Our personal vehicles may have made it possible for most Americans to travel widely, but there are definite tradeoffs. We're all familiar with the negative impacts of too many cars, SUVs, and RVs on the environment—and being caught in a traffic jam or spending a big chunk of your vacation looking for a parking place doesn't add to the enjoyment of a park visit.
Shuttle bus systems are growing in popularity as one solution to those problems, so for your convenience, the Traveler is providing the following overview of those systems at some popular NPS sites around the country.
Check the following links for each park for details, including the season of operation, and be aware that even though most of these systems are free, payment of the usual park entrance fee is still required to enter the respective parks. That's not unreasonable—those entrance fees help fund many of these systems.
If you've visited Rocky Mountain National Park and the gateway community of Estes Park, Colorado during the summer, you know that traffic can be a challenge at time. A nicely integrated shuttle bus system which joins Estes Park with some key stops in the park went into operation last weekend, and it can make visits to the area a lot more pleasant for the rest of the summer.
Rocky Mountain's shuttle system includes two routes which provide access to Bear Lake, other trailheads, the Moraine Park Visitor Center, and Moraine Park and Glacier Basin Campgrounds. A separate express route known as the hiker shuttle runs from the Town of Estes Park Visitor Center to the park's Beaver Meadows Visitor Center and then into the park, where it connects with the two park routes. The Town of Estes Park “Visitor Shuttle” will operate on three routes daily through Labor Day, and on weekends through September.
Grand Canyon National Park operates an excellent free shuttle system with five separate routes on the South Rim. The routes interconnect, but do not overlap, and all buses are equipped with bicycle racks, making it possible for visitors to bike one way and ride the shuttle the other. The Tusayan Route provides "park & ride" shuttle bus service between the gateway community of Tusayan, seven miles south of the South Rim Village, and the park.
One of the earliest entries in the park shuttle business was Yosemite National Park The park's free system includes service in Yosemite Valley as well as to outlying areas such as Wawona and the Mariposa Grove of Giant Sequoias and Tuolumne Meadows. For a fee, separate bus service and tours are available to Glacier Point, various trailheads on the Tioga Road, and neighboring communities.
Two free shuttle routes are available at Sequoia-Kings Canyon National Park (California). Stops include Wuksachi Lodge, Lodgepole Visitor Center, the Sherman Tree, Giant Forest Museum, the Moro Rock staircase, then over to sequoia-ringed Crescent Meadow. A separate for-fee service runs from the City of Visalia, through Three Rivers, and up to the Giant Forest Museum, where you can transfer to the two park routes.
At Zion National Park (Utah), the Springdale Shuttle stops at six locations in the gateway community of Springdale, and the Zion Canyon Shuttle loop stops at eight locations in the park. The transfer between loops is made at the Zion Canyon Visitor Center and the system is free.
Bryce Canyon National Park (Utah) encourages (but doesn't require) visitors who are not staying overnight in the park to park outside the park entrance and use the free shuttle, which serves key stops in the park. Bryce Canyon also offers a free daily guided tour to Rainbow Point, which takes four hours and covers 40 miles with stops along many of the park’s scenic viewpoints. Reservations are required and can be made up to 24 hours in advance. Details are available on the park website.
A combination of free and for-fee bus service is available at Denali National Park (Alaska). The free entrance area shuttles serve what the name implies; for a fee you can reserve a seat on the concessioner-operated shuttle system, which serves destinations along the entire 91-mile length of the road into the park. This is the only way to reach the interior during most of the year; for an additional fee, an interpretive tour bus will provide a more formal narrated experience during the trip.
Glacier National Park's free shuttle service began in 2007 as a way to reduce traffic on the Going-to-the-Sun Road during the multi-year rehabilitation project of that iconic scenic highway. The system connects the east and west sides of the park over that route, and I'd highly recommend it as an alternative to driving your own vehicle.
Here's an offer that sounds hard to beat: Mount Rainier National Park (Washington) is offering a free weekend shuttle to Paradise. Visitors have the option to begin outside the park in Ashford, Washington or inside the park at Longmire and Cougar Rock. Due to construction in the Paradise area, parking is limited and traffic moves slowly, so those who choose to drive their own vehicle instead of the taking the shuttle may feel their intended trip to Paradise ended up in that opposite destination.
Shuttle bus options aren't limited to western parks.
One of the most comprehensive systems is found at Acadia National Park (Maine), where Island Explorer buses provide service between park destinations, local communities, and the Bar Harbor-Hancock County Regional Airport. Regularly scheduled buses stop at specific destinations in the park—including campgrounds, carriage road entrances, and many trailheads. You can also flag down buses along their route; drivers will pick up passengers anywhere it is safe to stop.
The free Historic Triangle Shuttle connects two separate sites in Virginia's Colonial National Historical Park—Jamestown and Yorktown Battlefield—with the third side of the Historic Triangle, Williamsburg. The two routes of the Historic Triangle Shuttle depart at 30 minute intervals from the Colonial Williamsburg Visitor Center, one traveling along the Colonial Parkway to Jamestown, the other following the Parkway to Yorktown. After arriving at Jamestown and Yorktown, visitors use additional free shuttle services to the various attractions at those two destinations.
