The Business of Scenery: Why America’s national parks need new management

I was born just 6 years before Edward Abbey died. He wrote about this problem long before I was even born. This problem is not new, and some of its causes have been well known for a long time.

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.

Also, most of the busiest places can be visited as a pretty quiet experience in their offseason.

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.

Totally agree. Outside DC, Skyline Drive is a crowded mess in leaf season, but the rest of the year, it's not bad. The most popular day hikes are overcrowded on weekends (White Oak Canyon) as described in the article, but there are less popular hikes that are almost as dramatic and far less crowded.

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).

Certainly true, but we now have roads to all the "best" spots, sometimes with parking lots and paved trails. And long lines of cars waiting to get into the parks. There has to be a better way.

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).

> Close to 400M visitors means this is the 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.