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Comment by williamscales | Hacker News Reader

I hope we keep it closed, more or less. They could restrict visitors using a lottery system. No motorized vehicles within the park boundaries. The valley would have a chance in that scenario. Otherwise it will just be swamped by even greater crowds rushing in to "enjoy" (really destroy) the beautiful nature.

I visited Yosemite valley proper for the first time last year after living in California for five years. I was blown away by the scale of development and the sheer number of people.

If we truly want to save these places, we need to keep most humans out.

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The goal of a park (particularly the valley) is to allow as many people as possible to see and appreciate it. There are hundreds of thousands of square miles of empty wilderness in the Sierra (including in Yosemite) , with much of it similar in scale to Yosemite.

Your story is a good example for one of the goals of parks, but you seem to have missed the point. If you've never been to the Yosemite after living in CA for a few years, then you likely wouldn't expend a lot of effort to see wild places in nature. Thus, Yosemite is a perfect place for you to see and appreciate since it is spectacular and relatively accessible.

With your newfound appreciation, you now can advocate for the preservation and protection of wild places – though preferably not in the sense that you want to prevent others from having your experience, and rather in the sense that you should want to advocate for the protection of undeveloped wilderness.

Not hundreds of thousands, the Sierras are about 23,000 square miles, but the point still stands. The Sierras are massive and the majority of it is desolate. I spend about 10-20 days each year (for over 15 years now) exploring these areas and have barely made a dent in covering them.

Even if you just consider Yosemite National Park, the main valley where you mostly see overcrowding, is a relatively small portion of the park. Most of the Sierras are inaccessible to your average weekend camper. Having a few of these hotspots with high tourist activity, in my mind, is a good tradeoff to preserving the vast majority of the Sierra's.

I think if we made it even less accessible to your average Joe, we wouldn't have as much support for preserving these places.

If you really want to see untouched nature, there are many places in the Sierra's where you can drive for hours without seeing another car or hike for days without seeing any trace of humans.

you seem to have missed the point.

what's the point in allowing people to go to a park in such a way that it destroys the park? a national park simply cannot handle a limitless amount of traffic.

i went to rocky mountain national park on what happened to be labor day weekend. it sounds weird, but we actually didn't plan on going there while in colorado but ended up going due to other things changing. it was insane. cars, traffic, lines, massive congestion on trails, trash, etc. the park was completely overrun. lines for the shuttles were hours long. obviously, myself and my girlfriend were part of the problem (in terms of adding to the visitor numbers), but many didn't seem to care. it felt like almost being in a gold rush. people swimming with god knows what chemicals in delicate ponds and glacial lakes, trash, etc.

unprompted by anything other than my experience, i asked one of the park rangers / shuttle drivers if the park planned on implementing some system to reduce numbers in peak travel times. she basically said that it had been considered and talked about and that she felt that they were going to have to. she mentioned that the traffic of people on foot and cars was destroying the park. wildlife are constantly hit by cars, ranging from big to small. just a month or two earlier, a bear, already in dwindling numbers in the area, had been hit and killed by a car.

humanity acts as if the world must bend to its unchecked population growth. well, it will bend, then it'll break, and then it'll snap back.

Not sure they did miss the point, by my reading at least. Outside of impact of vehicle traffic on animals who otherwise roam, you're talking about a very specific part of the park, not the entire park. Huge portions of it are inaccessible to tourist vehicles and seen by very few. The difference between the main areas and backcountry are significant. Both you and the grandparent had experiences that confirmed their comment - you came away very aware of the human impact on our environment.

I don't mean to discount your broader position, I just don't think you're actually arguing against your comment's parent. Yes, the parks are absolutely swamped and many will gradually bring in shuttles or lotteries and the like. Zion runs a shuttle, Bryce also. Half Dome and The Wave have lottery systems as it is. Getting a camping spot in the big name parks during peak season is miserably difficult. When I went to Rocky Mountain last year, we drove Trail Ridge Road and found a parking spot just once that allowed us to stop. Every parking spot was otherwise taken along the entire drive. And the main, named trails' trailheads fill up daily too which meant we didn't even try. But that's not the entire park. Think of it like the ocean where almost everyone plays on the beach but you have to be well-equipped, skilled and aware of risks to dive at a continental shelf or cross oceans or whatever. (Just pretend cruise ships and trawling boats don't exist for this comparison...)

From “The Tragedy of the Commons” by Garrett Hardin [1]:

“The National Parks present another instance of the working out of the tragedy of the commons. At present, they are open to all, without limit. The parks themselves are limited in extent—there is only one Yosemite Valley—whereas population seems to grow without limit. The values that visitors seek in the parks are steadily eroded. Plainly, we must soon cease to treat the parks as commons or they will be of no value to anyone.”

He includes a lottery in his list of possible solutions.

[1] https://doi.org/10.1126/science.162.3859.1243

All I ever want to do is use the road. There aren't enough mountain passes. For me, Yosemite is basically a toll road.

I would like to see these national parks massively expanded, especially with an eye towards connecting them with wildlife corridors.

Some offshore areas should also become marine national parks, with no motorized boats allowed in their boundaries.

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