How are crowds impacting visitors' national park experience?/NPS, Neal Herbert

There's been much national media attention on the National Park System lately, but it's not the kind you'd like to see. 

"How Crowded Are America's National Parks?" asked the New York Times in introducing a photo essay that showed crowds of visitors practically overrunning America's Best Idea. NPR, meanwhile, sent correspondent Kirk Siegler to Arches National Park to report on "An Explosion In Visitors Is Threatening The Very Things National Parks Try To Protect."

Visit Yellowstone, Zion, Grand Canyon, Great Smoky, and many other national parks this crowded summer and you can see firsthand how the crowds are impacting not just the natural resources in these special places, but literally stomping on the national park experience.

Crowds are not limited to the "name-brand" parks, either.

• Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area in Kentucky and Tennessee counted 772,625 visitors in 2020, an increase of nearly 25,000 from 2019.
• Assateague Island National Seashore in Maryland and Virginia tallied almost 2.5 million last year, a jump of 137,124 from the previous year.
• Amistad National Recreation Area in Texas saw 1,424,139 visitors in 2020, nearly 160,000 more than in 2019.
• Cape Hatteras National Seashore in North Carolina recorded 2,648,522 in 2020, up from 2,606,632 in 2019.
• Cedar Breaks National Monument in Utah welcomed 845,867, more than 260,000 more people than visited the spectacular monument in 2019.

The list goes on. True, many sites saw visitation plummet last year due to Covid, but most were historic sites where visitors would head indoors to experience the park, and they couldn't do that as many facilities were closed.

The crowding continues this year.

• Yellowstone reported that it's June visitation was an all-time record for the month -- 938,845 --, and that year-to-date visitation (1,587,998) to the icon of the park system represented a 17 percent increase from 2019 (1,358,629). 
• Zion National Park in Utah counted 675,799 June visitors, a 13.6 percent increase over 2019's June traffic of 594,896.
• Acadia, which this year implemented a reservation system for the popular Cadillac Mountain Road, nevertheless counted 660,779 visitors in June, nearly 35 percent more than in June 2019, when 490,720 turned out.

How many is too many? Way back in 1978 Congress directed the National Park Service to establish human carrying capacities for the parks. How many parks have done so?

Adding to the crisis that the human burden is exerting on some parks is the lack of a Senate-confirmed director of the National Park Service, someone who could bring heightened attention and concern to the impacts of over-crowding and, we'd hope, bring pressure to bear to address it.

Consider:

• More than five years ago Zion officials began work on a Visitor Use Management Plan in a bid to figure out how to not only improve the visitor experience but ease the impacts on natural resources and staff. It has yet to be completed.
• Arches National Park officials thought they had a solution to their jammed park roads back in 2017: A timed reservation system much like we're seeing these days in Acadia and Rocky Mountain national parks. But worries that that approach could cost area businesses as much as $22 million in lost economic spending sandbagged that plan and sent park staff back to square one, where they remain (at least publicly).
• Rocky Mountain National Park staff, although having gained some respite from overwhelming crowds thanks to the timed-reservation system implemented due to the Covid pandemic, nevertheless are continuing to search for an answer to congestion that has led some visitors to say they will no longer visit the popular park in Colorado.
• When the Going-to-the-Sun Road opened end-to-end in Glacier National Park this summer, traffic was up 41 percent over the comparable opening day in 2019. 

Though visitor numbers are soaring in many areas, park staffing levels are not. According to the 2020 Best Places to Work in the Federal Government survey, the Park Service had 12,556 employees in 2020, down from 16,404 back in 2003. That means not enough rangers to deal with those off-trail crowds captured by the New York Times' photographers or to police visitors' behavior at Yellowstone that feeds a Facebook page titled "Invasion of the Idiots."

Again, those parks are not alone with their misbehaving visitors.

Across the country in Georgia at Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park, the park’s iconic Illinois Monument and grave site of the unknown soldier were recently defaced. At Assateague Island National Seashore in Maryland, a mare with a 3-month-old foal died, a victim of an apparent hit-and-run collision.

While rangers weren't watching, some visitors to Petroglyph National Monument in New Mexico in June "damaged" an extensive area by "creating several hundred rock 'cairns' across the landscape. "Creating new rock cairns is considered vandalism and is a violation of federal regulations. More than 300 newly created rock cairns were found," the park reported. "The cairns ranged in size from small 2-3 rock cairns, to large cairns several feet high comprised of dozens of rocks."

Parks with obvious crowding issues should implement temporary daily caps on visitation until the Park Service can come up with sound plans to manage visitation. Resource damages should not be tolerated while "more studies" are conducted, nor should the park experience be allowed to deteriorate further. 

A Senate-confirmed director could use their authority to push through much-needed visitor management plans, set the tone for seeing that the "national park experience" is not adversely impacted by overcrowding, ensure that natural resources are not adversely impacted, and develop priorities for how best to use Land and Water Conservation Fund and Great American Outdoor Act dollars in the parks.

It's been more than four-and-a-half years since there has been a Senate-confirmed Park Service director. How much longer can the agency drift without a rudder?