Should you visit Mesa Verde National Park this summer?/Tom Ribe

Summer is here. Americas are hitting the road for the national parks by the tens of thousands. People from all over the country are tired of coronavirus lockdown and they are breaking free to public lands like national parks. Totally understandable, but should YOU join the rush to the national parks? For many reasons, the answer is a firm no!

Come on! Grand Canyon National Park is 1,218,600 acres and Great Smoky Mountains National Park is 522,000 acres. Most Western parks are huge and far from the cities. Shouldn’t we be able to spread out and find some distance? Surely coronavirus isn’t lurking in the hills and canyons?

In fact, most national park facilities are designed to channel people to destinations like visitor centers, rest rooms, overlooks, and walks through giant trees. People cluster together to see Old Faithful erupt for example, and when asked why the National Park Service staff was not keeping people from crowding together at Old Faithful, Yellowstone Superintendent Cameron Sholly said, “The NPS is not going to be the social distancing police.” “Yellowstone staff will not be actively telling citizens to spread out and put masks on, especially outdoors,” Sholly continued. “We don’t have control over massive groups of people at Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone or Old Faithful.”

Rangers at Yellowstone have strict rules for how close visitors can get to bison and bears, but keeping people apart is a new problem. Disneyland has recently opened with strict rules for social distancing as have many state parks. But the National Park Service, with no national director, seems flummoxed by this problem.

Most national park staff want to protect the public from crowding where they will spread the virus and cause pandemic spikes and deaths. Yet orders from Washington have short-circuited local attempts to slow the tourist onslaught or regulate the number of people entering the parks. And in places like New Mexico, where tourism is a major part of the economy, the governor has specifically limited access to tourist destinations to protect small towns from out of state virus carriers. Out-of-state visitors have to isolate themselves for 14 days before visiting tourist destinations like national parks.

The NPS’s own epidemiologist said in a memo to employees in April; “Continued NPS visitation not only threatens our workforce but uniquely enhances COVID-19 risks in the neighboring communities and visitors and increases the risk of negative outcomes for all.”

Gateway communities, like Springdale, Utah, near the overly popular Zion National Park, have limited hospital facilities, yet they have thousands of visitors on their streets every day when the park is open. Normally towns welcome money from tourists, but now they worry more about contracting the virus from visitors.

Even so, the Trump administration wants America to return to normal in an election season and the federal parks must do their part to supply needed normalcy optics. The Centers for Disease Control tells the public to stay 6 feet away from non-family-members, yet the Trump Interior Department has not told NPS staff to enforce social distancing and has not given staff gear to protect themselves from infected people.

Donald Trump ordered the national parks to reopen on Earth Day. Leaders of the National Park Service at the various parks had struggled to close the parks only a few weeks earlier to protect the public and staff from the rapidly spreading coronavirus. Now the president was reopening the parks and National Park Service staff reacted with fear and anger as their bosses in the Interior Department told them to open up regardless of state and local public health orders.

Dustin Stone, a NPS employee in Alaska told the Daily Beast: “Being told over and over again that, ‘the system is working, trust the system, it’s taking its time,’ was like being given the middle finger over and over again,” Stone said of his bosses in an interview. “There is no time for bureaucracy right now when hours are so important.” Stone quit his job to protect himself from covid19.

“We feel our boss is not meeting up with our pleas… It’s political, to keep up the image,” one Grand Canyon ranger told the Daily Beast.

Federal firefighters are finding themselves in a similar predicament. These are the people who put out forest or grass fires, most of which are caused by people visiting public lands like national parks. Firefighters crowd together in trucks and in camps when they are working on a fire and social distancing is very difficult in those circumstances. Even so the Trump administration has been telling firefighters to work as usual regardless of the risk while giving little help protecting themselves from covid19.

“Firefighters are essential but not expendable” says Michael Beasley of Firefighters United for Safety Ethics and Ecology. The group has been helping push a bill in Congress to grant workman’s comp claims to firefighters who get covid19 on the job. The Trump Interior department has been denying such claims. Senator Tom Udall and others introduced a bill to protect firefighters this week.

And the National Park Service has the legal tools to protect the parks from overcrowding — they just don’t use them. The National Parks and Recreation Act of 1978 requires the Park Service to establish carrying capacities for all areas, yet few parks have. Local politicians push for maximum visitation to parks to increase business revenues in their states. The National Park Service leadership in Washington has discouraged limiting the number of visitors to parks because of political pressure to maximize commerce in nearby businesses.

The bottom line; visiting national parks this summer is dangerous and nobody is going to protect you from the hazards of mixing with potentially sick people from all over the country. Much as the national park rangers would like to protect you, they are not being given the tools or guidance to do that. They are afraid we will give them Covid-19 and we may get it from them.

So, if you need to get outdoors, stay closer to home, find a remote trail or beach where you will not encounter crowds. Keep focused on the threat of the coronavirus even when the president and many other people clearly have lost interest.

Tom Ribe is a journalist specializing in natural resources, renewable energy, travel and science. He lives in northern New Mexico.