Fifty years ago, Edward Abbey published his classic Desert Solitaire in which he chronicled his year as a ranger in Arches National Monument, now Arches National Park. He was a gifted teller of yarns, possessed of an acerbic and biting wit, and in this book lamented change he saw coming to the American West, particularly to Arches National Monument. Few visitors came to “his” park during his tenure, so he had plenty of time to explore and savor the beauty and solitude of the nature of his exceptional workplace.

I had recently moved to the Pacific Northwest from New Hampshire, and just begun to explore national parks and had never visited the Southwest. I don’t recall how I stumbled on Abbey’s book, but it struck a chord and I was excited to visit the country he described, and to do so before it was changed, maybe even destroyed, by “progress.” Wilderness was new to this Easterner born and bred, so I found his thoughts on wilderness exciting:

No, wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread. A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principal of civilization itself.

Even as he wrote such words, he feared – no, expected – wilderness like that he was enjoying in the Utah desert would be destroyed.

Two recent books about Abbey, Charles Bowden’s The Red Caddy and Amy Irvine’s Desert Cabal, inspired me to reread Desert Solitaire, and after 50 years of wilderness and national park travel, I found Abbey the provocateur as thought provoking as ever.

Irvine writes, “Your claiming of Utah’s desert outback taught an entire nation what it means to be in collective possession of a place. At the same time” she adds, “you taught us that one’s interest in national lands is not a given – although the idea of it certainly is.”

Rereading Desert Solitaire in the age of Trump when public lands are at risk makes some of what Abbey had to say back then timely and prescient.

Abbey wrote a lot, and what I focus on here is a drop in his big bucket of work but, I think, quite important. It is the essay in Desert Solitaire aptly titled “Polemic: Industrial Tourism and the National Parks.” There he sits by his trailer, enjoying his solitude, reflecting on his future:

On the rare occasions when I peer into the future for more than a few days I can foresee myself returning here for season after season, year after year, indefinitely. And why not? What better sinecure could a man with small needs, infinite desire, and philosophical pretensions ask for?

But the sinecure is not to be, “For there is a cloud on my horizon. A small dark cloud no bigger than my hand. Its name is Progress.” A dust-covered Jeep appears from an unexpected direction, its decal proclaiming “Bureau of Public Roads” and driven by a civil engineer. 

“Progress has come at last to the arches, after a million years of neglect. Industrial Tourism has arrived.” 

And had it ever! Engineers built the road, and the people came in “serpentine streams of baroque automobiles pouring in and out, all through spring and summer, in numbers that would have seemed fantastic when I worked there: . . . the ‘visitation,’ as they call it, mounts ever upward.”

He wrote this in the 1960s, and in the second decade of the 21st century the visitation at Arches has indeed reached “fantastic” levels. In 2016 the National Park Service recorded 1,585,718 visitors, as many as 3,000-4,000 per day on peak days, and most of these visitors came in the 21st century version of “baroque automobiles.” The Park Service admits to a serious congestion problem in this and other parks and struggles to find ways to reduce the problem.

Abbey had some ideas about how to deal with such mounting visitor pressure: (1) “No more cars in national parks. Let the people walk. Or ride horses, bicycles, mules, wild pigs – anything – but keep the automobiles and motorcycles and all their motorized relatives out.” People will object, he admitted, but once they discover the joys of intimate experience of a park, they will be won over. (2) “No more new roads in national parks. After banning private automobiles the second step should be easy. Where paved roads are already in existence they will be reserved for the bicycles and essential in-park services, such as shuttle buses, the trucking of camping gear and concessioners’ supplies.” (3) “Put the park rangers to work …. They’re supposed to be rangers – make the bums range; kick them out of those overheated air-conditioned offices, yank them out of those overstuffed patrol cars, and drive them out on the trails where they should be, leading the dudes over hill and dale, safely into and back out of the wilderness.” Abbey conceded there would be many objections to such ideas, that many would argue that “it is too late for such a radical reformation of a people’s approach to the out-of-doors, that the pattern is too deeply set …. ‘ but, he argued, “how can we be sure unless we dare the experiment?”

Abbey sought to provoke, enjoyed being sharp and sarcastic, even insulting, in his harangues, to overstate his arguments. Today, in 2018, we know both that he was right in his concern for the future of national parks, in his predictions of what the automobile culture might do to parks and the park experience. And even some of his self-styled “radical” ideas have been tried in some parks, but we have not gone so far as to “dare the experiment” he suggested. Should we? Is it time after 50 years of a rising tide of visitation to revisit some of Abbey’s ideas about what to do about “Industrial Tourism and the National Parks?”

