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Even for planning for personal travel, it's worth noting the massive difference in the amount of tourism between America's top 5 or 10 National Parks, and the countless other National Parks, Forests, Wilderness Areas, etc.
Yes, Yellowstone, Yosemite, the Grand Canyon, and a few other places are absolutely crawling with tourists. They're victims of their own success as destinations for people to check off a bucket list.
But once you get outside that top tier, America has countless places that are just as beautiful, still legitimately wild if that's your thing, and definitely not as crowded.
In my neck of the woods, the Blue Ridge Parkway and Great Smokey Mountains National Park (which are among the most-visited in the country, by the way) don't have the same sense of overwhelming crowding that, say, Yosemite does, except for maybe during peak leaf season, or at specific times/locations (e.g., Cades Cove in Spring). Most of the year, sure, they're not pristine wilderness, but it's not like they're wall-to-wall people and trash, either.
And, if wilderness IS your thing, you can go right next door to Pisgah National Forest or Nantahala National Forest, backpack for miles at a time without seeing another soul, and see views that are, IMO, equally as impressive as what you get in the official National Parks.
I guess what I'm saying is, if you're looking for a more remote experience, venture away from the big-name National Parks, and hit some of the lesser known areas, and you'll find that America still has a ton to offer.
Also, most of the busiest places can be visited as a pretty quiet experience in their offseason.
I've had the Grand Canyon, Zion, Arches, Yosemite, Sequoia and others as quiet, near-empty experiences in the past couple years...just showed up in mid-winter (and not on a holiday week).
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Of course, doing that means: Spikes are a requirement for most hiking. The desert may not get feet of snow, but a couple inches of ice on your narrow trail is an issue. Scheduling flexibility is needed because snow/ice storms close roads at times, and fog/other weather can limit the views you're there for. Some places require snow tires and may require you to have chains.
Not every trail/trailhead is accessible, although in some cases different winter-only routes exist.
But, if you're looking for visiting the "bucket list" places without their usual crowds, it's worth considering.
Even in Yosemite, at the absolute peak of the tourist season, if you go to one of the trailheads outside the main valley, in the Chilnualna or Hetch Hetchy area, it isn’t overcrowded at all. If you take a multi-day backpacking trip, after the first half day hiking into the interior, you’ll hardly see any people at all. And the vast majority of Yosemite is further than an easy stroll from a parking lot. One tiny, tiny bit of Yosemite is crowded and the rest has very few people and still incredible natural beauty.
Totally agree. Outside DC, Skyline Drive is a crowded mess in leaf season, but the rest of the year, it's not bad. The most popular day hikes are overcrowded on weekends (White Oak Canyon) as described in the article, but there are less popular hikes that are almost as dramatic and far less crowded.
Also, the Mt Rogers Wilderness is only a few hours drive south, on the TN/NC/VA border area. It's absolutely STUNNING how remote it is, despite being spitting distance off I-81. We spent a week visiting late last summer and it rivaled many of the other places we've visited over the years (Outer Hebrides/Scottish Highlands, Iceland, and others).
It’s worth pointing out that Pisgah, Nantahala, and Mt Rogers are all administered by the Forest Service, which is a division of the Department of Agriculture. They are NOT part of the National Park Service and are maintained with far different goals in mind!
Many histories of American national parks have stressed the tension between parks as preserves and parks as places for enjoyment. This is so even for park histories that might be expected to follow an orthodox view, such as the Ken Burns PBS miniseries "National Parks: America's Best Idea."
Among those discussions, what's interesting to me is that Stephen Mather [1], the first director of the National Park Service and before that a de facto lobbyist within the Wilson administration for national parks, saw little tension between promoting park tourism and better preserving parks from abuse. In fact, his consistent position was that making parks more fun and accessible for ordinary people would in fact lead to more parks and better-protected parks, because awed park visitors would themselves become lobbyists for parks. He actually broke with his friend and former employee Robert Sterling Yard (the ex-PR man for parks mentioned in this piece) precisely on this point - Yard didn't believe that more park visitors were the unalloyed good that Mather was sure they were.
