Use limits the next step?
Rick Smith
Yale Environment 360
Monday, July 31, 2017
How A Surge in Visitors Is Overwhelming America’s National Parks
The growing crowds at U.S. National Parks have become unmanageable, jeopardizing the natural experience the parks were created to provide. With attendance this summer continuing to shatter records, officials are considering limiting use of the parks in order to save them.
By Jim Robbins
Zion National Park in southwestern Utah is the poster child for the crowding of America’s most hallowed natural places. With its soaring and magisterial red, dun, and white rock cliffs with grand names such as the Court of the Patriarchs and the Temple of Sinawava, Zion is at the top of the list of the nation’s most dramatic scenery.
It is also small as parks go, just under 150,000 acres and has only one main road, six miles long. Yet Zion gets as many visitors as Yellowstone, more than 4.3 million a year, even though Yellowstone is nearly fifteen times larger.
“In the last few years, this huge uptick in visitation has overwhelmed our infrastructure facilities, our trails, our backcountry, it goes on and on and on,” said John Marciano, a spokesman for Zion. “We can’t sit on our hands anymore. We have to come up with some kind of management plan to be able to preserve resources and to make sure our visitors have a good and safe experience.”
Saving a landscape as a national park is only part of the preservation battle – saving the spirit of these places is also essential. National parks are often thought of as America’s natural cathedrals – serene, contemplative places to visit and be restored by a connection to wild nature and grandeur.
That is impossible in the front country of Zion – and many other national parks – these days. Veteran park administrators are aghast at the “greenlock ” – gridlock in natural surroundings – in marquee national parks like Yosemite, Yellowstone, Grand Canyon, Great Smoky Mountains, and a host of other crown jewels.
Yellowstone, for example, has gone from 2 million visitors in 1980 to more than 4 million last year and is likely to climb higher. There were 2.3 million visitors to the Grand Canyon in 1980. In 2015, attendance broke the 5 million mark. A year later, it broke the 6 million barrier. Glacier, Yosemite, Great Smoky Mountains, Acadia, Rocky Mountain are all smashing records and are overwhelmed with humanity, losing the very thing they were created to provide – a sense of peak naturalness. Managers are concerned that this is the new normal and may get worse.
“Visitors are losing in this mix of 5 and 6 million people trying to cram into places that are busy when it’s 2 or 3 million,” said Joan Anzelmo, a retired Park Service superintendent who lives near Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming and is active as a volunteer in efforts to mitigate the impacts of visitation outside Grand Teton and Yellowstone. “These are irreplaceable resources. We have to protect them by putting some strategic limits on numbers, or there won’t be anything left. Nobody will want to visit them. Everyone I know who lives, works, and is involved in these issues says something has to be done, it can’t go on like this anymore.”
If these were not national parks, the solution would be to keep building more infrastructure. But the National Park Service has a dual mandate from Congress: to “provide for the enjoyment in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.” Wider roads and more hotels and campgrounds would only create sprawl, diminish the experience of nature, and encourage yet more people to come.
This crowding comes at an uncertain time for the parks. President Trump has proposed cutting the Park Service budget by 13 percent (which would be the largest cut to the agency since World War II), and there is already a backlog of staffing and maintenance issues. And there is concern that the Trump Administration might move to make the parks even more friendly to commercial interests that would look bring in more visitors and more development.
The visitor crush is creating two main problems – a steep decline in the quality of visitor experience that a national park is supposed to provide, and damaging impacts on the ecology of these intact natural places.
Zion provides a microcosm of Park Service problems – and perhaps the beginning of a solution. Zion was one of the first parks to deal with the overwhelming crowds by closing the park to traffic and instituting a shuttle bus system in 2000. But the soaring attendance – since then the number of visitors has grown from 2.4 to 4.3 million – has swamped that effort.
The park now swarms with tens of thousands of people each day, and the season lasts almost all year, instead of 8 or 9 months as previously. Flocks of tour buses pour in from Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Instead of coming to get a sense of nature transcendent, people wait an hour or two in traffic just to get through the park gates, and day hikers jostle with hundreds of other people on one-lane trails eroded by overuse. Trash bins can’t be emptied fast enough and overflow onto the ground. Wild desert waterfalls at the end of a three- or four-mile trail feel less like a red rock cathedral and more like a crowded beach. Lines of vehicles to get a first-come, first-served camping spot start forming at 4:30 or 5 a.m., and many come away empty-handed. Amusement-park-style lines form to get on the shuttle and into restrooms.
In addition to a decline in visitor experience, there is an impact on park ecology. The legendary hike up the Virgin River Narrows, a red rock, steep-walled canyon, is the premier hike in the park. Now hundreds of people a day splash and wade their way up the riverbed into the half-light of the canyon.
