National Parks Traveler

Three decades after I was first told that Americans were loving their parks to death, some of the patients seem in need of life-support in the National Park System. 

Hyperbole?

Perhaps a bit. Yet a small but growing number of superintendents are concerned, as evidenced by their words or their turn to reservation plans to try to manage the crush.

Back in 1992, sitting in the office of Marshall Gingery, at the time the deputy superintendent of Grand Teton National Park, he lamented the demands and impacts of the growing visitation to the park system. 

"I just read recently, on the celebration of our 75th anniversary, the Park Service is caught in between hearing the call of the wild and hearing the call of the city," Gingery told me for a story I was working on as The Associated Press's correspondent-in-charge for Wyoming. "Of all the threats to the parks, many believe the greatest threat is the one posed by the visitor."

For some perspective, at the time there were 50 "national parks," and annual visitation to the park system had reached 257 million in 1992, a more than doubling of the 127 million who visited in 1970. Grand Teton welcomed 1.7 million visitors in 1992, and Yellowstone National Park next door counted 3.1 million.

Today, there are 63 "national parks," and 423 units of the National Park System. Visitation in 2021 reached 297.1 million, a rebound from Covid-wracked 2020. Grand Teton saw its annual visitation soar to 3.8 million, while Yellowstone approached 5 million, with a tally of 4,860,242. Are they all coming for a national park experience, or for an Instagram moment and then off down the road to the next park?

While last year's visitation was welcomed by National Park Service Director Chuck Sams -- “It’s wonderful to see so many Americans continuing to find solace and inspiration in these incredible places during the second year of the pandemic," he said -- the Park Service visitation numbers also showed a disconcerting trend that about half of those 297.1 million park travelers had just 25 parks on their minds. That fact didn't slip past Sams.

“We’re happy to see so many visitors returning to iconic parks like Yellowstone and Yosemite, but there are hundreds more that should be on everyone’s bucket list," the director said in an appeal for park travelers to spread out. "Whatever experience you’re looking for in 2022, national parks are here to discover.”

In 2017, Angels Landing in Zion National Park at times saw 1,200 hikers per hour. This summer you'll need a reservation/NPS file

Where The Crowds Are

Signs of crowding, and overcrowding, can be spotted across the National Park System. Yosemite National Park just announced that reservations would be needed this summer; Arches National Park will be testing a reservations system; Rocky Mountain National Park is bringing back its reservation system; ditto for Glacier National Park, with an extension into the North Fork area of that park.

Zion National Park expects you to reserve your place on the trail to Angels Landing, and word on the street is that Yellowstone just might do something similar if you want to walk the boardwalk around Grand Prismatic Spring. Last year Great Smoky Mountains National Park asked you to reserve a parking spot at the Laurel Falls Trailhead, though it's not expected to be required this year.

On Thursday, the Blue Ridge Parkway announced that nearly 16 million visited that scenic drive in 2021...and Superintendent Tracy Swarthout voiced some concerns over that turnout.

“While overall Parkway visitation has remained relatively stable over the past five to ten years, some of the park's most popular destinations are seeing the impacts of heavy visitation,” she said. “Overcrowding at popular locations can lead to diminished visitor experience and damage to park resources. These impacts can often be avoided by recreating responsibly. With 469 miles to explore, we encourage you to find new ways to enjoy the Parkway this year.”

Better yet, perhaps the messaging from overrun parks should be a slight twist on the Park Service's 2016 centennial messaging. Instead of "Find Your Park," perhaps the Park Service should be telling us more often to go "Find Another Park." 

But, as one superintendent told me, "in 33 years in the Service, I have not ever seen anything done to address that elephant [crowding] in the room."

Are you, the park visitors, bothered or concerned by the crowding? Is your national park experience adversely impacted by the crowds in Yellowstone, Yosemite, Rocky Mountain, and many of the other top 25 parks as ranked by visitation? Have you decided to bypass parks with reservatations?

