National parks are overcrowded and closing their gates | Hacker News Reader

National parks are overcrowded and closing their gates

wsj.com

41 pointsprostoalex78 comments

Relative to the population:

So much land... but so little "open" land.

Edit: The US has a higher population density number than I thought: 36 people per km^2. Still, it's not far that away from Sweden's 25 people people per km^2. Norway: 15 people per km^2, Finland: 18.

These scandinavian countries have a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_to_roam - of course it's culturally quite different in the US for historic reasons, but.. it just seems so weird to have opening hours to the nature.

If it was culturally/legally possible to step-by-step implement something like this in the US, I think it would be a great thing. I do see the challenges.

Many popular US National Parks do not have open and closed hours. Closed hours are an exception not the rule and arise from unique conditions. Petrified Forest for example is closed at night to prevent illegal collection of its artifacts and rocks.

Parks such as Arches and Canyon Lands mentioned in the article turn away visitors when their limited infrastructure reaches capacity. And their infrastructure is deliberately limited to protect their natural and cultural resources.

Generally, a good strategy is visit before 10am and after 5pm during peak season. The crowds come after breakfast and leave for dinner.

Most American public land is not in National Parks even though the US park system is utterly vast. National Forests, National Monuments, National Grasslands, National Recreation Areas, and other public lands tend to be open access all the time.

The US doesn’t have freedom to roam because it is not really needed in most places. Texas is the exception due to having so little public land.

There are millions of acres of insanely easy to access BLM land but it’s all kinda boring.

Not everyone lives in California. Recreational land is much more sparse east of the Mississippi.

NYS crowded, right? Well, just look at a map, e.g., via Google maps. Can look for lots of wilderness places in NYS, but, to make looking easy, just go to the Catskills or, better yet, north of Albany. There are huge areas of forest. For a name, try the Adirondacks. Somewhere up there they had a Winter Olympics -- plenty of ice, snow, and skiing!

Recently I escaped from NYS and went to east TN. There have the Smoky Mountains with huge areas of forest and hills.

Long lived in Maryland and often went to the mountains of VA -- huge areas of meadows, forests, deer, bears, etc., that is, Shenandoah!

And that's all well east of the Mississippi River.

Yes, technically, "Recreational land is much more sparse east of the Mississippi." but still huge. Yes, in Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Idaho, Nebraska, it's harder to find people or buildings and easier to find wilderness!!!

But, sure, if go to Canada and north a few hundred miles of the border with the US, then find very sparse areas -- it seems that most of the people in Canada live not so far from the US.

But for the US again, if want wilderness, try Alaska. Of course we don't hear so much about the wildest parts of Alaska -- maybe the reason is so few people come back alive!

Map of "BLM" lands:

https://i.imgur.com/Czj3jmX.png

What's the story behind that?

The west is vast, mountainous, dry, and sparsely populated. Also title was acquired by the US Federal government. Mostly via Louisiana Purchase and the Mexican War and “treaties” with indigenous peoples.

Can't see that changing in a hurry. It's barely a political given that BLM land in the West would survive as public space given how Americans feel about their federal governments.

Still, there are solid public spaces for camping/recreation in the east if you look. Harder to find, but it's there.

I live in the Midwest. There's a handful of decent camping/easy hiking places, but nothing fantastic. Glacial drift flattened most of the land here, so it's very boring. That being said, we still have a lot of public land here, it's just mostly run by the state or counties.

What constitutes midwest? Googling suggests it's more mid and north - is that right? There's still some charm in flat desert or forest. And if midwest includes South Dakota, I wouldn't cry about that - loved it.

For me, half of the appeal goes beyond the scenery to the ability to freely use a space. I'm not American but visit a lot and think the hierarchy of national parks, state parks and then monuments/forests/BLM is brilliant. If you don't want the rigid rules of a national park, go camp on BLM land for 10 days and pay nothing, etc.

South Dakota is indeed part of the Midwest (so is North Dakota), and arguably one of the more interesting parts of it. A good chunk of the Midwest is flat farmland, plains, and forest[0]. It's not very interesting, but certainly still camp-able. But hiking here is very mediocre.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midwestern_United_States#Physi...

We roadtripped twice across the US in 2019 and didn't stop much going through Nebraska! Not everywhere wins the scenery lottery.

There is a lot that is less exciting than the highlights of a national park, but it's far from "all kinda boring". I've camped at loads of BLM locations and similar public, non-national-park spaces and found many great spots.

