From Zion National Park (above) to National Park Service headquarters in Washington, Park Service personnel are trying to figure out how to deal with crowds/Kurt Repanshek file photo

Key to ongoing debates into how to manage seemingly ever growing visitation at Zion and Yellowstone, Yosemite and Acadia, and Glacier and Grand Canyon national parks is the notion of how national parks should be preserved and protected for future generations. It's a natural conversation in light of what one might call overcrowding of these places.

The outcome of those conversations stands to benefit not only those units of the National Park System, but all units. For the answers not only will revolve around carrying capacities for those parks, but how to monitor and protect natural and cultural resources, something of concern across the park system.

The crush of visitors in many parks, in the opinions of more than a few, has reached unacceptable levels. Glacier National Park recorded more than a million visitors in July, a monthly record for the park, one not even Yelllowstone has reached. So busy has Glacier been that Superintendent Jeff Mow has asked for visitors' patience as they try to navigate the Going-to-the-Sun Road, find a place to park on Logan Pass, and hike down a trail.

At Yosemite National Park, the visitation overwhelms the park's iconic valley, which offers roughly 6,500 parking spots, an insufficient number in face of that daily onslaught in summer.

"Park employees at the entrance stations are still continuing to allow literally hundreds of additional vehicles each hour into the park to jam up behind the already gridlocked traffic. Knowing full well Yosemite Valley is jammed with traffic, park employees are continuing to charge $30 per vehicle and send hundreds of additional vehicles on into the park to literally come to a standstill and then inch forward for hours in a traffic jam. New families become trapped in the traffic jam nightmare," wrote John Buckley, executive director of Central Sierra Environmental Resource Center.

Zion, which earlier this summer floated for public review a proposal that outlined a reservation system for visitors wanting to see the park's soaring sandstone walls and its slot canyons, is accepting the public's thoughts on that idea through Friday. While at Yellowstone, a new parking lot was built to handle the heavy visitation to Grand Prismatic Spring in the Midway Geyser Basin.

“The (Intermountain) region is thinking about this significantly, and has conversations region-wide," Yellowstone spokeswoman Morgan Warthin answered when asked whether the various parks were comparing notes on the crowding issues. 

The problems have not gone unnoticed in the National Park Service's Washington, D.C., headquarters.

"The National Park Service and its National Leadership Council have recognized that increased visitation is impacting high visitor use areas in some areas of the system," April Slayton, the agency's assistant director for communications, said in an email. "Visitor use management plans are currently under development at multiple parks with funding and support from the NPS Washington Office. These plans are meant to be long-term prescriptions for visitor use management in parks.

"However, to support parks in the short term, a multi-disciplinary work group is being developed to better understand the issues involved and outline the needs that exist in a variety of circumstances," she added. "We hope that by gathering best practices and experiences with visitor management situations, it will help other parks develop solutions that will work for them."

At the Interior Department, which would have to manage with $1.5 billion less in its budget if President Trump's budget proposal is adopted by Congress, Secretary Ryan Zinke believes reorganization of the Park Service can ensure the visitor experience in the parks doesn't suffer from a budget proposal that would cut nearly $400 million and 1,200 positions from the agency.

"Improving the visitor experience, health of the land, and the overall well being of the parks is at the top of the Secretary's list of priorities, which is why the Secretary's planned reorganization will allow the department to push more resources to the frontlines, rather than in offices in D.C.," Interior spokeswoman Heather Swift wrote in an email on Monday.

"The department also plans to look at expanding and duplicating successful public-private partnerships that are already happening in parks, such as making smart investments of federal dollars to leverage even more private funding, like in the case with ongoing improvements to the Gateway Arch at the National Expansion Memorial in St. Louis," she added.

At Jefferson Expansion National Memorial in St. Louis, the nonprofit Gateway Arch Park Foundation has been working with the Park Service since 2013 on a $380 million makeover of Gateway Arch grounds. The money has been raised through a variety of efforts:

• $69 million - Public funds from federal, state and local sources such as a USDOT TIGER grant, MoDOT funds, other federal grants and funding from Great Rivers Greenway District
• $90 million - Proposition P bond proceeds - On April 2, 2013, voters in St. Louis County and St. Louis City approved Proposition P: The Safe and Accessible Arch and Public Parks initiative. Great Rivers Greenway is the steward of the taxpayers’ investment in the project.
• $221 million - Private funding from gifts, grants and donations raised by the CityArchRiver Foundation (now the Gateway Arch Park Foundation). The Foundation will raise another $29 million to seed an endowment that will help maintain and improve the project area into the future.

However, the project has run a bit longer than expected. It was supposed to have been completed in 2015, but now won't be finished until 2018, according to the Gateway Arch Park Foundation.