Overcrowded National Parks

America’s reputation for having beautiful, and vast, national parks is known worldwide.  In 2023, there were 331 million National Park visitors (including 13 million from other countries).  As of 2024, our National Park system contains 85 million acres of relatively untrammeled land and, of that, 56 million acres are in Alaska (with severe climates and fewer population pressures).  The focus of this article is on the 48 coterminous states.

In 1872, Yellowstone (in Wyoming) was the first area to be designated as a National Park.  Its total land area is 2.2 million acres.  Since then, 62 more national parks have been added to the system, with the most recent (in 2020) being New River Gorge in West Virginia (7,000 acres).  However, all is not well with our nation’s national park system.  Year after year, park visitors are feeling more hassled by crowds and less uplifted by the grandeur of nature.

What once was a pleasant drive to a national park for hiking and solace, has become an environmental force that is impinging on the entire experience.  Every summer, the sheer crush of cars at many national parks can lead to overflowing parking lots, bumper-to-bumper traffic, roadside soil erosion, and lines miles long at park entrances.  Once out of the car, hiking trails can also be packed — resembling a dusty non-stop parade in both directions.  Overall, the number of visitors oftentimes exceeds the carrying capacity of the trails and surrounding vegetation while diminishing the enjoyment of the visitors themselves.

Although in some cases reservation systems are being employed (e.g., Rocky Mountain National Park) to manage the rate of visitor use, this overuse problem is being driven by the open-space/recreation demands from America’s rapidly-growing population, which are overwhelming the limited supply of national parks.

Global demand for America’s park system

This trend can be illustrated by looking at America’s five most congested national parks (as well as the US population).  The most complete visitation data is from 2021, and the data before that does not go beyond the completion of the interstate highway system (1992), so as to avoid introducing any transportation limitations that could have reduced visitation numbers.

As shown, the attendance at these national parks have outpaced (57-125%) America’s population growth (29%) during the same 19-year period.  These trends are unsustainable, especially because the expansion rate of the national parks’ land area has decreased dramatically over the years.

Limits to park system expansion

Aside from the exorbitant land costs, it is becoming more and more difficult to find suitable land, both in terms of size and quality, to be designated as a National Park.  One of the last sizable parks (greater than 600,000 acres), to be designated (within the 48 coterminous states), was in 1938 — Olympic National Park.  Located in Washington State, the park is comprised of 922,000 acres of forestland.  There have been larger parks designated since then, but they have been comprised predominantly of inhospitable desert, e.g., Big Bend in Texas (801,000 ac., 1944), Joshua Tree (795,000 ac., 1994), and Death Valley (3.4 million ac., 1994).

Contrast this with two recent (2019) designations – Indiana Dunes along Lake Michigan (15 ac.) and White Sands in New Mexico (146,000 ac.).  Although a prime location, Indiana Dunes is only about 2% the land area of Yosemite, and does not qualify as a majestic wilderness.  And, although White Sands is much larger, it also is desert land located within the Chihuahuan Desert (America’s largest desert).

As our nation becomes more densely populated, the vast areas of wilderness are becoming fewer and fewer, and land prices are rapidly rising.  This has a double-whammy effect when it comes to identifying candidate sites for national parks.  What remains in America is a patchwork of parcels (including National Forests). The days of securing big tracts of untrammeled and densely vegetated upland for national parks, like Yellowstone and Yosemite, are fading away.

Immigration-driven population growth contributes to fragmentation

The conflicts arising from a rapidly growing population vying for a limited resource promise to become more frequent and intense.  According to the US Census Bureau, our population will soar by another 50 million people by the Year 2060, with more than 90% of that growth due to immigration.  Indeed, like so many other examples of limited and dwindling resources (e.g., water, farmland), it is becoming more of a challenge to maintain a welcoming immigration system without compromising the very environment and quality of life of our home country.

Unsustainable population growth puts federal conservation managers in a situation where they must restrict park usage for Americans.  This loss of freedom leads to an obvious question — how many people can we sustainably admit each year into this country, while maintaining ready access to our natural resources?  For Americans who love the great outdoors, and want the same for future generations, reducing our high immigration rates is a necessary first step.

Related: Factsheet: Connection to Nature; Conservation Challenges, Sustainability Initiative