There are amazing BLM lands surrounding Arches and Canyon Lands National Parks. Not as amazing as what is in the parks, sure. But anywhere else they would be a prime destination.

In this context: BLM?

Bureau of Land Management https://www.blm.gov/

Bureau of Land Management was in the news during https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundy_standoff

> it just seems so weird to have opening hours to the nature.

Mostly only in the areas that you can drive to or that have something that can be destroyed.

Lots of areas in the US are available with a very brief hike and magically they don't seem to have opening hours.

In addition, there are lots of areas in the US that are quite beautiful but aren't under the management of BLM.

For goodness sake, almost the entire upper third of Pennsylvania is forest--as are huge swaths of New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine.

But you are trespassing when hiking there, right? Unless you ask the land owner for permission in advance.

> But you are trespassing when hiking there, right?

Nope. Lots of it is state forest. See Pennsylvania, for example:

https://www.dcnr.pa.gov/StateForests/Pages/default.aspx

Lots of Texas hunters will actually come up to Pennsylvania to hunt because the land has so much less restriction (basically--buy a license, don't shoot near houses or people and you're good).

Lots of land is owned by BLM (don't give a fuck what you do on it), states, counties, or towns (especially East). The latter often don't care much what you do on it. Even privately owned land is free to enter unless it's Posted or you've been told to leave.

> it just seems so weird to have opening hours to the nature

No it is not. The natural parks are there to protect the nature and not to entertain the crowds of bored retards.

I love National Parks and have done a ton of federal contracts with as a producer and photographer. But when I go camping - it’s far from the parks. I just spent 5 days out near Fort Rock in Oregon. Absolutely incredible high desert landscapes and epic skies. Nary a soul to be seen for days. Cougar tracks were visible on the trail. Creating a National Park here would ruin it. Sadly.

I can't read the article, but how is this actually a problem?

Set up a permit system and call it a day. They already do that for popular trails/activities.

> Set up a permit system and call it a day.

Yosemite implemented reservation system due to Covid and they carried it over. It works great. There’s less traffic inside the park, fewer people on trails and plenty of parking spots available. Only drawback is that tickets run out very quickly as it’s such a popular place.

> plenty of parking spots available

The dream of the outdoors...

Unless you intend to walk the 85 miles to get there from the nearest population center, you're going to need a car.

Edward Abbey is rolling in his grave.

> how is this actually a problem?

Over-use damages our natural spaces.

Sorry, I meant that this is self inflicted by the national parks. They know how to run a permit system and if the spaces are actually over crowded they can implement more of these systems across their parks and areas.

https://archive.is/Njmby

I was in Moab when the author of this article was. It was busy, but not honestly that bad, especially if you went to the park in the evening. We entered the park at about 5:30pm with no line, was all the things we wanted to see, enjoyed the stars coming out, and were home by bedtime.

Correct. Get into Arches before sunrise - most people sleep in. Hike trails as everyone is leaving for dinner in town. Last trip, we did Devils Garden out on the primitive trail from about 7-10pm with sunset - barely saw anyone. Both times I've been to Fiery Furnace, I didn't see more than a couple of people.

Some places will inevitably be busy (Delicate Arch at each end of the day) and Windows for sunrise but you don't have to adjust your behaviour much to miss the hordes. Even Windows at sunrise is tolerable as most people arrive after that.

We Can Dance Around Environmental Problems All We Want. We Eventually Reach Overpopulation and Overconsumption: https://shows.acast.com/leadership-and-the-environment/episo....

thankfully we'll peak at about 10 billion and drop from there

https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/14/world/world-population-shrink...

Whenever I hear "overpopulation" from anyone, I want them to watch this video:

Overpopulation or Underpopulation by Toby Ord

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7LgGylpI9U

A rough snippet: note that hammers and songs are different. Hammers are made of matter and require labor. Songs are a pattern and can be copied virtually for free. Songs are more valuable when there are more people: greater total enjoyment. And having more people means more minds to create great things. Some things like computers are so complex that they require a large population to make. Smaller populations might not yield the amazing technology we could otherwise have.

This video might be more approachable:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LyzBoHo5EI

I'm sure it won't convince all of the Malthusian doom and gloom sorts, but it's worth a try.

Except that as soon as you make life for women not suck, your country falls below replacement rate almost immediately.

The easiest way to avoid overpopulation is to establish equality for women.

It's very weird to me that Americans have turned nature into Disney-esque amusement parks with clearly delineated opening times and their own little police force.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say here.