On balance, I do think that Mather was more right than Yard. But for at least about 50 years there has been a realization that the downsides of park tourism are far bigger than Mather would have envisioned.
Isn't this essentially the origin story of the park service? Probably apocryphal but I remember something along the line of Teddy Roosevelt loving hunting so much he wanted to protect the wild areas of the US.
Most years I go to Yosemite at the end of tourist season to clean up (part of Facelift). Cleaning human waste is one of the least desirable tasks, but even apart from that the amount of lost and explicitly discarded crud is enormous. That's practically the only time I visit a national park at all.
The major parks are in some really really nice spots. And yes, they are quite heavily developed, but they are also relatively accessible.
They are also a tiny part of the wilderness owned by the federal government. Undeveloped BLM land is easy to get to and has few rules. Ironically because of that many of the visitors who travel more than a short distance from the roads are responsible (perhaps not the ATVers and snowmobilers...but they do deserve to have fun too). But you have to be responsible because there is none of the support infrastructure provided in parks. If you get into trouble you're likely on your own.
I don't really like the curated experience of the parks but I am glad it's there. And for some folks, it's a "gateway drug" to the wilder outdoors. Great!
We can have wilderness. The eliteness of this article really bothers me. Why should we be trying to make parks less appealing to people. Again we have wilderness preserves in which we preserve wilderness, letting people experience natural beauty is a different but also good thing
Putting asphalt roads and hotels in Yellowstone for example isn't really preserving the wilderness. Having hordes of people walk around and cause issues with bears/wolves/other local species isn't really preserving the wilderness. Etc.
In my experience people don't treat national parks with much respect.
Go to any national park and you’re lucky if 2% of tourists venture further than 5m from any road or maintained path.
You can have millions go through a a national park every year and 98% of the park will still be preserved with harmless any humans passing through.
I can't recall a time in my adult life when it was reliable and reasonable to expect respect as a norm. However the vitriol in the US seems to have risen over the last 20, maybe more, years.
These days I really do expect disrespect, at least to stand out as the perceived norm due to how much more common it seems to be. (It isn't really that common, but if you're in a crowd every day over a year, several hundred different people across a couple hundred days, statistics catches up!)
> Putting asphalt roads and hotels in Yellowstone for example isn't really preserving the wilderness.
Compared to normal patterns of human land use (agriculture, living space, resource extraction), national parks, inundated-with-tourists-or-not certainly qualify as preservation.
As another poster said, 50 yards from the trails lie hundreds of square miles of wilderness that few visitors venture into.
The difficulty is always balancing accessibility to beautiful areas for people who don't have the wherewithal to hike for 2 days in rough terrain, with preserving the wilderness aspect for those who can.
I've found the biggest issue in preserving wilderness is helicopters and planes - they can easily cover large amounts of terrain in short time in a very noisy and intrusive manner.
In NZ, we try to a) ensure the 'front country' has facilities for easy access by day trippers and that b) the 'back country' is not disturbed by commercial operations.
In some parts, the balance tips further in one direction than the other - as an example, while walking the Milford Track[1], hardly a backcountry experience due to the very well developed tracks and facilities to cope with huge numbers of visitors, I still found the very frequent overflights by tourist charters detracted from the overall experience.
It was still gorgeous, but the continual drone of tourist flights for people who didn't want to, or couldn't walk the track, detracted significantly.
In my usual stomping ground national park, no commercial flights or landings are allowed, you can't even lead a guided walk. You still get the occasional private pilot flying through, and of course can't really do anything about the airliners flying to Australia, but the frequency is far lower than you find in the more commercialised areas like Fiordland or Aoraki Mt Cook.
The Department of Conservation has a policy of focusing commercial activity in areas tourists want to be in anyway, so that the rest of the conservation estate is largely preserved for NZ citizens undertaking recreational activities.
[1]: https://www.doc.govt.nz/parks-and-recreation/places-to-go/fi...
In a large enough park, you could have several “front countries” for attractions near the edge of the park without upsetting the interior with roads.
Roads through a park have all the same problems as logging roads for habitat disturbance, plus having people who like to stop or throw shit out the window.
