Loved Almost to Death

The bulk of Steve Kemp’s writing and editing career has been spent in the Great Smoky Mountains. Why wouldn’t it be? SmokiesLife photo by Gary Wilson.

I believe America’s national parks are in deep trouble. While I recall decades ago when the media presaged every Memorial Day weekend with the obligatory “Are We Loving Our National Parks to Death?” story, and while the answer even back then was ‘yes,’ recently the problem of too much love for our fragile national treasures has become untenable.

            Today’s visitors to crown jewel national parks are often greeted even before they reach the rustic wooden entrance sign by miles-long lines of exhaust-spewing vehicles.[i] Trails that are little more than four-feet wide and in poor condition host thousands of hikers per day. From 9:00 a.m. on, there is no parking available at the more popular trailheads, scenic overlooks, visitor centers, restaurants, or even points of departure for shuttlebuses.[ii] Even in the backcountry, hikers stand in line for their turn to photograph a waterfall.[iii] Reservations are required for campsites, some hiking trails, backcountry areas, river access, firefly viewing, lodging, and even to enter Glacier, Mount Rainier, Yosemite, Rocky Mountain, and other national parks.[iv] A former park superintendent at Mount Rainier reported that visitors were getting into fights over parking spaces at her park prior to the reservation system. Some employees quit due to repeated verbal abuse from frustrated tourists.[v] The eleven-mile scenic drive on the Cades Cove Loop Road in Great Smoky Mountains National Park has become a three-hour-long, blood-pressure-spiking, bumper-to-bumper motorized slog. On a busy summer afternoon, many of our best national parks look more like Day Three at Woodstock than the pristine wildlands visitors seek and park managers are charged with protecting.

Since the early 2000s, as social media evolved to focus on sharing images, visitation to many already overcrowded national parks arched skyward. Visits to tiny Acadia on the coast of Maine increased by 1.7 million (over 75 percent) between 2004 and 2023. Nearly four million people now visit the small island park during a tourist season that stretches barely five months. Grand Teton National Park visitation jumped by more than one million (44 percent) over the same period. Yellowstone surged over fifty percent and visits to Great Smoky Mountains National Park swelled from 9.1 million in 2004 to more than 13 million in 2023 (45 percent).[vi] Bear in mind these hefty increases have befallen already maxed-out parks with stagnant budgets, failing infrastructure, and finite space.

While other tourist destinations such as theme parks and beach towns generally have the flexibility to expand parking and other infrastructure in response to rising attendance (and revenue), national park budgets are not tied to visitation and superintendents are mandated to protect their landscapes, not pave them. Even a ten percent increase in visitation to a popular national park can be suffocating.

            Potential park visitors are now inspired by both social media and amazingly comprehensive travel websites when in the planning stages of their trips.[vii] This new type of marketing, whether intentional or not, is at least part of the reason why visitation to national parks (not all NPS sites) nationwide jumped from 69 million in 2013 to 92 million in 2023, an increase of better than thirty percent.[viii] The number of annual visitors to NPS sites is now roughly equivalent to the population of the United States.[ix] It’s a conundrum, parks need all the admirers they can muster to continue to be recognized for funding from Congress, but there’s no longer enough room to shoehorn them into the more popular, “crown jewel” sites.

            In our capitalist system, too much demand and not enough supply generally causes either prices to spike or supply to increase. Raising the cost of visiting a national park, however, undermines the egalitarian goals of our park system.[x] The parks are, after all, America’s superior system of managing scenic places; they are sanctuaries open to all as opposed to the Old-World model of exclusive private estates owned by nobles and other wealthy persons and available only to the elite.[xi] Unfortunately, in iconic parks like Yosemite, Grand Teton, and Yellowstone, basic in-park concessionaire lodging goes for $350 to $600 per night.[xii]

Planning a trip to a busy national park today also involves a teeth-grinding amount of time spent (usually at the wee hours) battling apathetic online reservation systems. In a recent study by researchers at the University of Montana, William L. Rice et. al., noted that fifty-seven NPS campsites received 19,000 online reservation requests for the same date! Reservations simply to drive the Going-to-the-Sun Road in Glacier National Park fill up months in advance. Sadder still, Rice’s research indicates that on-line reservation systems for camping (and likely other park services) discriminate against lower income families and persons of color. The study concludes the current online reservation system “juxtaposes the democratic nature of the national park idea.”[xiii]

Excerpted from An Exaltation of Parks: John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s Crusade to Save America’s Wonderlands by Steve Kemp

[i] Scott Detrow, “Why You Might See Traffic Jams in Yosemite This Summer,” All Things Considered, National Public Radio, July 1, 2023.

[ii] “Plan Your Trip,” Various NPS Websites, NPS.gov/, 2024.

[iii] Holly Kays, “Smokies Seek Solutions to Overcrowding,” Smoky Mountain News (Waynesville, North Carolina), October 28, 2020.

[iv] Allison Pohle, “Reservations Needed at Yosemite Again,” Wall Street Journal, December 18, 2023. A11.

[v] Allison Pohle, “Rocky Mountain Park Sets Reservation System,” The Wall Street Journal,” May 31, 2024, A3.

[vi] National Park Service Visitor Use Statistics, STATS, Social Science Program, www.Irma.nps.gov, 2024.

[vii] Otak, Inc., “2022 Socioeconomic Research of Great Smoky Mountains National Park,” Natural Resources Report NPS/GRSM/NRR—2023/2564, University of Montana, September, 1923.

[viii] Casey J. Wichman, “Social Media Influences National Park Visitation,” PNAS, April 1, 2024, www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2310417121.

[ix] NPS Visitor Use Statistics, STATS, Social Science Program, www.Irma.nps.gov, 2024.

[x] Robert Sterling Yard, “The People and the National Parks,” The Survey, 48, Vol XLVIII, No. 13, (August 1, 1922): 547.

[xi] Alfred Runte, National Parks: The American Experience, (Boulder, Colorado: Taylor Trade Publishing, 2010): 2.

[xii] Jackson Lake Lodge, GTLC.com; Yosemite Valley Lodge, Travelyosemite.com; Old Faithful Inn, usparklodging.com.

[xiii] William L. Rice, Jennifer Thomsen, Peter Whitney, “Exclusionary Effects of Campsite Allocation through Reservations in U.S. National Parks: Evidence from Mobile Device Location Data,” Journal of Park and Recreation Administration, (March 2022).