The Economist (in this week’s print edition, and online here) reports that attendance at America’s National Parks, after years of growth to the mid-80s, has reached a plateau and even seen a slight decline. Here’s the key graphic:
First thought: we had been hoping to make next year our big “out West” family vacation, now that the youngest is old enough to handle at least modest hiking (he’s 6), so after reading this article, I looked at the cost and availability of lodging. Want a “Standard Room – 2 Queen Beds” in the Old Faithful Inn for anytime next summer? Sorry — all sold out. There are small, small patches of availability for a 2 Queen Shared Bath room, and a 1 Queen Shared Bath is wide open.
Now, back when our youngest was an infant (and fairly portable in a backpack carrier) we also visited Yellowstone — but we stayed in exactly one of these 1 Queen Shared Bath rooms, and I think this was partly for price considerations, partly because everything was booked already — but this was also much closer in time to our trip.
So this doesn’t actually tell me — or my reader(s) — anything about changes in the last 12 years.
But my bigger gripe with this article, and with the NPS’s approach, is that there is no “right number” of visitors.
In the first place, the graphic above doesn’t distinguish between Americans and foreign tourists, and there are plenty of reasons why the number, and country of origin, of foreign tourists will vary.
As for Americans from minority groups, the approach of creating new “national parks” with a focus on some aspect of the history of that minority group to attract them is missing the point — while technically, the government could declare any particular patch of land a “national park” and then its visitors are added to the total, there is a difference between the Cesar Chavez National Monument (basically, his home and gravesite) and a stretch of land with exceptional natural features, and whether or not one visits Cesar Chavez’s gravesite doesn’t have anything to do with the broader question of whether younger Americans are more attached to technology than nature, so that combining the visitor counts isn’t meaningful, just self-serving, if the NPS needs to increase its visitor counts for their own sake.
Are younger Americans less likely to visit the great natural national parks? Is this part and parcel of a declining interest in the natural world? Or is it due to the increasing cost of long-distance travel, with the increase in gas prices? Or is it due to the combination of a perception by younger people that driving a scenic route is lame, yet at the same time hiking that route is only for serious outdoor enthusiasts?
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