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Comment by mattbierner | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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