There are also absolutely massive portions of most national parks that are effectively wilderness. You barely have to stray far from a major trail to see no one at all. Go look at satellite maps of Yosemite as a common example - huge sections would be an ordeal to even reach on foot.
I was born just 6 years before Edward Abbey died. He wrote about this problem long before I was even born. This problem is not new, and some of its causes have been well known for a long time.
He argues that the major problem is that the parks are too easy to visit. If you make people get out of their cars and walk a bit, you might stand to preserve some kind of semi-natural experience. If you pave a road to the rim of the Grand Canyon, it shouldn't come as a surprise that people are going to drive right up to it, get out, take a picture, and drive on to the next overlook. As I'm not going to do his words or argument justice, I'd encourage anybody interested in this to pick up a copy of Desert Solitaire.
If you do, and you find his argument convincing, your next task is to figure out how to sustain the communities that have come to depend on tourist revenue. I'm not talking about the seasonal folks that work for the NPS or a concessionaire, I mean the people who actually live in these places year-round.
You should know that Abbey is not writing from a disinterested viewpoint. He wrote The Monkey Wrench Gang, after all. Still, I find his words both lucid and prescient.
He argues that the major problem is that the parks are too easy to visit.
This is absolutely true. And not uniquely American. Iceland has the same problem - many of the major sites are right off one of the various major roads (Golden Circle and Route 1/Ring Road). I visited in January and naively thought it would be quiet. Ha! I was so wrong. Reykjavik, Golden Circle, and the southern Ring Road area (out to Vik) were teeming with busloads of tourists. Trash, trampled muddy paths, and idiot tourists ignoring safety signs. We found it best to leave the house well before sunrise to beat the busses to wherever we were going that day.
That's interesting. I visited Iceland in early September and the Golden Circle tour bus was only about half full. I certainly didn't have the place to myself, but it was quiet enough. At that time of year it was definitely chilly but not awful.
This was 2013. I wonder if a few years made a difference.
Abbey (and climate change) has had a profound effect on my view of traveling. I once had a bucket list to visit every national park (and every continent, and every wonder, etc), but after reading Desert Solitaire I've tried to better appreciate and pursue a deeper relationship with what's around me (even in somewhere as "dull" and flat as the Midwest), rather than dreaming about and planning shallow, wasteful trips to other places. One quote in particular has really stuck with me:
"A man on foot, on horseback or on a bicycle will see more, feel more, enjoy more in one mile than the motorized tourists can in a hundred miles."
Looking over the tens of thousands of miles I've traveled, it's always the hiking/walking that's the most memorable, despite being the tiniest proportion, in distance, time, and cost. Whether hiking to Half Dome or walking around my local park, forest preserve, or neighborhood, there's so much more to experience.
Most tourists today are just checking off items on their list and taking a selfie for Instagram, then moving on to the next item, without ever really experiencing anything.
IIRC Franz Kafka joked about Americans rolling through national parks in their automobiles in Amerika https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amerika_(novel), which he wrote in the 1910s.
> one wonders these days about the greatness of the National Park Service, which, since the moment of its inception, has done nothing but encourage the human tide
Oh no. They encouraged Americans to go out, wonder at natural beauty, and do some light hiking. What an unforeseen tragedy.
Get rid of scenic drives/viewpoints and park attendance would crater. Most trails that are more than a few miles long are rarely busy.
Indeed. It's not hard to get a wilderness permit in Yosemite (as long as you don't pick the same five trails everybody else does on a weekend) walk a few miles into the wilderness and see a handful of other people a day.
Doing anything with a parking spot is an absolute nightmare though.
There is lots you can do to improve the preservation of the parks, but the article suggests that that is not the current goal and that the US currently prefers to make parks available to people to enjoy with cars, mountain bikes, and skidoos.
There is always a balance between preservation and use of the parks.
Also ban smartphones. This would repel the other 50% who are only there with their narcisticks taking selfies for their Insta.
nah it's too much of a problem in other areas, see the comment i made above.
we need to seriously raise the bar, socially. back in the dialup days we actually read the political stuff, actually contributed to interesting things, kind of like how the 60s was or punk was before the masses who are only interested in the hip factor got a hold of it and simply wore it as a fashion statement. then it died.