Americans like nature too much?

We protect it too much, including with rangers?

We have specific landmarks that are absolutely amazing and popular?

If you want to see specific landmarks (Yosemite valley, Arches), then they're going to be crowded because they're popular (for good reason. they're amazing). If you want to be deep in the wilderness with no one around, there are a massive number of options.

Wow I feel attacked. Its hardly Disney-esque, there are some delineated trails for safety and restrictions to prevent them from being destroyed by the millions of yearly visitors. If you want federally owned but chaotic there's millions of acres of BLM land, particularly in the west. Not every American is a blithering idiot.

National Forests are a nice balance between the two. Most trails are lightly trafficked, especially when you get more than a couple of miles from the trailhead.

Last week I camped for the entire week in a national forest and didn’t see another camper the entire time. The issue is we have high demand national parks that “everyone” visits and lots of national forest and BLM land that is very sparse.

That's true I forgot about the third designation.

And there's more! Many government agencies are responsible for managing our huge amount of public land.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_land#/media/File%3AUS...

Don't forget National Wildlife Refuges!

And the National Grasslands.

And the Wilderness Areas.

One of my personal favorites: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boundary_Waters

If you portage in far enough, you can be the only person/people on a lake, with no cell phone service. On the other side of the Canadian border is Quetico Provincial Park, which is a Canadian canoeing wilderness. The million acres of BWCA and 1.2 million acres of Quetico join to form a massive wilderness full of lakes and wildlife. Native Americans left pictographs which are still visible, and French Voyageurs used this area extensively to travel from Canada to Lake Superior. I highly recommend a trip if you ever get the opportunity.

I think what OP is referring to is that it seems like every year or so we hear that someone knocks over some balanced rock in Bryce or Moab or jumps into the grand prismatic pools in yellowstone.

And yeah, those areas are really full of idiot tourists walking around everywhere.

What I think a lot of people don't understand is that is 0.00001% of all the beauty that BLM/NF lands in the US offer. I have my own favorite trails in Oregon, Arizona, Utah (that I won't share anywhere) but some of them see 1 person per day. I'm sure there are some folks that know about trails visited once a year. It's those areas that are definitely NOT Disney. (Especially on June 21 when you'll have thousands of naked people hiking everywhere)

>"...Americans have turned nature into Disney-esque amusement parks..."

This comment makes me think you've never been to North America. The stretches of wilderness are truly vast; it's nothing like Britain or Europe.

Agreed, their comment screams "I'm European and I think I can drive across America in a day" to me, especially the bit about the police force.

Which reminds me of the Death Valley Germans,discussed many times on HN.

It’s funny because that comment is far more true about the Black Forest to just pick a random European “wilderness.”

Most of the wilderness is quite nondescript, though. There are far too many people for the few amazing sites. Compare to Norway, the Mediterranean coast and islands, the Alps, and the Canary Islands.

Europe has no true wilderness and is not even in this race. Huge areas of the US are essentially untouched, no visitors, no buildings, no roads, just primal Earth. The Alps are practically suburban in comparison to the Rockies.

I wasn't really talking about unvisited regions, so the Alps wasn't meant to be an example of that. I think you should be pretty easily able to find more remote wilderness if you look to the North or the East. Recall that Europe is larger than US, although of course a large part of that is very remote.

He edited his original comment to omit "repetitive", which made it even more chuckle-worthy.

I've driven through most of the places he mentions in Europe, and with that knowledge it seems even more arbitrarily chauvinistic to try to claim the limited areas he mentions are close to the diversity of the entirety of the US or North America. While I love several of the national parks in France, their nature of being so clustered ends up being much more repetitive than the gigantic sequoias, brutal deserts, enormous mountains, and temperate rainforests one can experience in the USA - and that's just west of the Mississippi.

The fact on the ground is that if you visit a tiny 100 foot waterfall in Pennsylvania, there will be a parking lot, a $25 entrance fee, a gift shop, a show every two hours, and security rails around the path. The travel distances between sights most people would want to see are vast, and hence the crowding.

Go to Niagara falls, and there's literally an amusement park.

That one's on the Canadians. Our side is nice little park. I've done a lot of hiking on the east coast and even a managed park with an entry fee and a visitor center with a little movie will have hundreds of miles of wild trails. 1% of it will be for the car tourists with railings, pavement, strollers and small children. Yellowstone for example, for as touristy as the main areas are, has 900 miles of trails. It is incredibly wild.

