Overcrowding Outdoors Bumming You Out?
Grand Canyon. Photo credit: Hugo Soons
In the last ten years, there’s been a significant uptick in visitation on public lands and waters (source). The COVID-19 pandemic only amplified that trend, with many people seeking solace in the outdoors as indoor activities were highly restricted. In 2021, visitation is already up significantly (source).
Of course, if you’ve been getting outside, you know this. Activities like camping in Yosemite National Park (a summer standby for my own family growing up in California) now require a series of advanced passes and likely the ingenuity of a bot to snag a campground reservation. Recent pictures of Zion National Park, the Grand Canyon, and other iconic landscapes teeming with visitors have been a reminder that outdoor recreation is more popular – and more crowded – than ever.
It’s still possible, of course, to find solitude and quiet outdoors (and land managers will continue to remind you that there are hundreds of less-visited parks and public lands out there). But the last few years, and especially the time following the pandemic, have shown that the trends are toward increasing participation, increasing crowding, and increased need for permits and reservations to control crowds and provide for better planning for visitors.
What can be done about overcrowding? While it may not be possible to return to the days of driving into Yosemite at the spur of the moment and finding a campsite, there are a few big policy changes that could make a big difference for improving the experience on public lands and taking the edge off crowding:
Better funding! Parks need more funding to ensure their infrastructure can handle high visitation. Congress has starved parks and public lands of funding for years, making it even more difficult to keep up with high visitation. The climate crisis has also strained budgets – for years, funding was siphoned from annual budgets for firefighting. And after wildfires, public lands often need greater investment to restore trails, parking areas, and handle issues like landslides and flooding. While the Great American Outdoors Act will start to address the maintenance backlog, the agencies also need robust increases in their annual funding through appropriations, which will make it easier to restore closed trails, build new campgrounds, and maintain infrastructure like bathrooms and parking that make it possible for public lands to sustain high visitation.
Invest in local parks and trail systems. Lots of people who want to spend time outdoors are not necessarily looking to get deep in the backcountry. There are a lot of opportunities to establish more local parks and build more close-to-town trail systems (like the Easttrail in Seattle) that would give easier access to the outdoors to major population centers. Programs like Outdoors for All focus on how to make access to green spaces more equitable, and offer opportunities to This would take the pressure off more remote backcountry landscapes, and help create more equitable access to the outdoors, ensuring more neighborhoods have green space. The Biden administration’s commitment to 30x30, a plan they are calling ‘Conserving and Restoring America the Beautiful’ also prioritizes conserving more land and water, and doing so in a way that helps create more equitable access to green space.
Improving policies around outdoor recreation. As outdoor recreation becomes increasingly popular, Congress needs tools and legislation that allows us to protect close-to-home recreation. One promising piece of legislation is the Recreation Not Red-Tape Act, which has two key provisions that would make a difference for crowding. The first is an organic designation for National Recreation Areas that would make it easier for Congress to protect landscapes with high recreation values; the second is the SOAR Act, which would improve permitting and facilitated outdoor experiences. As recreation becomes more and more popular, we need good tools and regulations to protect and improve it.
Finally, with so much participation in outdoor recreation, it’s more important than ever that we all recreate responsibly. Responsible recreation means protecting the outdoor places we know and love by leaving no trace and being respectful of Tribal lands and local communities, but it also means building an inclusive outdoor community. The outdoors look different than they did ten or twenty years ago, and our outdoor experiences are changing. But crowds don’t just represent a loss of solitude – they also represent a groundswell of new public support for the outdoors that is already translating into political support to protect new places, better fund parks and public lands, and modernize the policies that we use to protect places.
Take action below to:
Join Winter Wildlands at their annual conference and discuss overcrowding on public lands:
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