One of the newest entries in the park shuttle world is Valley Forge National Historical Park, which is "experimenting with a free shuttle around the park." The Revolutionary Shuttle runs at 15 to 20-minute intervals throughout the day.
Private companies also offer a variety of additional for-fee tours and shuttle services in parks, as well as transportation between parks and nearby communities. Check individual park sites on the NPS website for the latest ways to let someone else do the driving, while you enjoy the scenery.
Comments
The Denali shuttle bus system is an epic nature tour.
Ray -
I absolutely agree with you about the Denali bus system - one of the best bargains anywhere.
My wife and I used it two years ago, and had an incredible trip. I was free to enjoy the wildlife and scenery instead of having to concentrate on driving, and even though we chose the less expensive "shuttle" instead of the "interpretative tour," our driver did an outstanding job of narration and answering questions.
I can also recall the "old days" at Grand Canyon, when the sunset traffic jams on the West Rim Drive were a mess - when the parking areas along the Rim filled up, people just pulled off the road anywhere (no concern about impacts on the resource) or simply parked with their car blocking part of the road. The shuttle system is a huge improvement on all counts.
This article dovetails nicely with comments made on the "Get Your Free National Parks 'Owners Guide' from the National Park Foundation" story (although I think I failed to recognize "tongue-in-cheek" before I responded).
Frank, a climate change convertee?;-)
In the parks these shuttles do help reduce overall CO2 emissions by taking personal vehicles off the roads, and some reduce CO2 emissions further by relying on cleaner burning propane (ie, the Island Explorer at Acadia).
Your sarcasm aside, your point about the greater CO2 emissions being generated by traveling to a park is well made. That said, I'm sure you'd agree there's not a single over-night solution to wiping out these emissions. People are going to travel. But technology continues to evolve and I'm optimistic we'll see cleaner travel options as the months and years go by.
At the same time, the national parks are working to both reduce their own carbon footprints and help individuals learn how to reduce their own footprints. For instance, on Zion National Park's website you can find this page, which offers tips on reducing fuel use, water use, detergent use by lodges, and even addresses the emissions associated with flying and how you might offset your share of those.
A perfect, immediate, solution? No. But it's definitely helping move society in the right direction.
:) AMEN!
Damn, Frank, ya got me.
I'm no earth scientist, I'm a leftist hypocrite, and I drank the climate-change Kool-Aid.
I've placed misguided belief in scientists who are not fly-by-nighters beholden to environmental terrorists but rather who have made careers out of studying the Earth and its systems and how humans impact those systems.
I've pledged blind faith to the Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change, a scientific body comprised of some of the best scientific minds in the world, one that is said to reflect the consensus of the international scientific community, one that publishes reports -- based on peer-reviewed studies, mind you -- only after they are gone through line by line and word by word and approved by all member countries.
I read E.O. Wilson.
Too, I've been misled to learn that CO2 isn't the only greenhouse gas driving the climate, but that others impacting the atmosphere include methane, nitrous oxide, the entire family of hydrofluorocarbons, the entire family of perfluorocarbons, sulphur hexafluoride, nitrogen trifluoride, trifluoromethyl sulphur pentafluoride, halogenated ethers, and other halocarbons, and so obviously have wrongly come to accept that there's not just one culprit.
I've also taken the IPCC's word that "carbon dioxide radiative forcing increased by 20% from 1995 to 2005, the largest change for any decade in at least the last 200 years."
(*Radiative forcing is a measure of the influence that a factor has in altering the balance of incoming and outgoing energy in the Earth-atmosphere system and is an index of the importance of the factor as a potential climate change mechanism -- IPCC, 2007: Summary for Policymakers. In: Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Solomon, S., D. Qin, M. Manning, Z. Chen, M. Marquis, K.B. Averyt, M.Tignor and H.L. Miller (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA.)
I could continue, but you get the point, and you refute the point.
Global temperature change and "environmental Armageddon"? This from a September 2008 Washington Post article:
But then, you no doubt view media as leftist pawns.
You're right, Frank. To avoid hypocrisy the Traveler should be a fear-mongering portal that urges the NPS to lock the gates to the parks and tells travelers to stay at home, sell their cars, and cancel their electrical service unless it's derived from solar or wind power. Of course, I suppose we should also pull the plug on the Traveler itself to save the planet so folks don't waste electricity by firing up their own computers to read our drivel.
You're right. Let's let somebody else try to build more advocates for the national parks, let someone else point out the current science, the growing impacts of climate change on the parks and their resources, the possible solutions that we all can participate in.
Geez Frank, with all the hypocrisy on this site, it really does amaze me that you read it.
Unless it's derived from wind or solar??? Since when is wiping out thousands of acres of wild land, only to string thousands of miles of inefficient powerlines the answer?!
And in midst of the above discussion--I welcome the park shuttle systems described in the story as one positive - if even small - change from the status quo.