A half-century ago Ed Abbey warned us there would be lines like this at Arches National Park/NPS

Let’s start with his first idea – no more cars in national parks. A complete ban of private vehicles will likely never be possible, but a gradual reduction of what John Muir once called “mechanical beetles” should be the goal. A total ban might be feasible in some parks where the options Abbey advocates could be offered – shuttles, bicycles, horses, but probably not wild pigs. I can envision large parking lots outside such parks, or even at visitor centers just inside the entrance, served by various shuttles that might be a scenic tour or delivery to trailhead or campground. This would exclude recreational vehicles from most park campgrounds which would not please those who own them, but if people knew in advance of their visit that they would need a tent and camping gear or must ride a shuttle and book a park hotel, they could still enjoy the park despite their lack of private transportation.

A few years ago, I visited Arches in early spring when the only campground was half full, but my tent site was between a pickup-trailer and a small RV. The night was cold and the generators presumably heating the roomy vehicular accommodations annoyingly went on and off all through the night. It was a beautiful, clear night with a canopy of stars and I, bundled against the cold, was the only one out to see this glorious sight. Next morning, I was up and out on a hike and saw no one – not one of the reported one and half million visitors that year. Returning to camp the vehicles had departed. It seemed to me they might as well have been in a campground outside the park for all they seemed to have enjoyed their stay in this one.

Abbey recognized how difficult it would be to change national park visitation habits, even 50 years ago when there were far fewer vehicles and visitors than now.

The motorized tourists, reluctant to give up the old ways, will complain that they can’t see enough without their automobiles to bear them swiftly (traffic permitting) through the parks. But this is nonsense. A man on foot, on horseback or on a bicycle will see more, feel more, enjoy more in one mile than the motorized tourist can in a hundred miles. Better to idle through one park in two weeks than try to race through a dozen in the same amount of time.

In the decades since he wrote this, “park bagging” has become ever more the norm for the national park experience, and this requires brief vehicular trips through the parks. There are many types of national park units, many of them small national monuments, historic sites, and national battlefields, among others. Road trips to these parts of the park system units will be fine because many are not big enough to make multi-day experiences feasible. Abbey was thinking of the big National Parks like Arches, Yellowstone, Yosemite, and Glacier.

A little historical perspective might be helpful here. The automobile has been integral to the national park movement. In the 19th century, only those who could afford a railroad ticket could visit the new national parks in the far west. This changed with the advent of the automobile which, when middle-class families could afford them, enabled a broader demographic of visitors to national parks. Desire for outdoor recreation increased at the same time.

Founding National Park Service Director Stephen Mather championed roadbuilding in the parks because if visitors could not easily reach the parks, especially in the wide-open American West, they would not rally to the support of his agency which was in competition with the Forest Service for funding and recreation resources. His successor, Horace Albright, followed suit. An early promotion of national parks was the park-to-park highway that encouraged road tripping to Western national parks. Autos first entered national parks in the opening decade of the 20th century. The Park Service began counting cars in the parks in 1918, and that tally numbered nearly 54,000. By 1925 the count was 368,000 and it has been growing with minor blips, like WWII, ever since.

Abbey, reveling in his remote national monument, likely knew this history and must have known that automobile-based tourism was coming like an avalanche to national parks as the post-WWII economy allowed ever-more people to travel in their cars and to demand access to their national parks. Selfishly, he didn’t like this prospect because he liked his park wild and the experience of it solitary, so he wrote his polemic. He must have known that a total ban of private vehicles was impossible but was not deterred from expressing what he thought should happen. Another historical fact was that he was writing in the early 1960s during a program in the parks called Mission 66, a part of which was road construction that was responsible for the construction of easier access to Arches National Monument. Mission 66 was to be the last big push for park roadbuilding, so Abbey’s second suggestion that no more roads be built in the parks was more reasonable. The wilderness movement of the 1960s slowed park roadbuilding to a virtual halt but did not stop the rising tide of visitation.

Who wouldn't prefer an Arches scene like this, which Rebecca Latson captured last New Year's Day, without crowds?/Rebecca Latson

Abbey’s third prescription to put the “lazy scheming loafer” park rangers to work - make them range – was hyperbole. If the visitors were to be pried from their cars, they would need more help than they were getting, and thus more rangers would be needed in the field to enable safe and satisfying park experiences. If this were to happen today, rangers would be leading more interpretive and educational experiences, teaching the principles of leave-no-trace camping, patrolling the backcountry for safety and minimization of impact on park resources, and generally interacting with visitors about the values of the particular park they were visiting.

Charles Bowden, in The Red Caddy, writes that his friend Abbey often wrote “in an almost laconic voice punctuated from time to time by bombast, invective, and high jinks.” Granting this as somewhat true of his polemic on industrial tourism, Abbey was on to something that rings true these 50 years later. One part of his argument that struck me then and does now is this:

Suppose we banned motorboats and allowed only canoes and rowboats; we would see at once that the lake seemed ten or perhaps a hundred times bigger. The same thing holds true, to an even greater degree, for the automobile. Distance and space are functions of speed and time. Without expending a single dollar from the United States Treasury we could, if we wanted to, multiply the area of our national parks tenfold or a hundredfold – simply by banning the private automobile. The next generation, all 250 million of them, would be grateful to us.

