The Business of Scenery: Why America’s national parks need new management
harpers.org
harpers.org
Yes, Yellowstone, Yosemite, the Grand Canyon, and a few other places are absolutely crawling with tourists. They're victims of their own success as destinations for people to check off a bucket list.
But once you get outside that top tier, America has countless places that are just as beautiful, still legitimately wild if that's your thing, and definitely not as crowded.
In my neck of the woods, the Blue Ridge Parkway and Great Smokey Mountains National Park (which are among the most-visited in the country, by the way) don't have the same sense of overwhelming crowding that, say, Yosemite does, except for maybe during peak leaf season, or at specific times/locations (e.g., Cades Cove in Spring). Most of the year, sure, they're not pristine wilderness, but it's not like they're wall-to-wall people and trash, either.
And, if wilderness IS your thing, you can go right next door to Pisgah National Forest or Nantahala National Forest, backpack for miles at a time without seeing another soul, and see views that are, IMO, equally as impressive as what you get in the official National Parks.
I guess what I'm saying is, if you're looking for a more remote experience, venture away from the big-name National Parks, and hit some of the lesser known areas, and you'll find that America still has a ton to offer.
I've had the Grand Canyon, Zion, Arches, Yosemite, Sequoia and others as quiet, near-empty experiences in the past couple years...just showed up in mid-winter (and not on a holiday week).
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Of course, doing that means: Spikes are a requirement for most hiking. The desert may not get feet of snow, but a couple inches of ice on your narrow trail is an issue. Scheduling flexibility is needed because snow/ice storms close roads at times, and fog/other weather can limit the views you're there for. Some places require snow tires and may require you to have chains.
Not every trail/trailhead is accessible, although in some cases different winter-only routes exist.
But, if you're looking for visiting the "bucket list" places without their usual crowds, it's worth considering.
Also, the Mt Rogers Wilderness is only a few hours drive south, on the TN/NC/VA border area. It's absolutely STUNNING how remote it is, despite being spitting distance off I-81. We spent a week visiting late last summer and it rivaled many of the other places we've visited over the years (Outer Hebrides/Scottish Highlands, Iceland, and others).
I'd never heard of it until a few years ago when a friend mentioned it as a tangent in another conversation. Piqued my interest and last summer gave us a good opportunity to go. We just day-hiked, and based out of a tiny cabin a bit outside Grayson Highlands (a state park within or adjacent to the broader Mt Rogers zone, IIRC). I'd love to go back and do a week of backpacking or bike-packing.
Among those discussions, what's interesting to me is that Stephen Mather [1], the first director of the National Park Service and before that a de facto lobbyist within the Wilson administration for national parks, saw little tension between promoting park tourism and better preserving parks from abuse. In fact, his consistent position was that making parks more fun and accessible for ordinary people would in fact lead to more parks and better-protected parks, because awed park visitors would themselves become lobbyists for parks. He actually broke with his friend and former employee Robert Sterling Yard (the ex-PR man for parks mentioned in this piece) precisely on this point - Yard didn't believe that more park visitors were the unalloyed good that Mather was sure they were.
On balance, I do think that Mather was more right than Yard. But for at least about 50 years there has been a realization that the downsides of park tourism are far bigger than Mather would have envisioned.
The major parks are in some really really nice spots. And yes, they are quite heavily developed, but they are also relatively accessible.
They are also a tiny part of the wilderness owned by the federal government. Undeveloped BLM land is easy to get to and has few rules. Ironically because of that many of the visitors who travel more than a short distance from the roads are responsible (perhaps not the ATVers and snowmobilers...but they do deserve to have fun too). But you have to be responsible because there is none of the support infrastructure provided in parks. If you get into trouble you're likely on your own.
I don't really like the curated experience of the parks but I am glad it's there. And for some folks, it's a "gateway drug" to the wilder outdoors. Great!
In my experience people don't treat national parks with much respect.
These days I really do expect disrespect, at least to stand out as the perceived norm due to how much more common it seems to be. (It isn't really that common, but if you're in a crowd every day over a year, several hundred different people across a couple hundred days, statistics catches up!)
You can have millions go through a a national park every year and 98% of the park will still be preserved with harmless any humans passing through.
Local example - Great Falls National Park (VA side). Proximity to DC means it's a popular place. Fine, the NPS keeps it pretty tidy. But, there are often cars backed up for a mile in every direction - the single entrance is a major choke point for traffic. This is despite the pay booth being a good ways down from the intersection - the cars just back up onto surrounding roads. The park is often full, so lots of visitors end up turned away (where they then move to one of 2-3 nearby parks with less facilities and ruin those with trash and feces).
Compared to normal patterns of human land use (agriculture, living space, resource extraction), national parks, inundated-with-tourists-or-not certainly qualify as preservation.
