Take a walk through the Old Faithful Inn in the evening, and you won’t see many people in their rooms.
You’ll see people in the lobby, said Rick Hoeninghausen, the director of sales and marketing for Yellowstone National Park Lodges. Complete strangers will gather on couches, and they’ll chat with one another about their experiences in the park. They’ll tell stories and pass around their tablets and phones to share pictures.
That’s special, particularly in today’s divisive world, said Hoeninghausen. It harkens back to a time when art and literature helped to convince the public — and Congress — that Yellowstone was special and worthy of preservation.
“People have had amazing experiences here, and they feel compelled to share them with others,” Hoeninghausen said. “Through that process, they are demonstrating a sense of inspiration and appreciation for the place.”
Today, millions of visitors come from all over the world to see Yellowstone National Park. They marvel at geysers, thermal features, and iconic wildlife like bison, wolves and bears. They travel the roads, stay at campsites and hotels and stroll along boardwalks.
More visitors means infrastructure needs to be maintained more often, and more waste needs to be disposed of. It means employees need to do more to keep operations running smoothly, and it means more funding is required to keep up with the impacts.
But to Hoeninghausen, more visitors also means more people get to have life-changing experiences in the park. It means more people get to immerse themselves in it and see how special and inspiring it can be.
“We may not need more visitors, but we do need more stewards and advocates,” he said. “If you close the gates entirely, and nobody can see it, it’s hard to appreciate it.”
The National Park Service has long sought to preserve Yellowstone National Park and ensure that all people can access and enjoy it. But visitation is on the rise, and managing the impacts of that growth on park resources presents new and complex problems.
Retired park historian Lee Whittlesey believes Yellowstone is edging toward limits on entry, but park staff insist a reservation system is not on the horizon. Instead, they are looking to invest in infrastructure and staffing both in and around the park.
“The National Park Service wants no part of setting limits on visitation, and I don’t blame them,” Whittlesey said. “It’s difficult. It carries its own problems, but you know what? It’s reached the time now where they have to do something.”
To be credited with “discovering” a place, people need to do two things, according to Whittlesey. They need to find the place, and then they need to announce what they’ve found to the world.
Indigenous people who traded, hunted and lived within the modern-day boundaries of Yellowstone National Park for tens of thousands of years never got credit for “discovering” the place. Nor did the fur trappers and gold prospectors who crossed the area prior to the 1870s.
It took a long time — and three separate expeditions in 1869, 1870 and 1871 — for white explorers to finally find Yellowstone and convince the world that it was real, Whittlesey said.
“It was the last place in the American West to be discovered and explored, and it was just lucky that its geography had kept many people out of it,” he said. “It was a long way north of the Oregon Trail — the main beginnings of the migration West.”
The early expeditions coincided with the completion of the transcontinental railroad, which was marked with celebrations, fireworks and jubilees. Linking the East and West meant tourism had a way to start in the interior of the American West, Whittlesey said.
Word about Yellowstone National Park spread quickly, and on March 1, 1872, U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant signed an Act to protect the more than 2 million-acre tract of land at the heart of the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem from private development.
The landscape was to be “reserved and withdrawn from settlement, occupancy, or sale,” and “dedicated and set apart as a public park or pleasuring-ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people.”
“For the benefit and enjoyment of the people” was engraved in the Roosevelt Arch — a cornerstone at the park’s northern entrance that has welcomed visitors since 1903.
The famous words have provided something of a mission statement for the park, and Whittlesey said they’re nice-sounding, but legally speaking, they are throwaway words — a sort of window dressing. They do nothing in the way of protecting Yellowstone.
In Whittlesey’s opinion, the part of the law that has “resounded and reverberated through the many years” is the part that calls for the protection of the national park and its wonders from “injury or spoliation,” providing for “their retention in their natural condition.”
Once Congress set the park aside for protection, lots of people from around the world wanted to visit. Their curiosity was stimulated by the press, which talked up Yellowstone’s vast geological wonders.
The impediment was that almost no one could get to the park. Those who did either had to embark on a 450-mile overland journey through Utah, Idaho and Montana territory or steamboat up the Missouri River to Fort Benton — the deepest, uppermost port in the country — then set out on horseback from there.
Initially, only 500 people were visiting Yellowstone per year. By 1878, the number had increased to 1,000 per year, Whittlesey said.
In 1880, a new railroad shortened the overland journey, and three years later, a railroad reached Cinnabar, near Gardiner. Visitors could take a train to the town, then pack into Yellowstone on horseback.
“Those early visitors had a hard time. It’s amazing there were as many as there were,” Whittlesey said. “But, because the newspapers and magazine articles had propped it up so well, it was famous. Word of Yellowstone beat the railroads here.”{h2 dir=”ltr”}———
Yellowstone National Park was the first major tourist destination in the interior of the American West, and once people had a way to get to it, visitation gradually increased.
Between 1904 and 1914, some 15,000 to 30,000 people came to the park per year, and the numbers steadily rose from there. Visitation took off after World War II, when Yellowstone became a hot destination for families on road trips.
There were more than 1 million visits to the park for the first time in 1948. In 1965, there were more than 2 million visits. The numbers crept beyond 3 million in 1992, then 4 million in 2015.
In the spring of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic triggered travel restrictions throughout the country. Park staff closed Yellowstone’s entrances in March, and after they reopened, visitation increased slowly, then shot up.
