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Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

The parks are heavily curated and managed — think of them as open air museums. Personally I don’t like visiting national parks because of this - I prefer the pretty unregulated wilderness and BLM land. But many people aren’t prepared for the wild (and it really is wild; there’s nothing like it in the UK, more like the Aussie bush in level of isolation) so these parks are great to get people exposed to the outdoors.

Parks constitute a tiny percentage of public open land. And for the ones I’ve visited really have been built around special places (Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Larsen, etc) and why not? If it’s someone’s only exposure to nature why not make it the best. And I won’t have to see them when I’m in the desolation wilderness.

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This generalization is very misleading. Many national parks are massive, with vast tracts that can only be reached by days of hiking or an off road vehicle or an aircraft. This is true even of extremely popular parks like the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Zion, Joshua tree, Smokey Mountains, and Denali.

The Yosemite valley in summer for example can feel like Disney in terms of crowds, but that is just a small area of the park’s land. The entire eastern part of the park is far less busy even along the roads, there are plenty of remote trails for backpacking, and then there are true wild spaces without any official development.

The national parks offer a range of natural experiences that can suit almost everyone.

I think he means relative to the size of America. Here's a map of all national parks, overlaid on a map of all publicly-owned land in the US:

https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/programs/public_lands/pr...

The big splotch in California is Death Valley. To the immediate west is Yosemite; southeast is Mojave; to the south is Joshua Tree. These are big areas: Death Valley is about the size of the 9-county Bay Area with 7.68M people, while Mojave is about the size of the Los Angeles Basin with 15.7M people. Nevertheless, they're tiny compared to BLM-managed lands, which basically includes the whole state of Nevada.

This is a fascinating map, thanks.

Does anyone know why federal land is so concentrated to the western half of the US? Is the “empty land” in states like Texas state owned? Why?

Because development and homesteading proceeded from east to west, and so did private claims on land. Substantial preservation programs (by area) took off nearly a century later.

In addition to this, there's likely also a climate reason. Here's a map of the U.S. by rainfall:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_rainfall_climato...

Also, to answer who owns the "empty land" in Texas - it's largely private ranches:

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-us-land-use/

Recall that Texas was it's own country before joining the United States (The Republic of Texas [0]). So all the land in the state at one time was privately owned, unlike states like Wyoming and the Dakotas. Any public parks & land in Texas (primarily Big Bend out near El Paso) is public because it was donated by the owners.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Texas

Well, none of the land was owned by the US government. I'm not sure if land owned by the Republic of Texas (now State of Texas) really counts as "privately" owned.

That's my point - very little land was owned by the Republic of Texas government. It was all (or nearly all) owned by individuals/families. And after running up large debts to fund the national military in order to keep Mexico at bay, they didn't have the money to buy any land to be turned into parks anyway. Part of the deal upon joining the USA was that Texas would give up large areas of land out west in return for $10 million, to be used to pay off the debts.

You'll see the importance of private land ownership to the residents even today. When the Texas Central Railroad tried to acquire land for a bullet train a few years ago, their attempted use of eminent domain fell more than flat.

https://www.texastribune.org/2017/02/23/come-and-take-it-emi...

I can certainly believe that Texas, in practice, never had much public land -- I readily admit my ignorance on this point. I'm still not convinced of your original statement, that it has no public land because it was previously an independent country.

The idea of the government (and especially the federal government) holding massive swaths of land for conservation purposes did not occur until late 19th century. By that time, most of land that was still available was in the western states, that were still the frontier then, and sparsely populated. Doing something similar in the eastern states would be far more expensive, since that land would have to be bought from existing owners at substantial cost.

> The parks are heavily curated and managed — think of them as open air museums.

Most museums in the UK are free to visit too. They generally have donation boxes which is a great way to let those who can afford to do so support the museum. And those who can't are not excluded.

The Smithsonian in DC is also free to visit.

We aren't really talking about the same thing here. Many National Parks are massive properties with extensive ecological concerns and staff overhead. But they aren't even close to the sole extent of publicly owned land, that's where the BLM comes in. And there are the national grasslands and the forest service lands as well. We haven't even touched on state owned public lands or conservancy lands.

The amount of land set aside for wilderness and parks in the US is amazing. More than all cities and towns (urban) combined. This webpage[1] as a lot of cool maps of US land use.

[1]https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-us-land-use/

The national parks and most museums in the us you have to pay for certainly have programs to discount the price if you can't afford it. Despite popular worldwide opinion, We're not heartless greedy jerks in this country.

You can definitely get off the beaten path in National Parks, it's just that very few people choose to.

Not to be pedantic but "think of them as open air museums" may not be the best analogy for a question from the UK: Their most important museums are free.

> The parks are heavily curated and managed

The Bill Bryson book on the Appalachian Trail (A Walk in the Woods) gives a very different impression. It seemed to him to be underfunded and pretty badly managed with individuals trying very hard despite limited funds and support. Alarmingly there was even logging being done. I have never been to any of them.

The Appalachian trail isn’t a national park, it’s a collection of trails that pass through various locations. Ditto PCT, continental dividing trail in Australia etc.

Thanks. I even checked before posting and assumed this meant it was. “Strong Parks, Strong Communities Through Strong Parks, Strong Communities, the National Park Foundation (NPF), National Park Service (NPS), and Friends Alliance (the Alliance) enhance local philanthropic organizations, bringing park philanthropy to an elevated level”

https://www.nationalparks.org/explore-parks/appalachian-nati...

> The parks are heavily curated and managed — think of them as open air museums.

Oh. I hate that. I hate things being fake.

In the UK there is Dartmoor which is wild, but obviously no wolves or bears etc. which might be what you mean.

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