On Memorial Day this year, the Utah Highway Patrol closed the entrance to Arches National Park. The line of cars waiting to gain access was over a mile long, creating a traffic hazard as it backed out on to U.S. Highway 191. At the Devils Garden trailhead, 300 cars were wedged into 190 spaces, and on the road to Delicate Arch, the state of Utah’s unofficial symbol, parked cars lined both sides of the road for half a mile leading up to the parking area.
The number of visits to Arches, which for a decade grew slowly and steadily, by about 2 to 3 percent per year, has jumped by nearly 20 percent since the Utah Office of Tourism launched its “Mighty 5” national parks marketing campaign in the spring of 2013. At the state’s four other national parks – Canyonlands, Zion, Bryce and Capitol Reef -thousands of tourists jam entrance stations, overwhelm visitor center staff and overrun the landscape itself in search of a place to park.
Also, according to a new report interest in Yosemite National Park spiked directly after Apple’s announcement it was naming last year’s operating system “OS X Yosemite.” Google search traffic saw a significant jump in searches for the term “Yosemite” after Apple unveiled the new system name, and Wikipedia traffic also saw a 50 percent increase in page views.
But people aren’t just reading about Yosemite; they’re actually going there (or at least thinking about it). The Washington Post reports that Hotels.com saw a 21 percent spike in hotel searches for the area, though it’s worth nothing that the website declined to share actual data about completed bookings.
In Utah, Kate Cannon, superintendent of the Southeast Utah Group, which includes Arches and Canyonlands, said, “This is not the experience people expect, nor the experience we want to provide.”
TOO SUCCESSFUL?
There’s no denying that the “Mighty 5” campaign has been remarkably successful, introducing people from around the world to Utah’s natural wonders and allowing the state to cash in on its scenic beauty. But the massive increase in tourism has left Park Service officials scrambling to manage the crowds without damaging the landscape. After all, the agency’s mandate is to “conserve the scenery, natural and historic objects … by such means as will leave them unimpaired for future generations,” not simply to enable the parks to function as economic engines for nearby communities.
State tourism officials devised the “Mighty 5” campaign in 2012. As Vicki Varela, director of the Utah Office of Tourism, likes to say, “Mother Nature played favorites” with southern Utah’s iconic red-rock landscape, and the state is eager to share it with the rest of the world. The award-wining campaign generated nearly 375,000 visits between March and December 2013 and saw a return of $126 for every dollar invested. For Arches, that translated to an increase from just over 1 million visitors to 1.3 million that year, a number that’s expected to exceed 1.5 million by the end of 2015.
“It’s been wildly successful,” Varela says of the campaign. “In Europe, the Mighty 5 is now on everyone’s bucket list.”
Not the Arches wilderness experience many hope to find. Photo by Ethan Trewhitt
The campaign has been a boon for the parks’ gateway towns, many of which shifted from extractive industries to a tourism economy in recent decades. According to a 2015 study by the nonprofit Headwaters Economics, visitors to Arches and nearby Canyonlands generated over $145 million for Moab in 2014. That same year, visitors to Zion National Park spent over $170 million in the much smaller town of Springdale.
Zion National Park Superintendent Jeff Bradybaugh acknowledges the park’s importance to the local economy, but said that the increased number of visitors is straining park staff and infrastructure and threatening natural resources — even creating a public safety hazard at some of the more popular attractions. At Angels Landing in Zion, crowds queue up along an exposed ridge crest while clinging to a safety line 1,500 feet above the canyon floor. At the Emerald Pools, people routinely step over one another vying for a spot to enjoy the scenery, and the park’s shuttle system, implemented in 2000 to alleviate vehicle congestion in the canyon, is now regularly overwhelmed, with as many as 120 people packed into buses designed to seats 68.
“I don’t think we are in a sustainable situation,” Bradybaugh says.
