Emily Articulated: National parks

By Emily Erickson
Reader Staff

Last week, I closed the van doors on all the gear and supplies I’d meticulously measured, packed, stuffed and balanced inside. We were leaving for a trip I’d been thinking about for weeks and spent months preparing for. 

It wouldn’t be long, as far as trips go — four nights and three days in Mount Rainier National Park — with nights being pretty simple. We’d park in beautiful campsites, eat Instant Pot mac ’n’ cheese to a chorus of frogs and crickets, and fling open the doors for midnight bladder emptying under the stars (could I get more Millennial than borrowing by boyfriend’s parents’ Sprinter van for the week?).  

Emily Erickson. Courtesy photo.

But the days would have a bit more on the itinerary. My friend and I were going to fill the hours of Washington sunshine by running on the Wonderland Trail — a 93-mile-long circle of singletrack that wraps itself around the base of the glacier-draped volcano. In our circumnavigation, we’d rack up more than 22,000 feet of vertical gain, with each section of the trail ascending and descending through glacial river beds, old-growth forests, subalpine wildflower meadows, and snow and talus-pocked alpine terrain.

The physical rigors of the trip meant preparing our bodies to handle three consecutive days of 30-plus miles of trekking. But beyond preparing our bodies, we also had to plan the logistics inherent in the trip, finding answers to our questions like, “Where could our crew meet us each night to camp?”; “Was van camping allowed?”; “Do we have to make a reservation?”; “If we can’t make a reservation, what is the likelihood of actually getting a camp spot?”; “What permits do we need?”; “What new park rules did we need to comply with?”

In short, we had to navigate the not-so-simple National Park System.

If you’ve been to a national park in the past five years, you might know what I mean. It’s not the same “show-up-and-figure-it-out” system I remember from a decade ago, and for good reason. 

According to data from across 400 national parks, there were a total of 325.5 million recreation visits to parks in 2023. This visitorship marked an increase of 13 million more park attendees than in 2022, and 33 million more than in 2014 (reflecting a 90% increase in park use).

Zion National Park Superintendent Jeff Bradybaugh expanded on these numbers in an address to the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Natural Resources Subcommittee, explaining that, “along with overall visitation numbers, changes are also occurring in visitation patterns. Many parks that previously experienced a distinctive and quieter off-season no longer have one; their visitation numbers have largely remained steady or fluctuate only slightly in what had been the shoulder season.”

He continued: “Another example is the growing demand for campground reservations. Recreation.gov, the online trip planning and reservation portal for federal sites, saw over 10 million reservations in 2022, almost double the amount made in 2020.”

In response to the influx of visitors, parks are taking various measures, such as requiring overnight and backcountry permits, restricting passenger vehicle traffic (instead offering shuttles and expanding multi-use paths to encourage walking and biking) and piloting timed-entry systems to reduce peak-hour congestion in the most popular areas of certain parks, including parts of Rainier.

The reasons behind this national park boom are multifaceted. The post-pandemic desire for social distancing; increased exposure from social media (parks with high social media activity see increases in visitation that are 16% to 22% larger than parks with less exposure, according to research by Georgia Tech); the rise of remote and flexible work options; and the appeal of an affordable vacation in an increasingly expensive world have all contributed to the surge in park visitors.

Of course, this increase in visitation has come with consequences. From park goers carving their names into ancient petroglyphs in Texas to trampling rare and restricted ecosystems in California, and leaving behind litter and human waste — everywhere, the impact of a boom of people in our preserved parks is evident.

Generally speaking, I’m glad people are visiting national parks. Connecting with nature is important for fostering a stewardship mindset for our public lands. But directly competing with this thinking is the reality that more people in these spaces also means greater risk to the parks themselves. 

I can’t help but wonder if the surge in visitors has transformed the parks from the remote and rugged sanctuaries they were meant to be into something more like Disney World — where reverence is replaced with entitlement (cue the random tourist attempting to take a selfie with a wild Bison in Yellowstone).

I’ll always cherish national parks, and will gladly bake in extra planning and logistical hoop-jumping to enjoy my time in them. This past week in Mount Rainier National Park will be a trip I’ll remember for a lifetime, with the wild, remote beauty forever imprinted in my brain. 

So, even though I run the risk of sounding like a cliche, I hope you enjoy them too, always remembering to “take only memories, and leave only footprints in designated trail areas.” (And if that old saying doesn’t do it for you, maybe just, “Don’t be a dick and stop ruining it for the rest of us, please.”)

Emily Erickson is a writer and business owner with an affinity for black coffee and playing in the mountains. Connect with her online at www.bigbluehat.studio.