Photos pointing to overcrowding in Yosemite (left) and Arches national parks were displayed at Wednesday's Senate subcommittee hearing on overcrowding in the National Park System.

A litany of problems -- from troubles entering Glacier National Park and overwhelmed businesses to natural resource impacts and declining visitor experiences -- were raised Wednesday as the Senate Subcommittee on National Parks waded into the challenging dilemma of overcrowding at some of the top destinations in the National Park System.

From the outset, Sen. Angus King, a Maine independent who chairs the subcommittee, made it clear he wasn't looking for the hearing to produce well-defined solutions to the problems, but rather gain a broader understanding of the problems with a goal of strategically developing solutions.

Among the possible fixes raised during the roughly hour-long hearing were improvements in technology to guide park visitors to less-crowded areas in specific parks, marketing campaigns to highlight smaller, overlooked units of the park system, more shuttle systems to manage traffic, and even additional units added to the system.

"The fact (is) there are no obvious answers to some of these challenges, there is no one single solution that will fit all the situations in our parks," Sen. King said in his opening comments. "I know there is a path forward that we can build by collaboration and input from the local level, and it's my hope that our conversation today is a step in that direction."

Kevin Gartland, executive director of the Whitefish (Montana) Chamber of Commerce, relayed to the subcommittee during his remote testimony sentiments that very possibly are shared by park gateway communities across the country.

"If anything, business is a little bit too good right now," said Gartland, framing the rush to the outdoors that many communities across the National Park System have witnessed. "There aren't enough workers to fill the jobs available, so business owners are leaving some money on the table this summer. 'Limited operations' really are the catchwords of the day, most everybody in the hospitality industry and outside of the industry as well are struggling to find employees, running on limited operations, 75 percent, of capacity and that's anything from mom and pop restaurants to hotels, lodges.

"... Despite that, it's safe to say 2021 will be the busiest ever for tourism in our region," Gartland continued. "And the busiest ever for Glacier National Park as well. But that of course is nothing new. Visitation to Glacier has been setting all-time records for most of the ten years that I've been here in town. In the world of business, that's a pretty good thing. Simply gear up production to meet the demand you've got out there and everybody is happy. Unfortunately, in managing natural resources, in this case a national park, it's not just the law of supply and demand that applies. There's also a myriad other issues to consider, including visitor experience, the carrying capacity of the land itself."

Glacier officials tried this year to balance those demands by resorting to a ticketing system for visitors interested in driving the Going-to-the-Sun Road. Gartland pointed to flaws with that system -- the Park Service waited too long earlier this year in announcing the move to the reservation system and obtaining the $2 tickets is extremely difficult as they are snapped up quickly -- and told the subcommittee that "(I)t's really the system itself this year that's been the worst part of the visitor experience in Glacier, at least for those who were unable to get that $2 ticket."

Many visitors, he said, "have traveled thousands of miles, they've made tens of thousands of dollars in hotel and airfare and rental car reservations, only to see their vacation ruined because they can't get that $2 ticket to see Glacier National Park. ... One businesswoman put it to me last Friday like this: she feels more like she's a therapist than a marketing director. She's really trying to help people work through that issue, and it's really become a big deal."

Mike Reynolds, the regional director for the National Park Service's Denver-based Intermountain Region that holds more parks than any other region in the park system, told the subcommittee that the visitor experience has fallen at many of the country's most popular parks.

"The National Park Service wants every visitor to have a great park experience," he said. "We seek ways to support more diverse, accessible, and inclusive experiences that are compatible with the protection of the resources. Ensuring visitors have enjoyable experiences, however, is becoming increasingly challenging in our most popular parks.

"There are 423 parks in the National Park System, encompassing over 85 million acres across the nation," Reynolds continued, "but visitation trends among them vary greatly. About half of all our recreational visits are occuring at only the top 23 most visited parks, with significant congestion conditions concentrated in the most popular 12 to 15 destination parks."

Simply put, added Kristen Brengel, senior vice president for the National Parks Conservation Association, "the growth in visitation is ... posing one of the greatest challenges the National Park Service has ever faced. In 2019, before the (Covid) pandemic, overall visitation to the system was nearly 20 percent greater than it was in 2013."

Brengel also noted that Arches National Park in Utah is so popular that during the summer it has to close its entrance station every day to control visitation, while across the state Zion National Park "can have a four-hour wait to access popular trailheads."

"We are concerned for the natural and cultural resources the Park Service is empowered to preserve," she said. "For instance, Rocky Mountain (National Park) visitors are spreading out beyond existing trails, increasing wildlife disruption, especially with elk and moose. Arches and Canyonlands, there has been more vandalism, particularly defacing Indigenous rock imagery. Traffic gridlock, long lines for basic services, and crowding in the most popular attractions can result in unpleasant trips. Upticks in graffiti, litter, social trails, and improperly disposed of human waste are concerns in many parks."

Sen. King used a chart comparing visitation at Yellowstone National Park and full-time staffing levels there to illustrate the problem of not enough National Park Service staff to handle crowds.

It was pointed out by both Sen. King and Brengel that the Park Service does not have enough staff to properly manage the growing crowds. At one point the senator used a chart to show that while annual visitation to Yellowstone National Park has grown from about 3 million in 2006 to more than 4 million in 2016, full-time staff numbers have been essentially flat since 2000 at around 550.

"Between 2011 and 2019 NPS lost 16 percent of its staff capacity," added Brengel. "The result is staff take on multiple collateral duties. It's not uncommon to find trail crews attending to busy restrooms, or law enforcement helping with parking. It's a huge problem."

While turning to reservations for park visits not too long ago was considered anathema, a small handful of parks -- Rocky Mountain and Yosemite -- have experimented with it to manage crowds during the Covid pandemic, Muir Woods National Monument in California has used a reservation system for a few years to manage parking, and Acadia National Park in Maine this year implemented a reservation system for motorists hoping to reach the wildly popular summit of Cadillac Mountain where there are only 150 parking spots that at times in the past have drawn 500 motorists hope to snag one.

"We are very pleased with how the vehicle reservation system is going this summer," Acadia Superintendent Kevin Schneider said from his office. "I was on the summit of Cadillac on the first day of our reservations this year in May, I was there in uniform, kind of seeing how things were playing out. A visitor was there, he came up to me and said that he had been there a week prior to watch the sunrise, and he said that it was a complete mess. There were cars everywhere, completely overparked, cars double-parked. He said this was so much better with the reservation system."

But solutions to these woes could prove elusive and hard to achieve. Among the suggestions:

• More shuttle systems with remote parking areas.
• Better collaboration with local communities and other stakeholders in devising solutions.
• Better real-time technology to help visitors navigate, and avoid, crowded areas in the parks.
• Better marketing of lesser-known parks.

"I want to refer to a line in Mr. Gartland's testimony, which jumped out at me," Sen. King said in ending the hearing. "The law of supply and demand doesn't apply here. The demand is here, but we can't just go out and build more Glacier parks. Well, perhaps we need to bear that in mind as this committee and subcommittee considers new proposals for parks across the country. That there is a demand, and it is increasing, and all the ideas that we talked about today, spreading the visitation out, reservation systems in certain situations, shuttle buses in other situations. As we've all learned, there's no single solution.

"But one additional solution is to provide additional opportunities for people to enjoy these extraordinary places in our country."