Presumably Abbey was referring to the population of the country when he wrote that. Last year, 331 million visitors passed into the national parks. Who can deny that bigger parks are needed to accommodate this visitor load, but prospects for geographically bigger parks, or more of them, are dim to none. In light of this, Abbey’s idea may not be so far-fetched.

What might someone not as much given to hyperbole and bombast as Ed Abbey was, but concerned as he was about the impact of “industrial tourism” on the national parks, suggest in view of today’s crisis of crowding in many national parks?

1.  The National Park Service should set as a long-term policy goal the reduction or even elimination of private automobiles from parks where crowding and vehicle impacts are a problem (such as Arches).

2.  Implementation of such policy should be carefully staged over time and accompanied by extensive educational efforts to convince visitors of the need for and benefits of such a policy.

3. Careful study should identify those parks where such policies should be implemented because the problems there resulting from crowding are very serious. Criteria defining “serious” should be rigorous, clear, and transparent to the public. Carrying capacity for users of all types should be determined and clearly communicated as part of the rationales for visitation and transportation policies.

4. The policy should be implemented during periods when crowding is a problem and only then, allowing private vehicles in during the “off” season if there is one. Monitoring should be constant, and an adaptive management approach taken as conditions change.

5. Alternatives to private autos should be provided, as Abbey suggested, including shuttles, bicycles, horses, mules, llamas to carry packs for hikers who cannot backpack, with concessionaires offering such services where possible.

6. Trail systems and campgrounds in affected parks should be modified to accommodate the changes in use patterns brought about by the policy.

7. Rangers should range in parks with alternative visitation and transportation policies as Abbey sarcastically suggested, providing appropriate services to facilitate and enhance safe and satisfying visitor experiences.

8. The private sector outside the parks should be encouraged and provided with incentives to provide parking for RVs and autos whose passengers wish to undertake multi-day visits to the parks.

9. The National Park Service and its allies should mount a massive educational campaign aimed at changing public expectations of national park experiences from drive-through to extended immersion.

10. Where necessary and possible, infrastructure should be modified to facilitate this changing nature of the national park experience.

There will undoubtedly be vehement objections from many directions to such an approach: from those who want to tick off as many parks in as short a time as possible; from the RV industry; from time-constrained visitors; from companies who take large groups by the busload into many parks; from people who reject regulation and see it as an incursion on their freedom – the list will be long. After all, 50 years ago TV advertisement jingle sung by pop star of the time Dinah Shore, urged Americans to “see the USA in your Chevrolet,” and ads since have proclaimed in many ways that “Your car is your freedom!” The automobile is at the heart of American culture.  But the very nature of the national park experience, and of the parks themselves, are at stake. If national parks and quality experiences of them are to be sustained into the future, innovative measures seem necessary. The population of the world and the nation is much larger than in Abbey’s day, and the complexities of changing cultural expectations for national park visits is more complex, but it seems time to “dare the experiment” in Abbey’s words.

I recognize that the National Park Service has not ignored the challenge of park overcrowding in the half-century since Desert Solitaire appeared. Arches National Park, for instance, pledges “to manage traffic congestion within the park while maintaining and improving public access.” It has prepared an “Alternative Transportation System and Congestion Management Plan” which suggested that for various reasons a shuttle system would be ineffective. Zion, Bryce Canyon, and Rocky Mountain national parks have implemented shuttle plans with varying degrees of success in addressing their congestion problems. One difficulty with shuttles everywhere is when they drop numerous hikers off at trailheads, trail congestion is the result. Shuttle tours might be too long for some, too short for others. The solution to one problem leads to another. I cannot go into detail here about what the Park Service has and is doing to address the crowding and congestion problems in its many units. Suffice it to say that the agency is wrestling with the problem but is understandably hesitant to go as far as Ed Abbey suggested.

A few years ago, I visited Bandelier National Monument and was surprised to learn that I could not drive down to the visitor center in Frijoles Canyon. A visitor center and shuttle station had been built at White Rock, miles outside the park entrance, and shuttles ran regularly to take visitors to and from the visitor center in the canyon. When I reached the visitor center, I understood why such measures were necessary. There was very limited parking at the bottom of the canyon and too many cars down there would result in a huge mess. The shuttle system was smooth and comfortable and controlled somewhat the flow of visitors. We could be dropped off at trailheads if we wished to hike down into the canyon. Bandelier provides a small example of how alternative transportation systems might work in the national parks.

One big challenge will be to communicate to a public accustomed to going anywhere anytime they please in their vehicle that some parts of the National Park System will not allow them to do this. Today a national reservation system is in place for many campgrounds in peak season, and that seems to be working, so perhaps a reservation system for entry into some park units in peak visitor season is not unrealistic. The public might not like this degree of regulated access, but an inspired Park Service, in collaboration with the outdoor recreation industry and others, should be able to mount an effective education and information campaign that will allow the public to continue to enjoy their national parks well into the future.