Crowds at Grand Prismatic Spring in Yellowstone/NPS

Proposals ranging from no barriers to visitation in the National Park System to better management of visitors entering and exploring parks were floated Tuesday during a House subcommittee hearing on how to deal with overcrowded parks, but no consensus materialized and whether the issue will be revisited in the next Congress remains to be seen.

The 90-minute hearing raised many of the issues facing visitors to the park system: Near-impossible odds of obtaining camping reservations through recreation.gov, crowded areas in the parks, and occasionally long lines backed up behind entrance stations. Staffing shortages in the parks also were mentioned as part of the problem when it comes to managing the crowds, and the park system's ongoing maintenance backlog also was cited as an impediment to visitation.

Absent from the House Natural Resources Committee's Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations was National Park Service Director Chuck Sams, who was on a previously planned trip to Hawaii to participate in the Pearl Harbor anniversary commemoration. Subbing for the director was Zion National Park Superintendent Jeff Bradybaugh, who acknowledged to the committee that it has become more challenging in some parks to ensure enjoyable visits because of crowding.

"The past few years have reminded us how important national parks and public lands are to our overall well-being. Ensuring visitors have enjoyable experiences, however, is becoming increasingly challenging in most of our popular parks," said Bradybaugh, who testified from his office in Utah. 

At Zion, the superintendent said the implementation of reservations for visitors to hike to the top of Angels Landing had improved the visitor experience on that steep and narrow trail, but he acknowledged that one size does not fit all when it comes to managing visitors across the park system, and that park-wide reservation programs might not be needed if congestion is isolated in an area.

When asked why Zion doesn't yet have a visitor use management plan despite launching the effort in 2016, Bradybaugh said engaging all the stakeholders and understanding visitor behavior takes time.

"The National Park Service is committed to collaborating with local communities, businesses, and nonprofit partners to find solutions that improve the quality and inclusivity of visitor experiences addressed congestion in a thoughtful way and maintain the tremendous range of benefits that national parks provide," he said. "One of the principal lessons learned, and key to really all of our management actions, is to develop partnerships and work with our local communities. We know that visitors don't just come to national parks, they are welcomed in our gateway communities. They attend businesses, support an economy in our region. We have nonprofit partners that assist us in planning and provide some funds that help us in those ways. What's really important is to engage with the local community, local elected officials or state tourism organizations or departments of transportation, that we need to coordinate both within and outside the park while we're dealing with traffic congestion in particular."

But the committee's chair, Rep. Katie Porter, D-California, noted that while Congress in 1978 directed the National Park Service to specify visitor capacities for each and every park, few have actually done so and wondered why. Bradybaugh didn't directly answer the question, but pointed to the lengths park staff go to prepare visitor use plans that address capacities.

Crowds on Angels Landing in Zion prior to the reservation system/NPS

"We were trying to be very deliberate about our process in our engagement with our cooperating agencies, which include four county commissions, the state of Utah through their Office of Tourism and public lands policy office, our gateway community, [U.S.] Bureau of Land Management, which manages a great deal of federal land surrounding us. These are important connections and these agencies bring specific expertise, knowledge and experience, to the questions that were involving crowding and congestion and parks," he said.

"As we work on alternatives for a plan, we're considering education, how we relate to the information to the visitors, or trip planning, how we may target specific infrastructure investments, and how we need to adjust day to day operations," the superintendent continued. "Those are some of the basic elements in a plan. But there's also a lot of information that needs to be collected. We've invested over a decade of research and information collection to discern what the  visitor use patterns are for Zion and the surrounding area. As I mentioned earlier, we have to consider that visitors are coming to parks, but they are in a larger environment in a regional setting, and so we needs to have information, and technical expertise, from these other agencies."

Throughout the hearing Rep. Blake Moore, R-Utah, said there should be no barriers to visitation, but acknowledged that parks need more staff to manage visitors.

"Our parks should resist the temptation to simply limit the number of visitors who can enter," the Republican said. "Instead, we should pursue innovative and common sense solutions that address the challenges of overcrowding while maintaining access to our parks for the greatest number of people."

