Stop Going To National Parks
You have other options.
A recent article in the New York Times says our National Parks are being overcrowded by millions of visitors.
This is an issue not only because a crowded national park sucks, but because the parks’ aging infrastructure can’t handle the record numbers.
After I read the article, I raged at my desk, thinking of the millions of thoughtless people tramping through the parks system, briefly and conveniently forgetting that I visited two national parks myself this summer.
In fact, I visited in August, when 40 million people entered our National Park System. That includes me. I’m a part of that number. It’s not 40 million minus 1 super cool guy who is beyond reproach.
Just 40 million.
Not only did I contribute to the unprecedented crush of people visiting our national park system this year—driving all over the roads, breathing in the air that otherwise might have gone to elk or bison — but I didn’t even pay for it (the entrance fee to Grand Teton and Yellowstone was waived on the day of the solar eclipse). That’s my bad. (My friends and I did pay for a Yellowstone backcountry permit, but I feel I still owe the parks something. Donation incoming.)
According to the NYT, as part of the effort to battle overcrowding, the NPS is considering an online reservation system for Zion National Park, one of the country’s most-visited parks. If they go through with this plan and it’s successful enough, the system could spread to other national parks (that last part is just my speculation, at this point).
Which, bummer. But I get it. The NPS is in a tough spot.
On one hand, the whole point of national parks is that they’re open to anyone, anytime. To go online in order to reserve your spot in America’s natural splendor seems to go against the spirit of the enterprise. Kind of takes the romance out of it.
On the other, have you been to a national park lately? It’s like getting on the line ride. Nothing kills the buzz of staring at colorful rocks or steaming geysers like doing so in a crowd. Kind of… takes the romance out of it. And this anecdote from the NYT about visiting Zion sounds like everyone’s worst nightmare:
And at the top of Angels Landing, an iconic trail of switchbacks on the east side of the park, some portable toilets were marked off with a sign: “Due to extreme use, these toilets have reached capacity.”
Gross.
[UPDATE — A day after I published this article, the NPS released notice of another proposal: Entrance fee increases during peak season at 17 of the country’s most-visited parks, including Arches, Denali, Yellowstone, Olympic, and Zion.
“During the peak season at each park, the entrance fee would be $70 per private, non-commercial vehicle, $50 per motorcycle, and $30 per person on bike or foot.”]
So what’s the solution? While the federal government seems more interested in selling off public lands than expanding or protecting them, the burden is going to fall more to everyday people to care for the parks we have now, including being respectful when we visit and doing our part to not overtax them.
Not overtaxing them is easier said than done, of course. It’s hard to feel like you personally are making an impact when you’re just one person, ambling along a hiking trail, taking pictures of mountains. And cutting down on national park visits isn’t like instituting Meatless Monday. Most people make a vacation of a national park visit — are they supposed to cut their visits from one to zero? That doesn’t feel right or fair.
Well, none of this is fair. I say, do what you want. But in case you’d like to play a part in lessening the impact on our national parks, I have a few ideas for you. They may seem obvious to some, but I think they’re often overlooked:
Utilize national forests and grasslands
It wouldn’t surprise me if most people used words like “national park” and “national forest” interchangeably, and never used the words “grasslands” at all. But a national forest is very different from a park, and the forests have perks you may not have recognized.
Though visits to the national forests have also been on the rise the last few years, this type of managed federal land stretches across 190 million acres in this country (as opposed to 84.4 million acres in the National Park System), which means they make up more than 8 percent of the nation’s total land. Though the forests are sometimes used for logging and mining, vast swaths of it are designated wilderness, and they’re often used for recreation.
Plenty of national forests have campgrounds, hiking trails, signage, and other resources that lead to over 95 percent of respondents to an Forest Service survey saying they felt both satisfied and safe in national forests. National forest isn’t literally just forest — it’s more like parkland that has multiple uses and doesn’t get the kind of shine that the actual parks do.
The best part? Especially out west, national parks often reside inside national forests (or right alongside, or nearby). Here’s a list of 16 (!) national forests that are close to national parks, including George Washington and Jefferson National Forest (near Shenandoah National Park), Dixie National Forest (near Zion National Park), and Sierra National Forest (near Yosemite National Park).