I'd bet that would repel more than 50%. Or maybe someone could write some deep fake tools that would help limit attendance.
They are amazing places to visit, but feel like we could preserve parks better if we enforced better self control somehow.
I also wonder how many are inspired to treat the environment better after a visit. Maybe those national park visits are a net positive for the environment.
If you’ve visited Acadia National Park in a non-pandemic summer I believe you’ll be sympathetic to my impression that the crowds, the cruiseships, the fleets of buses and (my god) the cars all render the intended purpose of preserving and promoting experience of wilderness quite moot.
Acadia is not really the same kind of national park. It's trying to be a kind of timewarp back to Edwardian robber barons summering and rusticating at posh "cottages" on the coast, with a little hiking sprinkled in, but Disneyfied for the middle-class of Massachusetts and Quebec.
"cape cod for tourists who want to pretend they're not like all the other tourists."
The idea of making the parks car-free doesn’t really make sense to me. Right now, the vast majority of the parks are car-free. When you visit, you drive in, park in a huge parking lot somewhere, and then you have a vast area you can hike through. What would change if the whole park was car-free? You still have a lot of people who want to come visit from far away and they’re going to drive. So now the parking lots are just right outside the border of the park? It doesn’t really seem like it would make any difference.
It's difficult to balance access with conservation. I don't feel that limiting access is the right approach on its own. There's clearly a demand for visiting scenic parks, and why would I have more of a right to visit than anyone else? And seeing natural beauty is important for valuing natural beauty. As others have pointed out, it's mostly the main sites in a handful of parks that are overrun. I think it's unfortunate to effectively sacrifice some of the most beautiful parts of the country, but it might still be a fair tradeoff.
There are room for improvements, though. For one, I think parks could have strict enforcement and fines for littering. Second, driving into a park usually means wasting a lot of time getting through the entrance station and finding somewhere to park. Post-COVID, I wish parks would provide better public transit into and within a park so driving isn't as necessary. Similarly, I wish they would set a cap on daily car entrances and let you purchase admission online beforehand.
I recently read Desert Solitaire which the article references in closing. It’s kinda controversial but interesting read.
I loved that book.
The description of the overcrowding reminded me of pre-covid Silicon Valley.
I cannot even find the article to read. Just a very small blurb above the clickbait ads by taboola or whatever.
(Chrome on Android)
I didn't have any trouble. Safari on macOS.
TLDR; National parks administration has been degraded severely under Obama and then Trump and at this point it's a mess mostly designed to make money from industry at the expense of preservation.
I hit a similar issue, 3 pics but no content. Ffx/W10
Public interest in our national parks is the only reason these places exist... early robber barons tried to monetize Yellowstone and were only stopped because of people like George Bird Grinnell and the outdoorsmen/women he organized behind this effort. Without public interest in Yellowstone, the American Buffalo would likely no longer walk the earth.
hipsters ruin everything
literally my mantra
whether it's last years riots from people wearing 20 dollar red fist shirts from amazon, or jan 6th insurrection by the dude wearing some funky horn helmet thing, or ariel pink, or the guy from vice starting the proud boys, or trump complaining about the mainstream, or fyre festival, or even once you add some edgelordism to it like lil nas x....
hipsters ruin everything. like frank zappa said... america is superficial. no real culture, no real art, just fads. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5WEU30Iods
What does this have to do with hipsters? Close to 400M visitors means this is the mainstream. Americans have flocked to their national parks since the first one opened.
> like frank zappa said... america is superficial. no real culture, no real art, just fads.
Jazz? Blues? Abstract Expressionism? Broadway?
Give me a break.
> Close to 400M visitors means this is the mainstream.
Hasn't it often been said that foreign tourists are so prominent at the biggest parks, because relatively few actual Americans get enough holiday to go that long distance? I would think that visiting the big parks (as opposed to some less famous park nearby one’s home) is not really mainstream.
What you are seeing, and letting yourself get upset about, are the elements catchy enough to go viral and reach you. Strikes me as a superficial take on things.
Do what others are unwilling to do. Not sure if that's a quote, but it ought to be.
I regret to inform you of this, but, American culture is essentially world culture at this point