Supporting that position was Hannah Downey, the policy director for the Property and Environment Research Center, a free-market-espousing think tank based in Bozeman, Montana.

"Americans are rediscovering the outdoors in record numbers. Recently, park visitation grew by more than 20 percent in just three years, and it has stayed high," she said, referring to Yellowstone National Park. "Despite overall system visitation growth, the impacts are not felt equally. Last year, 44 out of the 423 National Park System units set records for visitation, and parks hosted a total of 297 million recreation visits. More than half of those visits, however, were to just the 25 most-visited parks in the country, representing just 6 percent of the National Park System. To further complicate matters, those visitors do not disperse evenly. 

"Yellowstone National Park, for example, estimates that 98 percent of visitors never get more than a half-mile away from their car, using just 1 percent of the park," Downey noted. "While it is encouraging to see widespread enthusiasm for our parks, congestion in popular areas is negatively impacting visitors, Park Service personnel, and the natural resources that our parks were created to protect."

Downey said there were two keys to addressing crowding in parks: Give superintendents the flexibility to be creative in managing visitation, and give the Park Service more money to tackle deferred maintenance.

"The deferred maintenance backlog now totals nearly $22 billion and includes everything from eroding trails, crumbling roads, failing wastewater systems and dilapidated visitor facilities," she said. "Significant funding was provided through the Great American Outdoors Act, but the reality is that the underlying issue remains unresolved, which is a lack of attention to routine maintenance."

The PERC representative said Congress could help with the maintenance issue by reauthorizing the Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act, which provides parks with a stream of money from entrance fees. As FLREA was envisioned and set up, the revenues from entrance fees and other approved programs go to enhance the visitor experience. That could be through better facilities, more interpretive programs, or restored habitat. While Downey said park superintendents should have more latitude to spend those dollars "where they are most needed on the ground to improve the park visitor experience," former Park Service Director Jon Jarvis during his tenure directed superintendents to spend 55 percent of FLREA dollars towards deferred maintenance.

Better use of technology to help visitors avoid congested areas also should be put to use, she said.

"Another approach is to look at how we can better encourage visitors to explore public lands outside of a park on busy days," said Downey. "These approaches will have to be unique to each national park and done in coordinated manner with neighboring public land managers and gateway communities. The National Park Service can also explore how to better feature less popular parks."

Frank Dean, the CEO and president of the Yosemite Conservancy, as well as the chair of the National Park Service Friends Alliance, an organization of more than 100 partners that raise charitable dollars for parks, told the committee that reservation systems can be helpful in managing visitation.

"In 2019 Yosemite National Park experienced near-record visitation with 4.5 million visitors. There was traffic congestion and even gridlock in July and August of 2019," Dean said from his California office. "The number of cars at Yosemite Valley exceeded the maximum cap that was established by a U.S. District Court settlement in 2014, making the park vulnerable to possible litigation from conservation groups. At the request of the Park Service, Yosemite Conservancy retained a transportation planner in 2019 to collect traffic data and identify possible solutions, including tracking how long people actually stayed inside the park. This data and planning would prove to be crucial to reopening Yosemite during the global pandemic. COVID-19 pandemic forced Yosemite to close in March of 2020. National Park Service managers, in conjunction with Department of Interior officials in Washington, agreed to reopen Yosemite in June of 2020 at reduced service levels and required to use reservations for visitors not staying in the park campgrounds or hotels."

While the reservation system helped manage traffic flows in Yosemite, Dean said there was a problem with informing the public about the system, part of which stemmed from the lack of bilingual messaging. Going forward, he said, Yosemite officials later this week will begin a process that could lead to a long-term plan for managing visitation.

The hearing touched briefly on recreation.gov, the portal used to reserve everything from campground sites to backcountry permits, and the frustration many users have with the system. According to testimony given the committee, someone trying to reserve a campsite has a 0.3 percent chance of landing the desired reservation.

The hearing was the committee's last for this session of Congress.