In fact, in just the last year or so, I’ve visited three national forests adjoining national parks, and ended up having such wonderful experiences that entering the park wasn’t necessary.
I camped and hiked in Pisgah National Forest, on the outskirts of the Great Smoky Mountains, in one of the most peaceful and well-kept campgrounds I’ve ever visited.
I did “dispersed camping” in Bridger-Teton National Forest and ended up watching the solar eclipse from a hill overlooking the Grand Tetons. On the busiest day in the history of Grand Teton National Park, I sat serenely, just a few miles away, in the forest, accompanied by a handful of people.
And during a visit to the Pacific Northwest, I climbed Mt. Ellinor, a peak that straddles the line between Olympic National Forest and National Park — hiking from the forest side. At the summit, we could look north, down into the park, as well as south to the lakes, trees, and mountains that stretched into Oregon. The only thing that technically separated me from Olympic National Park was, it felt, a fairly arbitrary boundary that I likely crossed (or might as well have) numerous times during my hike.
So visiting a national forest is a lot like visiting a national park, except that it will be less crowded (very few respondents to the FS survey described the forest they visited as being more than a “6” of crowded on a scale of 1–10, and most ranked it between 2–5), won’t require entrance fees, and will contain features and sites that you’ve never heard of previously (making you both adventurous and unique). Plus, they’re typically close enough to national parks that you can visit or just check the parks out from a short distance away.
State parks
Why would I want to go to a STATE PARK? State parks can only be 1/50 as good as a national park, if not worse. Otherwise they’d be national parks.
That’s not how it works. While it’s true that national parks are likely better staffed, protected, and typically seen as more important than state parks, there are plenty of prime state parks across the country that scratch the “be surrounded by pristine nature” itch. Fees to enter state parks are typically lower than for national parks (again, not that helping to protect our natural resources with an entrance and/or parking fee is a bad thing), and you’re less likely to be one in a herd of tourists clogging the trails and bathrooms.
As Aaron Gulley writes in “The Case for Visiting State Parks”:
If the national parks are the polished crown jewels of the U.S. public land system, our state parks are the geodes that litter the American West: they may not look like much at first, but crack them open, and they’re far more ubiquitous — and nearly as dazzling.
There are over 10,000 state parks across the country, which means it’s more than likely that if you take a trip out to a national park and find it swamped, booked up, or about to explode, you’ll have better luck finding a camp site and a quiet hike — or a great climb, or fantastic beach — in a state park nearby.
Just to get you started, Fodor’s has a list of lauded state parks, which includes the not-a-state-park-but-basically-is-and-is-awesome Adirondacks, in upstate New York.
The hundreds of other national recreation sites, trails, monuments, museums, and so on, all around the nation
You want more work done for you? Here ya go: Outside Online put together a list of 351 places to visit that aren’t national parks but are still cool. Some of them don’t quite fit the bill when it comes to experiencing the great outdoors — I love the Tenement Museum in the L.E.S., but it’s kind of the exact opposite of what we’re looking for here — but others are specifically mentioned as alternatives to national parks (i.e., Canyon De Chelly National Monument instead of the Grand Canyon).
As a bonus, some of these monuments are only accessible by hiking or forms of transportation that aren’t “drive your car within five feet of the spot,” which makes them much less crowded, since the majority of Americans are a step or two away from fusing with their cars and subsisting on a combination of carbonated sugar water and gasoline and hamburger grease.
Google Image Search
Just Google the places and get high enough to feel like you’re there. It works!*
The takeaway: Be mindful of what we’ve got
The unfortunate reality is that climate change is going to kill us all sooner rather than later, and if we’re even halfway-decent people, we’ll try to keep the planet alive long enough for a few more generations to enjoy it. While we all want selfies in front of Mt. Rainier that we can tag on Instagram with the location set to “Mount Rainier National Park 55210 238th Avenue E, Ashford” (how fun!) (the Seattle area has this weird thing about refusing to start over with their avenues and will go up to like 8,712th Avenue), one of the small ways we can help protect the planet is to stop overburdening it so much.
Take a walk instead. Travel where you live. Visit a national forest or state park or recreation trail, and remember why you really wanted to visit that national park in the first place: To be outside. You don’t have to go all the way to Zion just to do that.
*Not really