There's no question that seeing Old Faithful erupt, or hiking to the top of Half Dome, or riding Trail Ridge Road create memories for a lifetime. At the same time, have we grown unconscious to the crowds and the impacts they bring to the park experience and park resources? Indeed, how do you define "national park experience"?

As generations of park travelers come and go, do expectations lessen when it comes to those crowds?

"We need more large parklands with the facilities, to spread the crowds out," Stephen Milton wrote on the Traveler's Facebook page. "Otherwise, as this culture is nowadays, a handful of parks are going to be trampled to death."

Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota is a great place to escape the crowds and enjoy the setting that grabbed Theodore Roosevelt/Kurt Repanshek file

Where There Are Few, If Any, Crowds

It's certainly debatable whether more large parks are needed to disperse the crowds. But the crowds that are descending on some parks are greatly impacting the visitor experience, and not in a good way. 

It doesn't have to be that way. There are incredible units of the national forest system that will take your breath away (Sawtooth NRA, anyone?). And really, within the current 423-unit National Park System there are many dozens of incredible parks outside the top 25 that merit not only your attention, but your visit.

Instead of being one of the more than 3 million to visit Cape Hatteras National Seashore this year (3.2 million hit the beaches there last year), check out the solitude at neighboring Cape Lookout National Seashore, where the 2021 tally was a roomy 562,461. Sure, the experience is more rustic, but it's also extraordinary, especially with the extra elbow room.

With the 250th anniversary of United States looming in 2026, you'll likely find fewer crowds this year at places such as Valley Forge National Historical Park, Moores Creek National Battlefield, and Saratoga National Historic Site than you can expect in the coming years. Why wait for the crowds to join you? Looking for wide open spaces in the West? Consider a road trip to Wind Cave National Park, Jewel Cave National Park, and Badlands National Park in South Dakota. You won't be disappointed. Trees turned into colorful rocks? They exist at Petrified Forest National Park (top photo).

Mesa Verde National Park certainly is a culturally rich unit of the park system, but within an hour of Flagstaff, Arizona, you can seen similar vestiges of the past at Walnut Canyon National Monument, Wupatki National Monument, Montezuma Castle National Monument, and Tuzigoot National Monument. Without the crowds.

The list goes on and on. Theodore Roosevelt National Park. Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. Little River Canyon National Preserve. Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park. Colorado National Monument. New Bedford Whaling National Historical Park. Salem Maritime National Historic Site. Grant-Kohrs Ranch National Historic Site.

Across the park system you'll find not only wonderful scenery, but rich history and stories that reflect and explain the American experience, sites that interpret prehistoric cultures, and sites that offer windows into the time of dinosaurs.

Politics Over Resources

No doubt, part of the problem with today's crowding are the economics, and the politics, tied to the top 25 and the pressures on the Park Service not to cap visitation. 

Back in 1992 during my visit to Grand Teton, Pete Hayden, at the time the park's chief of resource management, offered this perspective:

"I think sometime around 30 years ago they [the Park Service] got into a mindset that we are a political entity. Therefore, we have politically knowledgeable people to manage our areas," he explained. "In a lot of cases ... those people came out a little shortchanged in the resource end. I mean, everything was negotiable.

"From my perspective, none of the resources of a national park are negotiable. Period," maintained Hayden, who at the time was approaching 30 years in Grand Teton. "That doesn't sit too well with management anymore, or some segments of the public."

During my work on that 1992 story I also interviewed John Varley, at the time Yellowstone's chief of research.

"The single biggest threat to this park, or any other park in the lower 48, is encroaching civilization," Varley said. "And though we hang on to all of the things that Yellowstone is famous for and had originally 119 years ago, at some point the straw is going to break the camel's back and it will all start to come unraveled."

Today, with Yellowstone about to turn 150 years old as a national park, the camel's back isn't broken, but it surely must be aching just a bit. For while only about 1 percent of the park has roads and development, that's where more than 90 percent of the visitation is focused.

How can the overcrowded parks recover? Short of prolonged global economic depression, both stringent crowd management and your decision to go find another park would move things in the right direction.