All of these feet trample vegetation, aquatic insects, and fish habitat. And there are other problems. “Imagine how bad the human waste issue is in the Narrows when there’s swarms of people like that,” said Zion’s Marciano. “There’s only so many little private areas where you can peel off. Everyone goes in the same place. Human waste is not only a problem in the narrows, it’s everywhere in the front country.”
Ecological problems from the hordes of people abound in many parks. In Yellowstone, for example, a growing number of visitors are walking off boardwalks, making their own trails, throwing stuff into hot springs, or driving off roads and trampling fragile natural areas. Hundreds of people crowd wildlife along the roads, and some animals lose their fear of humans and need to be moved. Wildlife is also displaced by the numbers of people on the trails. And in many areas of the parks, the roar of traffic drowns out the subtle sounds of nature.
Why the boom in visits to national parks? Baby boomers are retiring in droves – every day 7,000 to 10,000 people turn 65 and travel is high on their list. The threat of terrorism in Europe has also kept many people in the United States, experts say.
Many point to unbridled promotion by states where the parks are located. At Zion, many people cite an international promotion by the Utah Office of Tourism called The Road to Mighty, an advertising campaign that urges a visit to the Mighty Five parks spread across southern Utah: Zion, Arches, Canyonlands, Bryce, and Capitol Reef. The campaign shows people hiking, biking and driving through sculptural red rock formations, as soaring music plays. “It’s been wildly successful,” Vicki Varela, director of the Utah Office of Tourism told High Country News. “In Europe, the Mighty Five is now on everyone’s bucket list.”
And bucket lists elsewhere. It’s not uncommon to hear Japanese, Chinese, German, French, and other languages around the breakfast tables at the large new hotels built in rural Utah.
Social media too shoulders some of the blame for overcrowding. “People come to the park, take a crazy selfie with a beautiful backdrop, put it on social media, and then their 100 friends want to go there and do the same thing,” Marciano says. “It cascades.”
An irony not lost on many is the effort by the Utah congressional delegation to undo protection for public lands in the state. Both Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears national monuments are reviled by Sen. Orrin Hatch and others Utah Republican politicians, and Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke is currently reviewing the status of these monuments to see if they can be rescinded or shrunk.
Many parks are designed to withstand and mitigate the impacts of large numbers of people, says Jeffrey Marion, a recreation ecologist at Virginia Tech, but at a certain point the crowds can no longer be managed. “When you bring people in by the busload, parks have few tools to deal with masses like that other than limiting use. You hate to see them do that, but I think it’s inevitable.”
The Trump administration is moving to overturn long-standing U.S. policies on protecting the nation’s public lands.
Is that the answer? Zion is the first park to consider such a solution. Officials there are beginning a series of public meetings aimed at creating a new visitor use management plan. Two of the proposed solutions are requiring a reservation to get into the park and a reservation to go on some of the most prized hikes. A decision is expected in 2018.
Few like the idea, but experts say the time has come. “Parks have been commanded by the Congress to accommodate people and to preserve and protect these places,” said Marion. “It’s a huge management paradox.”
In the end, Marion says, “they have to limit use. We think these parks can handle an infinite number of people, and they can’t.”
Rick Smith
5264 N Fort Yuma Trail
Tucson, AZ 85750
Tel: 520-529-7336
Cell: 505-259-7161
Email: rsmit...@comcast.net
Jerry Rogers
If the first 100 years of NPS action is any basis for prediction, my guess is that NPS will deal with this problem by developing policies, programs, slogans, etc., that encourage more people to come to the parks.
Jerry
--
--
View all the postings by visiting our homepage at:
http://groups.google.com/group/parklandsupdate?hl=en
To join the Park Land Watch group email Rick Smith: rsmit...@comcast.net This will allow you to post your messages to the PLW Group.
Membership is free
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "parklandwatch" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to parklandsupda...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Ron Mackie
> If the first 100 years of NPS action is any basis for prediction, my guess
> is that NPS will deal with this problem by developing policies, programs,
> slogans, etc., that encourage more people to come to the parks.
>
>
>
> Jerry
>
>
>
> From: parklan...@googlegroups.com
> [mailto:parklan...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Rick Smith
> Sent: Tuesday, August 01, 2017 8:22 AM
> To: parklandswatch
> Subject: [PLW Update] Use limits the next step?
>
>
>
> Yale Environment 360
>
> Monday, July 31, 2017
>
>
>
> How A Surge in Visitors Is Overwhelming America’s National Parks
>
> The growing crowds at U.S. National Parks have become unmanageable,
> jeopardizing the natural experience the parks were created to provide.
