By The Herald Editorial Board
A stretch of warm sunny days easily prompts thoughts of getting outdoors, breathing some fresh air and — take your pick — either strenuous activity or lounging in a camp chair. For those in Snohomish County, you’re sharing the same thoughts with about 850,000 others.
With the pandemic in the rear-view mirror, the near-mania to get out — dubbed “revenge travel” for those booking flights nationally and abroad — has its domestic counterpart in rebounding visitation numbers at parks at all levels, from local open spaces like Everett’s Jetty Island to national parks such as Mount Rainier.
The National Park Service recorded about 312 million visitors last year. That’s short of pre-pandemic numbers, including 327 million in 2019, but 2022’s numbers reflect a 5 percent increase from the year prior.
And with so many seeking to get away from it all, we’re finding ourselves waiting in long lines, in traffic or jockeying for parking spaces with fellow wanderlusters.
Mount Rainier National Park, for example, is expected to release a “corridor management plan” later this year to better handle the crowds that have increased from 1.1 million visits a year in 2008 to more than 1.7 million visits in 2021. The park has reported wait times of more than hour at the park’s main entrances and traffic congestion along the main roads to campgrounds and its most popular visitor centers and trail hubs, including Paradise and Sunrise. Among possible solutions, the park service is considering a timed-entry reservation system during peak times, parking permits and shuttle buses and other alternative transportation.
Crowds also are returning to popular parks closer to home; if visits there ever slowed during the pandemic. During weekends, March through October, finding a parking space among the 107 available at Wallace Falls State Park, near Gold Bar, more closely resembles the hunt for parking before a Seattle Mariners or Seahawks game. Bring patience and your state parks Discover Pass.
For other parks, the issue is more than sheer numbers; it’s the multitude of uses at particular parks. It took a good six years for Snohomish County to develop a multi-use plan for Lord Hill Regional Park, the 1,480-acre park, located between Snohomish and Monroe, with trails that for years have attracted hikers, horseback riders and mountain bike riders.
Adopted last year, the plan sought to satisfy each of those user groups as well as assuring safety and environmental protections. Yet in the end, some among the mountain bike enthusiasts initially balked at speed and other restrictions on common trails in divvying up some 26.5 miles of trails into multi-use, bike/hiker trails, hiker/equestrian trails and dedicated bike trails.
With the growing understanding of the importance of parks and public lands and outdoor spaces to our physical and emotional health, the problem of overcrowding seems to call on a demand-and-supply response, in other words creating more park land and public space.
Much of that work already has been occurring in the background, including grants and capital spending with the assistance of programs like the state’s Washington Wildlife and Recreation Program and the federal Land and Water Conservation Fund for land purchases, park maintenance and development and wildlife habitat protection. Notably, the federal conservation fund, after years of uncertain support in Congress, won sustainable and full funding through the 2020 Great American Outdoors Act, which also assured $9.5 billion through 2025 in funding for maintenance and preservation at U.S. national parks.
Protection of those investments at all levels, of course, calls for the planning and thought shown in developing policies for managing visitors and multiple use of parks. But there’s responsibility for park users, too, to make better use of the public lands available — and their own time that is now wasted in lines, finding parking and fighting crowds — to make better choices of the parks and lands that we visit.
In 2021, the National Park System reported that 44 of the system’s 423 parks set records for visitation, with 297 million visits; yet more than half of those visits were to the system’s 25-most visited parks, representing only 6 percent of total park land.
Testifying at a U.S. House committee hearing regarding national park overcrowding last December, Hannah Downey, policy director for the Property and Environment Research Center, noted that those crowds are further concentrated within each park.
“Yellowstone National Park, for example, estimates that 98 percent of visitors never get more than a half-mile away from their car, using just 1 percent of the park,” Downey told the committee, as reported by National Parks Traveler. “While it is encouraging to see widespread enthusiasm for our parks, congestion in popular areas is negatively impacting visitors, Park Service personnel, and the natural resources that our parks were created to protect.”
John Muir, the naturalist and conservationist credited with inspiring the creation of the National Park System, knew what we would need from the outdoors and nature.
In his 1869 book “Yosemite,” Muir wrote: “Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where Nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike.”
Our most popular parks — locally and nationally — are popular for obvious reasons and deserve a spot on our personal bucket lists. But the beauty and quiet we most need can be found all around us in less-traveled spots, too. And without waiting in line.
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