State, local and federal officials agree that congestion is a problem, but argue that, from an economic perspective, it’s better than having no visitors. Most favor finding better ways to manage the crowds rather than seeking to discourage them, and the idea of determining the parks’ actual carrying capacity has so far proven unpopular.
In Moab, where park officials have been asking the local community for suggestions, a range of possible solutions will be released for public comment later this month. In addition to building more parking lots, roads, and entry stations, the proposal includes an innovative “timed entry” or online reservation system that would encourage visits at less-crowded times and draw more attention to some of the less-popular destinations. Cannon says that the system would take some getting used to, but that it would be better than spending an hour in line and then another hour looking for a parking space.
“Our main concern is improving the visitor experience,” she says.
JUST DEAL WITH IT
Colin Fryer, who owns the Red Cliffs Lodge and three other hotels in Moab, says managing people’s experience isn’t the Park Service’s responsibility. He opposes the reservation system. “Anything you do to make it harder for people is just like putting up a barricade,” he says. “It’s an unwelcoming idea, and it wouldn’t be good for business in Moab.” Instead, Fryer advocates building more parking lots as well as paving the road out through Salt Valley, on the remote north end of the park, to accommodate more traffic and disperse use.
“They are just going to have to accept that it’s not going to be a pristine experience,” Fryer says. “People need to drive in, take their pictures, leave some money, and drive away. These are the people whose experience we need to improve.”
Crowds on Half Dome are nothing new. Photo by Bill Couch
Scott Groene, executive director of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, believes that national parks should not be used merely as local tourist traps. He supports finding alternatives to automobiles (a shuttle system was proposed, but deemed too costly) and implementing daily visitation limits. Paving the Salt Valley road is a bad idea, he says, and moving larger crowds into the backcountry would only fragment habitat and destroy solitude, all the while increasing management and rescue costs.
“Reining in the Mighty 5 promotion campaign is part of the solution, too,” Groene says.
As scenic landscapes become more commercialized, and gateway communities continue to grow, the National Park Service may find itself in an impossible situation. Both Cannon and Bradybaugh say that protecting the visitor experience is of primary concern, and they understand the economic importance of national parks to local communities. “It really is a question of sustainability,” Bradybaugh says. “We can’t just always build more facilities.” Bradybaugh says his staff will be considering possible solutions over the next year, seeking to determine what are the “desired conditions,” without making any predetermined decisions.
Cannon notes the conflict often inherent between protecting natural and cultural resources and providing for visitor experience. “It’s couched as a scientific question, but it’s really a value judgment. How many people can be here and still enjoy the values that the park was established to provide?” she asks. “But it’s so wonderful to have these phenomenally beautiful, culturally rich places for people to enjoy. It’s well worth struggling with these questions.”
This story appeared previously on High Country News. Additional Yosemite reporting by GrindTV. Top photo by National Park Service.
Thing is, there are a lot of really cool places in the area that are not IN national parks. The crowds suck – if you don’t have the option to go off season, there are BLM lands, many neat hikes and camp sites well worth exploring. Do a little research – one of the coolest hikes I have ever done (and I have done a lot was just outside Moab and I did not see a single person the entire time.
This is a catch-22, for sure. The NPS is struggling in many parts of the country to see growth in visitors to its properties (there was a NYT editorial about this a few days ago, regarding minorities not visiting public lands largely due to fear and cultural differences). More and younger people getting out into nature are needed to sustain our wild, public spaces, but massive swings in visitorship of people who aren’t used to exploring nature also threaten those places if there’s no accompanying educational component.
I don’t mean to sound like an outdoorsy snob, but it’s like suddenly letting a bunch of people loose in the Louvre who don’t know that you aren’t supposed to touch the art. Sure, you got their money, but at what cost? Suddenly, it’s so crowded that you can’t see anything, and those who get close enough end up leaving lasting, damaging marks on the paintings and sculptures. The last time I went camping and hiking in Arches, I had to shoo away a couple of kids who were blatantly defacing one of the rock formations with offensive carvings.