> With attendance this summer continuing to shatter records, officials are
> considering limiting use of the parks in order to save them.
>
> Zion National Park in southwestern Utah is the poster child for the
> crowding of America’s most hallowed natural places. With its soaring and
> magisterial red, dun, and white rock cliffs with grand names such as the
> Court of the Patriarchs and the Temple of Sinawava, Zion is at the top of
> the list of the nation’s most dramatic scenery.
>
> It is also
> six miles long. Yet Zion gets as many visitors as Yellowstone, more than
> 4.3 million a year, even though Yellowstone is nearly fifteen times
> larger.
>
> “In the last few years, this huge uptick in visitation has overwhelmed
> our infrastructure facilities, our trails, our backcountry, it goes on and
> on and on,” said John Marciano, a spokesman for Zion. “We can’t sit
> on our hands anymore. We have to come up with some kind of management plan
> to be able to preserve resources and to make sure our visitors have a good
> and safe experience.”
>
> Saving a landscape as a national park is only part of the preservation
> battle – saving the spirit of these places is also essential. National
> parks are often thought of as America’s natural cathedrals – serene,
> contemplative places to visit and be restored by a connection to wild
> nature and grandeur.
>
> That is impossible in the front country of Zion – and many other
> national parks – these days. Veteran park administrators are aghast at
> Yosemite, Yellowstone, Grand Canyon, Great Smoky Mountains, and a host of
> other crown jewels.
>
> Yellowstone, for example, has gone from 2 million visitors in 1980 to
> Canyon in 1980. In 2015, attendance
> Mountain are all smashing records and are overwhelmed with humanity,
> losing the very thing they were created to provide – a sense of peak
> naturalness. Managers are concerned that this is the new normal and may
> get worse.
>
> “Visitors are losing in this mix of 5 and 6 million people trying to
> cram into places that are busy when it’s 2 or 3 million,” said Joan
> Anzelmo, a retired Park Service superintendent who lives near Grand Teton
> National Park in Wyoming and is active as a volunteer in efforts to
> mitigate the impacts of visitation outside Grand Teton and Yellowstone.
> “These are irreplaceable resources. We have to protect them by putting
> some strategic limits on numbers, or there won’t be anything left.
> Nobody will want to visit them. Everyone I know who lives, works, and is
> involved in these issues says something has to be done, it can’t go on
> like this anymore.”
>
> If these were not national parks, the solution would be to
> dual mandate from Congress: to “provide for the enjoyment in such manner
> and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of
> future generations.” Wider roads and more hotels and campgrounds would
> only create sprawl, diminish the experience of nature, and encourage yet
> more people to come.
>
> This crowding comes at an uncertain time for the parks. President Trump
> has proposed cutting the Park Service budget by 13 percent (which would be
> the largest cut to the agency since World War II), and there is already a
> the roads, and some animals lose their fear of humans and need to be
> moved. Wildlife is also displaced by the numbers of people on the trails.
> And in many areas of the parks, the roar of traffic drowns out the subtle
> sounds of nature.
>
> Why the boom in visits to national parks? Baby boomers are retiring in
> droves – every day 7,000 to 10,000 people turn 65 and travel is high on
> their list. The threat of terrorism in Europe has also kept many people in
> the United States, experts say.
>
> Many point to unbridled promotion by states where the parks are located.
> At Zion, many people cite an international promotion by the Utah Office of
> parks spread across southern Utah: Zion, Arches, Canyonlands, Bryce, and
> Capitol Reef. The campaign shows people hiking, biking and driving through
> sculptural red rock formations, as soaring music plays. “It’s been
> wildly successful,” Vicki Varela, director of the Utah Office of Tourism
> everyone’s bucket list.”
>
> And bucket lists elsewhere. It’s not uncommon to hear Japanese, Chinese,
> German, French, and other languages around the breakfast tables at the
> large new hotels built in rural Utah.
>
> Social media too shoulders some of the blame for overcrowding. “People
> come to the park, take a crazy selfie with a beautiful backdrop, put it on
> social media, and then their 100 friends want to go there and do the same
> thing,” Marciano says. “It cascades.”
>
> An irony not lost on many is the effort by the Utah congressional
> delegation to undo protection for public lands in the state. Both Grand
> Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears national monuments are reviled by Sen.
> Orrin Hatch and others Utah Republican politicians, and Interior Secretary
> Ryan Zinke is currently reviewing
Rob Arnberger
I am sure all of us "out of the traces" folk have heard so much of this before. In me, it breeds a certain cynicism about the ability of our political institutions, our managing agency, and the American people to really engage the notion that these places are more than destinations and play areas. We see them as representing the "last" of our national natural heritage, and the ongoing developing history of our people....really national educational institutions.