Our protection of public lands is a crowning achievement. We have 7,000 state and national parks covering an area roughly the size of Spain. Sorry you didn't like the park you visited in PA.

And considering the problems he seemingly has with the state of US parks is worse in Europe in those same French national parks, the black forest, the alps... Well, I suppose he already declared crowds weren't an issue in Europe, but I'm surprised to see him bring it up against US parks given the state of the "wilderness" he has been to.

For comparison, the city of Oslo has more than 1500 miles of marked and maintained trails, and this isn't even a destination for hiking.

If you don't do that, the areas will be absolutely ruined by people just doing whatever they want.

There are literally tens of thousands of other campsites and trails to hit if you want to avoid that kind of thing. Hell, even in the more crowded areas, it's straightforward to head into backcountry trails and go from hundreds of people to none.

From personal experience: Multnomah Falls, in the Columbia Gorge in Oregon, is a madhouse. Tour groups get bused in, everyone and their dog (literally) is walking up to the top of the waterfall, etc. More than two million people visit the falls every year. But if you head past the waterfall, you'll only see a few people, and after five miles up the Larch Mountain trail, there's absolutely nobody except for the very occasional weirdo like me. And if you don't like the crowds even at the entrance, there are a gazillion other trails in the Gorge that are very sparsely traveled.

I was in Yosemite early this spring (before they implemented the advanced registration system). Even the backcountry trail I was on was crowded. There were so many people it felt like taking a walk in an urban park.

Many trails near Seattle are actually more crowded than the urban parks within the boundaries of the city. Lake Twentytwo and Mount Si are conga lines compared to places like Seward Park or Discovery Park.

They're hardly amusement parks. Many don't have gates, but the most popular ones do need to control the flow somehow. There are roads, and trails, and sometimes lodging. People can buy souvenirs from affiliated nonprofits. Aside from that, though, there's a lot of emphasis on education, not entertainment.

Also, I've experienced an order of magnitude more joy and awe in various National Parks than in any amusement park.

Well yeah, the fastest way to ruin natural space is to let in too many people.

This is just national parks. There is a lot of wilderness that is not governed by that system. As another example, BLM land is pretty much free use.

In California BLM land is popular for plinking because of the supremacy clause. Sadly people abuse the opportunity and leave filthy messes behind.

Huh, never heard that word until now. I guess that's why so many of the road signs have bullet holes.

It's really cool to be able to simply pull over to the side of the road and put up a tent nearby

It makes sense to me. There's a line between preserving it and enjoying it. We've had plenty of similar problems in the UK with staycation-ers enjoying their first trip out into the lake district, and leaving behind their empty beers, the remains of the cheapest tent they could find, etc.

If you've ever seen the leftovers of people camping at a festival, it's immediately obvious that there's a saturation point for things like this.

If you like open wilderness and few people, there is ample BLM land[1]. It’s vast and you can camp in it. No need to go to national parks to camp in the open.

[1] https://www.blm.gov/sites/blm.gov/files/BLM%20Camping%20Guid...

And many national parks have reasonable rules for backcountry camping - the rules themselves encourage you to get out of sight. It's restrictive at Zion, but I've camped in the backcountry at Joshua Tree a couple of times, at Arches, Canyonlands, etc. You leave the trail and won't necessarily see anyone until you return.

American National Parks are still very much wilderness landscapes. Even the most touristy of areas can have the barest of amenities.

There are no guard rails at the edge of many popular high points. You can fall off the top off Half-Dome in Yosemite if you’re not careful. Bison will and often do gore people in Yellowstone. Hikers drown in flashfloods all the time.

Why is it weird to preserve and strongly regulate natural landmarks?

We have so much public land that's essentially uninhabited and in a wild state. A small amount is managed as parks, essentially natural tourist attractions. The fees, entry gates and infrastructure is not only to better accommodate and attract tourists. It's also to carefully manage the human impact on these natural areas. It's not Disneyland, it's a fragile natural ecosystem. The visitors can very easily destroy the very thing they are coming to see.[1]

[1]https://www.audubon.org/news/a-drone-crash-caused-thousands-...

I went to Yellowstone a couple years ago over a holiday weekend and it was absolutely packed trying to find parking near Old Faithful or the prismatic springs.

However, if you walked literally 10 minutes onto a trail you'd reach a point where you'd start to only see people pass every few minutes. Completely isolated for the rest of the day.

Prior to the 70s, rangers weren't law enforcement officers. This changed with the Yosemite/Stoneman riot.

You should read some Edward Abbey.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com