As a Wilderness snob, I want pristine backcountry experiences to survive (and might have to accept that NPS properties aren’t going to be able to offer that in the future). As someone who works in advocacy of human-powered recreation, I want the park visitor pot to grow and become more diverse so that the idea of (and a willingness for) protecting landscapes survives in upcoming generations.
What to do?
with $170M going to the local area, surely they see the value in having the local community paying for some parking and volunteers?
This is hard to manage without a consensus on the purpose of these parks.
According to the NPS, “The National Park Service preserves unimpaired the natural and cultural resources and values of the National Park System for the enjoyment, education, and inspiration of this and future generations”
According to Colin Fryer and the like, the mission of the NPS is to manage the parks in such a way as to maximize the number of visitors.
I have to say that I heartily agree with the stated mission of the NPS. With that in mind, they should be thinking about unpaving roads, not paving them. That will turn many away but perhaps others who have a bit of buried intrepidity will rediscover the joy of two feet and senses freed from the confines of climate conditioned metal and glass cells.
Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded – Berra
Quoting our man Ed Abbey:
“No more cars in national parks. Let the people walk. Or ride horses, bicycles, mules, wild pigs–anything–but keep the automobiles and the motorcycles and all their motorized relatives out.”
“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.”
“We have agreed not to drive our automobiles into cathedrals, concert halls, art museums, legislative assemblies, private bedrooms and the other sanctums of our culture; we should treat our national parks with the same deference, for they, too, are holy places. An increasingly pagan and hedonistic people (thank God!), we are learning finally that the forests and mountains and desert canyons are holier than our churches. Therefore let us behave accordingly.”
Facilitate increased numbers not through increased parking lot infrastructure, but through investment in more robust educational programs and guide services. Welcome the novice outdoorsman or outdoorswoman through these programs, not by morphing our national parks into amusement parks.
Thank you, this is exactly the passage I was thinking of when I read this article. Then he mentions include free bikes in the NP fee, which I think would be a great idea. It probably would deter a lot of people though…but to some of us that may not be the worst thing…
Are buses within Mr. Abbey’s realm of acceptability? OK, I know he he said “all their motorized relatives”, and that’s all well and good, but a bit too purist for me.
Everything is a compromise, and buses would be a good compromise. I honestly can’t think of visiting a spread out park like Yellowstone without some type of motorized transport.
There, I said it.
I don’t know about you folks, but I want to still be able to visit the national parks when I am too old to be able to ride my bike. On the other hand, I also like to take my young kids into the parks.
By saying no to cars, you are only allowing young, in shape, childless people see the national wonders.
Very interesting article; kind of sad to see all those cars stacked up in an area that does not deserve a traffic jam. The “no cars” idea is not bad; if your health prevents you from walking, cycling, etc., then get a special permit for an auto, but other than that, do some work. All in all, very intriguing dilemma.
The crowds certainly are a discouragement for many of us. Even backcountry, BLM is slowly becoming saturated with people.
The last two years I’ve set tents down only in BLM just outside the parks we visit; The Great 5, and most of everything in CA, NV, AZ, and NM. Upon doing so, we’ve noticed those secret niches that only a hand full know about are often occupied with people throughout the seasons. Trash is accumulating in places you would least expect.
Honestly, these more commercialized parks are slowly getting scratched off my list. Do you know how difficult it was to get a shot atop Angel’s Landing without someone in the shot? Or the slowly increasing waitlist time for reservations at Cottonwood/Phantom Ranch in the Grand Canyon Valley? It’s crazy and ridiculous.
Limitations are the only options if you want to sustain park conditions and revenue. An occupancy limit sounds ideal. No cars within Bryce? I’m in. You have to bike Yosemite Valley? Hell yes!
For the ones who can’t obviously are pardoned. But, something needs to be done because it’s getting ugly out there and very frustrating to appreciate the beauty of it all. And even more frustrating when more than half the visitors could care less about the endangered plants they trample while hiking.
I guess Alaska is all we have left.