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As my kids have gotten older, hiking has become one of our favorite activities. I live a short ways from the Adirondack Mountains and Adirondack Park, so the sky’s the limit for hiking opportunities. Earlier this summer I read about a trend that many ADKers find disturbing: too many people are visiting the park. Trailheads are becoming so crowded that visitors create dangerous situations on holidays and weekends as cars spill out onto the roads. Trails and summits are often crowded with throngs of selfie-taking tourists. Perhaps worst of all, inexperienced hikers create medical emergencies by attempting some of the 4,000+ ft. peaks they’ve heard to be “easier” without water, food, or adequate gear, stressing local rescue organizations.
This trend isn’t limited to my region: national parks around the US are becoming overwhelmed with visitors. The 229-square mile Zion National Park in Utah regularly tweets that its parking areas or campgrounds are full. Zion is relatively small for a national park, but it receives 4.3 million visitors per year, as many as Yellowstone in Wyoming, which is fifteen times larger. Parking issues aside, trails in Zion and other parks are now peppered with throngs of people, a sight that disappoints solitude-seeking hikers. Visitors to Zion have to contend with packed charter buses from California and Nevada and often have to wait 1 to 2 hours just to enter the park. And of course, heavy foot traffic leads to ecological damage, especially when many tourists don’t know or care about policies like Leave No Trace.
Bucket lists and social media are commonly cited as reasons for the overcrowding. Early in 2016, for example, Utah’s Office of Tourism started a campaign encouraging a visit to the state’s Mighty Five parks: Zion, Arches, Canyonlands, Bryce, and Capitol Reef. It was so successful that visiting the Mighty Five is now common on European and Asian bucket lists, causing a huge uptick in traffic. Social media is self-explanatory: a hiker takes a crazy selfie on a mountain peak or canyon edge, and like magic all of his or her contacts want the same experience.
This problem is obviously complex, and doesn’t have an easy solution. National parks want visitors, but not to the extent that the parks are destroyed or heavily altered in the process. Building up additional infrastructure like roads and hotels would alleviate congestion problems but also take away from a park’s pristine natural effects. A lottery system has merit as a potential solution. Several popular national park activities—such as a hike up Half Dome in Yosemite or a paddling trip up the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon—use lottery systems to ensure a relatively tranquil experience for visitors.
While overcrowding is recently escalating at parks like Zion and Yosemite, concerns about harmful visitor effects began soon after Yellowstone’s founding in 1872. Early visitors to Yellowstone actually dumped laundry soap into geysers to enhance eruptions. John Muir worried about mixing Yosemite’s fresh air with automobile exhaust. And National Parks Service Director Conrad Wirth wrote this to President Eisenhower over 60 years ago in 1956:
“The problem of today is simply that the parks are being loved to death. They are neither equipped nor staffed to protect their irreplaceable resources, nor to take care of their increasing millions of visitors.
Here is the attendance picture: 358 thousand visitors in 1916; 21 million in 1941; 50 million last year; and by 1966, the parks will have at least 80 million visitors. Are all of these 50 million people finding [...] the unspoiled refreshment they seek and deserve?”
Wirth might be horrified to learn that 307 million visited national parks in 2015. Whether national parks decide to accommodate floods of visitors or take stricter measures like enforcing reservations or lotteries, any solution is a delicate balance.
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Re: Are America's National Parks Too Popular?
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