I remember in the mid to late 90's when we were finishing, at that time, the largest and most complex GMP in the Service, at Grand Canyon. We were facing a clear decision matrix that had to include a visitor reservation system on the South Rim of some sort in order to save the essence of the resource, while also preserving the special visitor use values we felt the visitor was entitled to. I remember visiting two Arizona Senators, one still in office, and being told the idea of limiting visitor use in any way was dead on arrival and they would do what they had to in order to prevent any limitations. From those discussions, GMP planning began to evolve to build a system of more effectively managing volumes of people such as a light rail system that could enter volumes of people ,then distributed to an effective in-park LP gas bus system. In other words, if we couldn't limit numbers, maybe we could be more effective in moving them and managing them. It was a wild idea and gained substantial support from the Administration and even the Arizona Senatorial delegation. A momentum began to be built even to the point of actually constructing a light rail arrival station at the newly constructed Canyon View center. Department of Transportation planners helped to finesse much of the engineering which was very doable and relatively light on the land using existing rail to make connections. However, I was soon called before several Ralph Regula committee hearings, several hearings managed by Arizona congressman Shadegg, and a hearing or two held by Utah Congressman Hanson...all of which were argumentative and negative. Regula even brought the full committee to the park for briefings. At the end of it all, I was told by Regula that "not one dollar of federal money was going to be spent on the project....not one damned dollar". Even though we had developed some cost sharing strategies and special contracting strategies, I was told, as was the Secretary, to "focus on something else...that a reservation system was not in the cards and no federal dollars were going to be spent on a light rail strategy". Accordingly, the park was left with a GMP that put into place another huge parking lot that is now full most of the time and no successful engagement of the real problem of over visitation to a beloved spot. While the GMP, in my view, as it has been implemented over the years by succeeding Superintendents, has been tremendously successful in most areas of the plan, it failed to really solve the root problem the park faced then....and now.
It failed because politicians are incapable of engaging long term strategies. It failed because the government institution managing the parks is truly also incapable of taking a firm stand on resource preservation versus public use over a multi-decade strategy. It failed because the American people don't like to stand in line for anything other than a movie, dinner reservations or a visit to Disney World....."parks are special and should be open to all at all times." So, forgive me my somewhat cynical and jaundiced view about the patter and public discussions about "increasing need to limit visitors". Finally, as the transportation plan at Grand Canyon failed.....another one succeeded at Zion...yes, the very same place now in the forefront of the most current discussions. Under the superb leadership of Don Falvey, they instituted a wonderful bus mass transit system funded by special appropriations aided by an influential and the same Utah Congressman Hanson that worked spectacularly. They got federally funded but the Canyon did not (the vagaries of politics). But, even that success at Zion, was limited and the park is now again faced with the same situation Falvey and I faced in the 90's....that even a mass transit system can not solve the root cause that still stands before us. It is not just "visitation". It is about "saving" the resource in order to allow visitation.
Forgive me if the repeated refrains of this song so long sung sound so damned familiar, as I am sure they do for many of you. Forgive my cynicism about whether the essential root "threat" to our parks will ever truly be engaged or whether the "threat" will just be managed in innumerable ways over the coming decades, forever forgetting about the essential responsibility of the American people to protect these "last special places" and not cumulatively destroying the very things that made them great.
Rob Arnberger
Sent: Tuesday, August 1, 2017 6:44 PM
To: parklan...@googlegroups.com
Subject: RE: [PLW Update] Use limits the next step?
Rick Smith
Rob—
I agree but the problem of overcrowding is substantially worse now than when we worked. The failure of our own leaders plus those of the politicians put, as you say, resources at risk. I fear for the future.
Rick
Ron Mackie
dealing with it until there are some major political changes. The sad fact
is, at least in my view, it leaves the NPS no choice but to try to build
its way out of the visitation loads, no matter the modes of
transportation. I disagree with Dr, Runte on some issues, but I think he
is correct when he talks about population growth and all the
infrastructure needed to support it. Interestingly enough, in the court
ordered settlement agreement with the plaintiffs and the NPS, it was
agreed a certain visitation level in the approved alternative for the
Merced River plan, when reached, would trigger turning people way.
Needless to say, 5 years later, it sits shelved. I have mentioned it
before, but on one lunch occasion with David Brower, he stated to Jim
Snyder and I," one of the frustrating things about wins in environmental
lawsuits is that basically you have just temporarily postponed the next
development proposal."