Overwhelmed National Parks

Above, visitors on a walkway in Yellowstone National Park. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

Our national parks are suffering from overcrowding. This hurts the park as people overrun the facilities such as trails, restaurants, campgrounds, parking areas and roads.

The Weather Network has an article on this problem.

It begins with:

Wednesday, May 9, 2018, 14:55 - If you plan on travelling to one of the 58 national parks in the United States this year, you may want to plan well ahead of time and be extra patient during your visit. Things are not like they used to be in many park areas and if the situation continues to deteriorate, we may not be able to enjoy nature protected areas like we have done for over 100 years. 

Last year, 331 million people visited the National Park Service's 417 sites, which was slightly down from 2016. However, in 2017 visitors spent more time in the parks at 1.4 billion hours, an increase of 19 million hours with respect to the previous year. August was the busiest month of the year with close to 40 million visitors.

This is precisely the reason that I prefer to visit national parks during the off-season and avoid going during the summer vacation season. I was lucky last year when I went to Crater Lake National Park and Lassen Volcanic National Park during the summer. Both parks are more remote than Yosemite and the Grand Canyon and not as prone to overcrowding.

To read more, go here.