Zion National Park officials are considering a move to require visitors to have reservations to enter the park/Kurt Repanshek

In a move that could signal the future of your national park vacation, Zion National Park officials are thinking of moving to a reservation system for entry into the iconic red rock cathedral to protect resources and ensure the enjoyment of visitors.

It's an idea being considered more and more in recent years by superintendents as record-breaking crowds strain places like Yellowstone, Yosemite, Glacier, Grand Canyon, Zion, and many other parks. There likely will be pushback to Zion's proposals. But park staff, budgets, the tight confines of 6-mile-long Zion Canyon, and today's growing crowds cast a reservation system as perhaps the best way to help superintendents meet the National Park Service Organic Act's overriding directive: 

... to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations." 

"On Memorial Day Sunday, we had 30,300 people in the park that day," John Marciano, the park's public affairs spokesman, said Saturday. "That's nuts. No one has a good time."

More and more times during the year, the Virgin River in the Zion Narrows is overcrowded/NPS

To provide visitors with a better experience in the park, and to better protect natural resources, Zion officials are seeking public comment through August 14 on three proposals:

• Alternative A: Make no changes from the current visitor management system.
• Alternative B: Require all visitors to obtain a reservation for their stay. With this reservation, they would be allowed to go to any of the park's frontcountry areas, places such as Zion Narrows, Angels Landing, and Observation Point.
• Alternative C: In addition to needing a reservation to enter the park, you'd need specific reservations if you wanted to enter Zion Narrows or hike to the top of Angels Landing. Day hikers heading into wilderness areas also would need to obtain permits.

A reservation system, if implemented, would apply to all areas of the park, from Zion Canyon and Checkerboard Mesa to the Kolob Canyon corner of the park.

Driving the process is overcrowding to the point where it can jeopordize safety and damage the park's natural resources. While there are roughly 13 miles of official trails in Zion Canyon, officials say there are more than 30 miles of visitor-created unofficial trails there.

"The longer we wait, the worse the condition of the resource gets," said Mr. Marciano.

Visitation to Zion has gone up 60 percent over the past decade, to more than 4.3 million a year. While the park years ago moved to requiring visitors to ride shuttle buses into the famous canyon unless they had lodging reservations, the shuttle system has bogged down with increasing demand.

"Visitors are experiencing long lines for basic services," said the park's newsletter that announced the reservation proposals. "The shuttles are routinely over capacity, with buses that have a capacity of 68 seated riders commonly being filled with between 95 and 100 people.

"Vehicular traffic is often backing up along roadways into Springdale, causing traffic congestion problems there," the newsletter went on. "Trails, campgrounds, and other infrastructure are seeing wear and tear more quickly and faster than funding allows for repairs."

Visitor safety also is at risk, as the number of emergency response calls for rangers "has increased exponentially, and emergency response can be delayed because of traffic congestion," said park officials.

Alternative C would also improve traffic flow from the South Entrance along the Zion-Mount Carmel Highway to the East Entrance by prohibiting oversized vehicles -- large RVs, tour buses, motor homes, and travel trailers -- from traveling that route. Alternative B would restrict those oversized vehicles to specific time windows in mornings and evenings.

Alternative B and C also would move the South Campground to a reservation system; it currently operates on a first-come, first-served basis.

Discarded from consideration in the effort to better manage crowds and protect resources was congestion pricing, also known as surge pricing.

"National park units are a public resource, and to the extent possible, should remain affordable to visitors across a range of financial status," the park newsletter said. "Congestion pricing could place unfair financial burdens on some visitors, as price points during peak vacation times would likely need to be very high to maintain visitor capacity by dissuading park visitors from entering during crowded times through paying a high rate."

In developing the proposals open for public consideration, park officials reviewed available data -- "We know how many people come into the canyon every day. We have a breakdown of big vehicles, small vehicles, people who walk in, drive through. We have that breakdown," said Mr. Marciano. "We also have (hiker) numbers for trails, Angels Landing, etc." -- and discussed the issue and possible solutions with Park Service staff in both the Intermountain Region Office in Denver and the agency headquarters in Washington, D.C.

If a final decision is made to go with a reservation system of some sort -- either Alternative B, Alternative C, or some sort of hybrid -- then Zion staff will have to settle on a daily visitor capacity.

Details of the proposal, and a page to comment, can be found at this site.

In a common scene at Zion in summer, traffic backs up from the South Entrance down into the gateway community of Springdale/Kurt Repanshek