What About…Parking Reservations?
Yosemite did just this in a pilot program in the Yosemite Valley in 2017. Visitors could go online and guarantee themselves a spot for a few bucks. But it resulted in fewer places to park because people with reservations were nabbing the first spots they saw, including those in first-come, first-served zones, not their designated spots. “We had to honor those reserved spaces, so we had a fair amount of empty spots,” says Yosemite’s Gediman.

Clever Concept
Integrate broader public transportation, as Yosemite does with the YARTS regional system. Visitors can catch a YARTS bus from as far away as Fresno, Mammoth Lakes, or Merced for a lift to Yosemite Valley, no car necessary. The park also targets visitors staying in gateway communities as well as at local RV parks. (Note: Some routes have been altered and buses are running at reduced capacities during the pandemic.)

Solution 3: Alter Pricing

Groups outside the NPS have suggested this supply-and-demand-style idea: Charge more for access when demand is highest, thereby encouraging people with flexible schedules to travel during quieter periods. You’ve probably heard of this model in the context of city highway tolls during rush hour or Uber surge pricing; the same principle could incentivize park visitors to try a winter or shoulder-season trip.

The Big Idea
A week at most of the top-tier parks costs $35 per car—a screaming deal—and doubling or tripling that fee could, in theory, dissuade a significant percentage of visitors. But putting a higher price on access to land that belongs to everybody raises all kinds of issues surrounding fairness and equity. And, if history is any indication, it’d be tremendously unpopular: When then Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke tried to hike some national park fees in 2017, public outcry against the move forced him to abandon the plan. There could be another option. “You can structure [entry fees] so there’s a discount,” suggests Tate Watkins, research fellow at the free market environmentalism think tank Property and Environment Research Center in Montana. “Rather than raising prices when you have a lot of people, you can lower them during less-desirable seasons to nudge people a certain way.” The same strategy could apply to weekdays versus weekends.

Solution 4: Point Out the Road Less Traveled

Yellowstone has Old Faithful, Yosemite its famed valley. Both are marquee destinations that attract the mountain lion’s share of tourists. But those people magnets represent a mere fraction of the natural wonders any given park offers. It’s not a bait-and-switch situation for park staff to instead suggest places like Shoshone Geyser Basin or Hetch Hetchy, respectively, which are spectacular in their own rights.

The Big Idea
Notify visitors in real time when A-list destinations fill up and point them toward equally stunning yet less-crowded alternatives. In 2019, Glacier introduced its online Recreation Access Display, a frequently updated tool on its website that reports which parking lots and campgrounds have filled up each day and which still have openings (visitors centers in the park and in gateway towns also use the display’s information so guests can check it without Wi-Fi).

But redistribution strategies work best in tandem with other crowd-control measures, notes Rocky’s Patterson: “There’s no magical utopia to send people to where we know they’re going to find a parking place. We need to look holistically and parkwide, or we’ll just be pushing impacts to other areas.” Patterson knows of what she speaks. Relatively recent parking problems and private-property trespassing issues at previously off-the-beaten-path spots like Lily Lake and Lumpy Ridge have required officials at Rocky to put up new no-parking signs, block illegal parking spots with boulders, and ramp up law enforcement citations.

What About…Pushing Off-Hours Visits?
“Show up early or late” was once solid advice for dodging the mobs at even the most crowded destinations. About 10 years ago, Glacier rangers began urging travelers to visit Logan Pass outside of the midday hours, but “what we didn’t take into account was the increase in visitation,” Riddle says. “Redistributing works to a certain degree…until you’re full all the time.”

Clever Concept
Introduce geofencing—location-based services that use GPS, Wi-Fi, or other tech to trigger messages when someone accesses a specific area—to the parks. “When people enter a part of a park, you could have a pop-up message on your phone or in your car,” the NPS’ MacIntyre says. “It might say, ‘Welcome!’ or it might say that parking lots in the area are already full, or that this other lot is still open.”

Solution 5: Manage the Ick

More people, more poop. It’s gross but true. At best, that translates to long lines at trailhead vault toilets (and in the COVID-19 era, closer contact with others and potentially contaminated surfaces; BYO hand sanitizer). At worst, it means human waste piling up in the backcountry. Dodging soiled TP swatches and sidestepping poorly covered catholes is not what anyone envisions for a walk along the Pacific beaches of Olympic National Park or a hike in Rocky, but it’s the unfortunate reality of overcrowded parks.

The Big Idea
Build more toilets, but be smart about it. Parks’ remote destinations and lack of infrastructure often preclude plumbing, but simply digging more pit latrines isn’t ideal, either. Not only are such toilets high-maintenance and expensive to pump, but, “if you continue to put up toilets with a maximum capacity, they simply fill up within a few years and pose yet another maintenance problem to solve,” says Thor Retzlaff, co-founder of nonprofit Do Good Shit, which works to improve waste management in wild places worldwide. “It doesn’t make sense.”

Instead, parks could implement new-school, urine-diverting toilets that drastically reduce waste volume, maintenance costs, and overall stink. These models redirect pee to on-site septic fields, tanks, or the ground’s surface, thereby preventing the gag-inducing ammonia buildup that comes from mixing solid and liquid waste. That diversion also makes it easier for soil microbes to break down the remaining TP and poop, greatly shrinking the overall load parks have to deal with in the backcountry.