Cam Sholly, superintendent of Yellowstone, said visitation is increasing, but park staff are confident the 2021 numbers were significantly inflated due to the method used to count recreation visits.
Every vehicle is registered as it enters Yellowstone National Park, and that number is multiplied by the average of 2.6 people per vehicle. In a normal year, a good chunk of tourists come to the park, get counted one time, stay within its borders for an average of three days, then leave.
Last year, due to pandemic-related restrictions and other factors, there were 22% fewer overnight stays in Yellowstone than in 2019. That meant more visitors were counted multiple times as they entered the park over and over again, Sholly said.
Trail counters at Midway Geyser Basin, Old Faithful and Artisan Point indicated that foot traffic in 2021 was the same or lower than it was in 2019. Visitors used less water, produced far less trash and caused fewer law enforcement and EMS incidents than in 2019, Sholly said.
“Generally speaking, almost every statistical category that we track from a visitation management standpoint was at or lower than 2019 levels,” he said. “We did not have 800,000 more people in the park. We had a lot more people who had to leave and come back.”
While there was a discrepancy in numbers, visitation is increasing, and Sholly expects the trend will continue. As more people use finite resources within a very small area of the park — especially at the height of summer — they will have a greater impact on that area.
Less than three-tenths of 1% of Yellowstone’s 2.2 million acres is developed, yet staff invest somewhere around 96% to 98% of their budget, time and energy in that tiny portion of the park, according to Sholly.
“Contrary to some of the narratives out there, there are many areas of the park where, even in July and August, you can drive the speed limit,” he said. “The whole park is not a traffic jam, but there is a lot of work to do.”
A time will probably come when park staff need to take more aggressive visitor management actions, but that isn’t on the immediate horizon, Sholly said. For now, they are identifying how rising visitation impacts park resources, employees, infrastructure and gateway towns.{h2 dir=”ltr”}———
Most visitors don’t travel more than a half-mile from their cars, so officials are taking a close look at use in road corridors. They’ve found that Old Faithful, Midway Geyser Basin, Norris Geyser Basin and the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone are by far the park’s most congested areas.
Adopting a shuttle system would be a huge investment. It would cost $30 million to $50 million up front, then another $5 million to $10 million per year in perpetuity, he said. Parking would also need to expand in specific areas, and stops would have to be built along routes.
Part of the equation is exploring new transportation options, but existing road networks also need to be maintained. Dunraven Pass is set to open this May after two years of construction and $28 million in road improvements. The route that hasn’t been worked on since the 1930s.
More infrastructure projects are in the works. The bipartisan Great American Outdoors Act — passed in 2020 — has provided much of the funding needed to maintain roads, replace bridges and rehabilitate historic sites throughout the park.
The law was championed by Montana’s Republican U.S. Sen. Steve Daines. It authorized full and permanent funding for the Land and Water Conservation Fund. That freed up money to support deferred maintenance and infrastructure projects on public lands nationwide.
With more funding on hand, park staff can take steps to bolster road networks as visitation increases. They can fit road corridors with shoulders and make reasonable adjustments to parking capacity. However, “the notion that we are going to build our way out of this — that’s not going to work,” Sholly said.
Ahead of expanding parking capacity every 10 to 30 years, staff would need to look toward adopting some kind of park-wide reservation system, he said.
“We’re not at that threshold yet, but I think that the available infrastructure for visitors to travel on has to be looked at in calculus around when you would do something like that,” Sholly said. “We want to be strategic and look at the long term. We don’t want to be reactive.”{h2 dir=”ltr”}———
No one can predict the future, but “unrelenting, overwhelming, all-encompassing visitation” to Yellowstone National Park is predictable, Whittlesey said. To manage the influx of new visitors, he thinks the park service needs to adopt a reservation system for entry.
Visitors are already required to book stays at most campsites in advance. They are also required to secure most backcountry permits online in advance. Getting admitted to the park is the next step, and “hell is going to hit the fan” when that happens, Whittlesey said.
“Nobody wants to close an entrance. Nobody wants to build huge parking lots for buses at every entry point,” he said. “What are you going to do? Tear out a million acres of trees to build a parking lot. No. Not in this environmental place.”
Early on in Whittlesey’s career, when he worked as a tour guide, visitors would ask him what Yellowstone would do when there were too many people. Back then, he would joke about the idea of a reservation system.
He feels that time is here, and that once the system is in place, it’s going to be a mess initially. “This is a complicated problem, and we have a duty in my opinion to take care of a world-class and magnificent place like this,” he said.
Scott Frazier, a Crow Tribal member and Santee descendant, said the 150th anniversary of Yellowstone National Park is not like a birthday party or an anniversary party. It marks 150 years of a really good idea — that you can set land aside for the future.
That idea spread like a seed around the world because people needed places like Yellowstone, he said. They still do.
One hundred and fifty years after it was established, visitors come from all over the world to see the park. They are drawn to animals like wolves, buffalo and bears because moments with them are spiritual, and “we don’t have enough of those in our lives,” Frazier said.
Back when he was a kid, Frazier used to camp with his dad at Pebble Creek. His dad was a veteran who had served in multiple wars, and he suffered from post traumatic stress disorder.
When Frazier’s dad looked upon Lamar Valley, “you could see all that just go away for a brief time, and he was himself again,” Frazier said. “In Yellowstone, there is a lot of healing that can be done.”
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