As another poster said, 50 yards from the trails lie hundreds of square miles of wilderness that few visitors venture into.
I've found the biggest issue in preserving wilderness is helicopters and planes - they can easily cover large amounts of terrain in short time in a very noisy and intrusive manner.
In NZ, we try to a) ensure the 'front country' has facilities for easy access by day trippers and that b) the 'back country' is not disturbed by commercial operations.
In some parts, the balance tips further in one direction than the other - as an example, while walking the Milford Track[1], hardly a backcountry experience due to the very well developed tracks and facilities to cope with huge numbers of visitors, I still found the very frequent overflights by tourist charters detracted from the overall experience.
It was still gorgeous, but the continual drone of tourist flights for people who didn't want to, or couldn't walk the track, detracted significantly.
In my usual stomping ground national park, no commercial flights or landings are allowed, you can't even lead a guided walk. You still get the occasional private pilot flying through, and of course can't really do anything about the airliners flying to Australia, but the frequency is far lower than you find in the more commercialised areas like Fiordland or Aoraki Mt Cook.
The Department of Conservation has a policy of focusing commercial activity in areas tourists want to be in anyway, so that the rest of the conservation estate is largely preserved for NZ citizens undertaking recreational activities.
[1]: https://www.doc.govt.nz/parks-and-recreation/places-to-go/fi...
Roads through a park have all the same problems as logging roads for habitat disturbance, plus having people who like to stop or throw shit out the window.
He argues that the major problem is that the parks are too easy to visit. If you make people get out of their cars and walk a bit, you might stand to preserve some kind of semi-natural experience. If you pave a road to the rim of the Grand Canyon, it shouldn't come as a surprise that people are going to drive right up to it, get out, take a picture, and drive on to the next overlook. As I'm not going to do his words or argument justice, I'd encourage anybody interested in this to pick up a copy of Desert Solitaire.
If you do, and you find his argument convincing, your next task is to figure out how to sustain the communities that have come to depend on tourist revenue. I'm not talking about the seasonal folks that work for the NPS or a concessionaire, I mean the people who actually live in these places year-round.
You should know that Abbey is not writing from a disinterested viewpoint. He wrote The Monkey Wrench Gang, after all. Still, I find his words both lucid and prescient.
This is absolutely true. And not uniquely American. Iceland has the same problem - many of the major sites are right off one of the various major roads (Golden Circle and Route 1/Ring Road). I visited in January and naively thought it would be quiet. Ha! I was so wrong. Reykjavik, Golden Circle, and the southern Ring Road area (out to Vik) were teeming with busloads of tourists. Trash, trampled muddy paths, and idiot tourists ignoring safety signs. We found it best to leave the house well before sunrise to beat the busses to wherever we were going that day.
This was 2013. I wonder if a few years made a difference.
I only had time for the touristy stuff in the immediate vicinity of Reykjavik. I would like to go back and see it more intimately.
Weird.
Anyways, I hypothesize that some TV shows from taking place in Iceland brought a lot of attention to the landscape which was capitalized on by the Tourism departement.
Every site off the southern side of the ring road had 4-5 tour buses full of tourists, plus assorted individual cars. It wasn't crowded to the point of annoyance, but it was close. What was annoying was poor behavior by many tourists - stepping inside the chains and touching water at Geysir, going into the "caldera" of Kerid Crater, and going near the water at Reynisfjara Beach. All despite many signs in many languages. And poor tour guides chasing the idiots back to safety.
I'd guess if we went north, it would have been relatively quiet, but we only had 4 days, so based out of a flat in Reykjavik.
"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."
Looking over the tens of thousands of miles I've traveled, it's always the hiking/walking that's the most memorable, despite being the tiniest proportion, in distance, time, and cost. Whether hiking to Half Dome or walking around my local park, forest preserve, or neighborhood, there's so much more to experience.
Most tourists today are just checking off items on their list and taking a selfie for Instagram, then moving on to the next item, without ever really experiencing anything.
Oh no. They encouraged Americans to go out, wonder at natural beauty, and do some light hiking. What an unforeseen tragedy.
There is always a balance between preservation and use of the parks.
we need to seriously raise the bar, socially. back in the dialup days we actually read the political stuff, actually contributed to interesting things, kind of like how the 60s was or punk was before the masses who are only interested in the hip factor got a hold of it and simply wore it as a fashion statement. then it died.
They are amazing places to visit, but feel like we could preserve parks better if we enforced better self control somehow.
I also wonder how many are inspired to treat the environment better after a visit. Maybe those national park visits are a net positive for the environment.
Doing anything with a parking spot is an absolute nightmare though.