Several parks have already installed these modernized toilets in crowded, fragile backcountry environments, such as Zion’s Angels Landing and the Boulderfield just below Rocky’s Longs Peak. Not only have Rocky’s new-in-2018 latrines reduced waste buildup by 40 percent—a big deal when llamas are your chief means of packing out crap—but their natural stone meets sleek modern design is also stylish enough to have earned an American Institute of Architects Award in 2019.

Clever Concept
In particularly pristine and/or high-impact sites, encourage hikers to pack it all out by providing WAG bags (bags you do your business in and then haul out), as White River National Forest rangers do at Conundrum Hot Springs, where unchecked human waste was soiling, well, everything.

Solution 6: Ask People Not To Do It for the ’Gram

It’s tough to say with certainty that a once under-the-radar campsite or backcountry lake is now overrun with selfie-hungry hordes because of Instagram hashtags. But land managers across the region anecdotally blame the social media platform for outing certain spots, from Grand Teton National Park’s Delta Lake to Glen Canyon National Recreation Area’s Horseshoe Bend vista, with geotagged glamour shots.

The Big Idea
While there’s nothing wrong with taking pictures, asking visitors not to share the exact coordinates of every landscape photo they post could help. Boulder’s Leave No Trace Center for Outdoor Ethics made social media restraint part of its philosophy with 2018 guidelines that ask adventurers to “think before you geotag,” consider omitting specific location details, and promote Leave No Trace ethics. “We’ve been called out in terms of being gatekeepers,” says Ben Lawhon, the center’s education director, who adds the goal isn’t to keep people off public lands, but rather to encourage good behavior when they go. “If every social media post had a Leave No Trace or stewardship message, we’d be in a better place.”

Also leery of the social media spotlight and perturbed by congestion on local trails, the Aspen Chamber Resort Association launched its Tag Responsibly, Take the Aspen Pledge campaign in July 2019. Inspired by a similar push in Jackson, Wyoming, Tag Responsibly asks visitors to use a generic tag location instead of pinpointing specific trails, like Lost Man Trail or Cathedral Lake. “We technically can’t prove it, but we’ve seen [visitor] numbers increasing” at the Maroon Bells along with the social media posts, notes Melissa Wisenbaker, public relations manager for the Aspen chamber. “We’ve noticed that as soon as the fall colors hit and people start posting on social media, we’ll have crowds the next weekend,” adds White River National Forest’s Shelly Grail. Thus far, the Tag Responsibly geotag has been used more than 200 times, perhaps mitigating the Instagram effect on Aspen’s backcountry gems by spreading out visitation. Asking national park visitors for similar restraint might relieve pressure on the system’s most-tagged locales.

Solution 7: Spread the Love

Social media platforms aren’t all bad, of course. Remember the Find Your Park campaign? The park service launched its media juggernaut of ads, events, and social media hashtags in the runup to the NPS’ centennial celebration in 2016. Meant to get a younger and more diverse crowd excited about national parks, Find Your Park was hugely successful at encouraging the next generation to discover public lands. In fact, the campaign reached a third of American millennials, according to the NPS. Jonathan Jarvis, NPS director from 2009 to 2017, sees a clear link between that marketing push and the record-breaking visitation that followed: “It piqued people’s interest, and I believe it did translate to a higher level of visitation.” It stands to reason, then, that cleverly concepted campaigns deployed via Instagram and the like could be tools to combat crowds too.

The Big Idea
The park service could unleash a new PR campaign, this one aimed at attracting travelers to lesser-known parks instead of the ones overrun with visitors. Rocky is Colorado’s all-star destination, but only a few hours away, Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park offers a plunging gorge, adventurous hiking, and trout-teeming waters yet ranks 45th out of the 62 national park units in recreation visits. Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve sits only a little higher, at number 40, while Mesa Verde National Park’s 556,203 annual visitors earn it spot 38.

Outside of Colorado (but not too far outside), Capitol Reef National Park delivers all the classic Utah red-rock glamour of Zion with 27 percent of its visitors. Washington State’s North Cascades National Park ranks 58th on the list with 38,000 annual visitors, a fraction of the people Rainier and Olympic national parks pull in. Nevada’s Great Basin National Park hosted about 130,000 visitors in 2019, about the same number of parkgoers that explored Rocky in March alone.

And why stop with national parks? The gamut of public land options could get in on the campaign: national monuments, historic sites, and lesser-traveled national forests and Bureau of Land Management tracts. “Certain other [types of] public lands are often underutilized,” Jarvis says.

Bottom line: There’s plenty of epic beauty beyond Rocky, Yellowstone, and Yosemite. Highlighting it could deliver much-needed elbow room around the biggies.

Solution 8: Do Your Part

You know that saying, “You’re not in traffic—you are traffic”? As Westerners, we understandably feel ownership over “our” parks and maybe more than a little annoyance at the tourists in flip-flops standing in “our” way on the trails. Let’s face it, though: By expecting to waltz into a parking spot at Bear Lake on the Fourth of July, we’re part of the problem.

The Big Idea
Front Rangers can fairly easily head up to Rocky on a Wednesday in April. Or leave the car in Estes Park and bike through the gates in July. Or head for Roosevelt National Forest or Dominguez-Escalante National Conservation Area or Eagles Nest Wilderness—spectacular places not on the bucket lists of your average tourists from New Jersey—during high season. And we should. Even with its national park crowding problems, the West remains a largely wild and empty place. And as Westerners, we have access to all that wide-open splendor. So act like a local—because, hey, you are one—and leave Dream Lake in July to the Texans. It’s arguably prettier in the winter anyway.