10 a.m. ET, will be webcast live on the committee’s website, and an archived video will be available shortly after the hearing concludes.

Traveler footnote: National Parks Traveler's most recent podcast, Episode 128, discussed the overcrowding issue with NPCA's Brengel and Phil Francis, chair of the Coalition to Protect America's National Parks. You can find it here.