There are room for improvements, though. For one, I think parks could have strict enforcement and fines for littering. Second, driving into a park usually means wasting a lot of time getting through the entrance station and finding somewhere to park. Post-COVID, I wish parks would provide better public transit into and within a park so driving isn't as necessary. Similarly, I wish they would set a cap on daily car entrances and let you purchase admission online beforehand.
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TLDR; National parks administration has been degraded severely under Obama and then Trump and at this point it's a mess mostly designed to make money from industry at the expense of preservation.
literally my mantra
whether it's last years riots from people wearing 20 dollar red fist shirts from amazon, or jan 6th insurrection by the dude wearing some funky horn helmet thing, or ariel pink, or the guy from vice starting the proud boys, or trump complaining about the mainstream, or fyre festival, or even once you add some edgelordism to it like lil nas x....
hipsters ruin everything. like frank zappa said... america is superficial. no real culture, no real art, just fads. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5WEU30Iods
> like frank zappa said... america is superficial. no real culture, no real art, just fads.
Jazz? Blues? Abstract Expressionism? Broadway?
Give me a break.
like experiencing national parks for instance, pack in pack out just like i had to do in boy scouts (and hated i'm not the outdoors type).
hipsters are only there for the "hip" factor. hipsterism as a culture is the mainstream. it's basically a cartoon version of itself, and we're worse off for it. people tried to counteract it within art and things like that, however it has no effect because the hipsters just latch onto it and you're back at square one again.
it's almost like we've gotta go back to book clubs and leagues and things like that, or somehow have some kind of platform like this mixed with twitter where you can have some kind of long form serious discussion, with real evidence (even observances). just like that dude said somewhere else in this thread, probably about half or more of these people are just taking photos for insta.
except there's nothing wrong with even that. it's the "just" part, and the lack of general respect for others and their environment. it is a trend that needs to end or we're over as a species and i'm not even making a joke.
somehow, some way, we need to make the lowest common denominator mentality we have made socially acceptable, socially unacceptable, and the design of our social systems and technology need to reflect it.
the first wave are the originals that start something, usually through serious means (ie, through literature, serious study, or whatever - think jimi hendrix right before monterrey)
the second wave is the hipster wave, where a bunch of people who see something cool/new want to capitalize on such new things.
the third wave is the mainstream wave, where now it's just a complete joke, who followed the hipsters because they told them it was the cool new fad.
when in reality, we should be in the first wave all the time, and THAT is what should be mainstream.
Hasn't it often been said that foreign tourists are so prominent at the biggest parks, because relatively few actual Americans get enough holiday to go that long distance? I would think that visiting the big parks (as opposed to some less famous park nearby one’s home) is not really mainstream.
i'm upset about nobody reading their literature.
i'm upset about this article. it's just the piles upon piles upon piles of things i'm upset about and i could write books on it, but it all reduces down to our lack of seriousness which is a NEW phenomenon. even adam curtis pretty much agrees with me. that's literally the whole entire 6 hours of his new shindig.
Here’s DFW and his contemporaries talking about it in the 90s:
https://www.salon.com/2014/04/13/david_foster_wallace_was_ri...
like the past few years i started going through history, from the 30s through 1990 (cuz most of that i lived through) and just started mapping out these long trends over 20-40 years. noticing the differences in what happens and so on. and it's kind of funny, you go back 20 years and it's limp bizkit burning down woodstock 99 to break stuff, and 20 years before that you get the sex pistols.
and then you fast forward back to now and it's literally aging johnny rotten screaming his love for trump on television and zoomers burning down anything they can, and having an intergenerational fight between those two camps. i think beyond all, it was that combination that most explains the events that have been going on. the sort of generations of goal post moving, the polished nature of diversity that is both a waste of time and ends up tokenizing the trend vs mavericks like roddenberry. and then you mix that with the sort of careless attitudes because so far we've equated freedom from government control, with freedom from any kind of civil order or basic ethical values.
when i was a kid, and this isn't that long ago cuz i'm barely in my 30s, if i got caught even considering any of the stuff i read in this article, somebody would've probably kicked my ass or gave me a stern talking to and rightfully so. you shouldn't have to NEED to feel something to do the most minimal of things. we shouldn't NEED to have some crappy surveillance state and have to pay a bazillion park service people to keep an eye on things. people should just do it. hell, go plant a tree or something and go insta that, go read a book, even go to a Broadway show or listen to some Jazz. that was the ethic that glued together this country, and now it's gone.
i've been watching a lot of the old generation, the pre you know stewart brand types. and the crazy thing is the bookchins and the ayn rands actually if you really look at it - hated them. because they thought they were too careless and merely wanted to just pick whatever sounded good or mostly plausible to run with it.
like this guy was right there along with brand and SDS and all them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pd73MYOBV-k
i'm a big quality over quantity type of person. i think most people drift towards that, but we're habitually lazy. when the social ties reward that, i just don't really think that's a good idea.