The line of vehicles waiting to enter Yosemite Valley stretched back many miles along California State Route 140 on a Tuesday morning in July. engines that are not running. Kids in the rear seats are beginning to inquire. The granite walls that have attracted tourists for more than a century could be seen in the distance as the valley rim, but reaching it required standing in a traffic line with no set end time. Eventually, a few families changed their ways. Others waited while they sat. Some, it seems, had already done their homework and were somewhere else.
Although American tourists have been moving away from the biggest, most well-known national parks and toward smaller, more tranquil options for some time, a number of particular changes over the last few years have further expedited this trend. Timed-entry reservation systems, which were implemented to handle peak-season overflow, were removed from parks like Yosemite due to political pressure and concerns from local accommodation companies who claimed the reservations were hurting their bottom line.
In hindsight, the outcome of their removal was predictable: in the absence of a capacity management tool, summer visitation reverted to the uncontrolled spike that the reservations were intended to prevent, resulting in precisely the Disney World-style traffic backups that overcrowding critics had been warning about.
In a more fundamental approach, the personnel situation has exacerbated the crowding issue. Due to government budget cuts, the National Park Service has lost about a fifth of its permanent staff. The remaining rangers and maintenance personnel are dispersed throughout the same area as before, but with a much smaller workforce. There is not enough staff in visitor centers. The ability to respond to emergencies in remote locations has been weakened. The current experience may seem like a diminished version of what it was in the past to tourists who have visited a major park recently and have different memories of it, such as more visible rangers, more operational amenities, and quicker reaction to issues on the path.
Uncontrollably large crowds and a lack of staff have subtly become a factor in people’s decision-making. That process has been aided by social media. For the next 10,000 individuals making similar travel plans, someone who traveled four hours to Yellowstone, spent two days stuck in traffic and was unable to get a place at Old Faithful, and then blogged about it in detail on a travel forum has produced helpful knowledge. Both the information about overcrowded parks and the information about parks that still provide what visitors are looking for disseminate more quickly than they did in the past.
The number of visitors to lesser-known parks, such as Congaree in South Carolina, Black Canyon of the Gunnison in Colorado, Great Basin in Nevada, and Isle Royale in Lake Superior, has been rising faster than that of its larger siblings. None of these parks are as well-known throughout the world as Yosemite or Yellowstone. They all have pathways that are truly solitary, wildlife that hasn’t become accustomed to humans, and the kind of quiet that is genuinely hard to find in a park when thousands of people are taking the same walk every morning.
This distribution trend has the risk of making the issue worse rather than better. In a few years, a smaller park that had a 40% increase in visitors when word spread that it was uncrowded will no longer be uncrowded. Smaller parks that are receiving more visitors are doing so with even less resources than they had previously since the NPS staff reductions affect the entire system, not just the larger parks. The data will eventually reveal whether the dispersal results in more evenly dispersed enjoyment or a progressively growing circle of overcrowded parks. It’s possible that the parks themselves lack the personnel necessary to handle either scenario.
