Traveler's View: À La Carte Parks?

Is the National Park System turning into an à la carte experience?

That's not an unreasonable question when you explore the recreation.gov website in search of a national park experience. For starters, no longer is your America the Beautiful Pass guaranteed to get you into every unit of the park system whenever you want.

There is a $2 processing fee to obtain a free permit to enter Arches National Park in Utah most of the year (April through October). There also are reservation fees at certain times of year to enter Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado and Glacier National Park in Montana. At Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee and North Carolina, you'll need a parking tag ranging from $5-$40 (depending on whether it's a daily, weekly, or annual tag) to get out and stretch your legs along one of the park's 800 miles of trails.

And, if Katmai National Park and Preserve moves forward with requiring you to obtain a permit to enter the Brooks River Corridor to watch brown bears feast on salmon, it appears there will be a $6 fee to obtain that free permit.

As we pointed out earlier this year, there already are quite a few fees you must pay to enjoy the parks. For example:

• $15 nonrefundable application fee to seek a permit to float the Yampa and Green Rivers in Dinosaur National Monument.
• $10 cancellation fee for campsite cancellations.
• $10 change fee to add to or remove a night’s campsite stay or to move to a different site.
• $10 reservation fee to secure a backcountry permit.
• $6 nonrefundable reservation fee to obtain a free climbing permit at Acadia National Park’s Otter Cliffs.
• $2 nonrefundable administrative fee for vehicle trips to Cadillac Summit at Acadia National Park.
• $1 application fee for all lottery applicants to view fireflies at Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
• There's a $6 nonrefundable fee to enter the lottery with hopes of landing a $3 per person permit to hike to the top of Angels Landing in Zion National Park.

There also are several parks where you can get a permitting jump on the rest of the public by entering an early lottery ... for a nonrefundable $10 fee.

Critics of these fees refer to them as a "Recreation Access Tax," or RAT taxes. Like frogs in that pot of cool water, is the park-going public being lulled into a more and more costly national park experience by the growth of what the National Park Service calls "amenity fees"?

How far should government appropriations — the annual National Park Service budget — go to covering the costs associated with our connection with the parks? And beyond the cost of a nightly campsite, or a boat launch permit, or even a hike, is it reasonable to charge a processing fee on top of those fees? The fees — at least the actual activity fees — bring in a fair amount of revenue for the Park Service. In 2020 the agency received about $249 million in recreation fee revenues, Lori Sonken was told for her 2021 story on the growing cost of a national park vacation. 

How much the processing fees generate annually is a question I haven't yet had answered. But the bulk, if not all, of those fees pays a government contractor to run recreation.gov.

As the National Park Service becomes more and more pressed for dollars, it remains to be seen how creative the agency will become with fees. Of course, a concern there is that the agency will become too dependent on them.

Beyond that, though, is the question of whether these fees run counter to the national park ideal?

Back in 1991, during a conference to celebrate the National Park Service's 75th anniversary, the late Michael Frome, the dean of environmental writers, stood before a distinguished audience of top Park Service managers and promptly scolded them for losing sight of their mission. Frome, who long ago warned that commercialization of the national parks would turn them into "popcorn playgrounds," told his audience that: 

"A national park as I see it is not simply a place. It's an ideal, a mission, an old mystique that sets national parks and park people apart. The seventy-fifth anniversary provides a marvelous opportunity to recharge old batteries. Let us go on from this conference to rescue everything that still remains wild and to recapture a lot more that has been lost. Let us not privatize the parks with the goodies of Disneyesque "partnerships" and the strings attached to them."

Back in 2010, then-Park Service Director Jonathan Jarvis, in Director's Order 22 pertaining to these fees, wrote:

The rationale for supplementing appropriated funds with visitor fees is that people who use the parks should pay part of the cost incurred by the NPS for their visit, including expenses associated with avoiding and mitigating impacts on resources and responding to increased demand for visitor facilities and services. Studies demonstrate that visitors both understand why parks collect fees and support the practice.

What do you, the park visitor, think of these fees? Are they, as Frome feared, privatizing the parks?