America's National Parks Are In Trouble

By John Corley

April 27th 2018

It's hot on a bright sunny midafternoon April day. About a hundred people are jam-packed under an overhang protecting them from the sun at a shuttle stop, all waiting patiently to get on board. But many more people are forced to stand out in the beating sun because the line is getting so long.

Shuttles arriving every 6 to 10 minutes can't come fast enough as people keep flocking in from all over the world to get on one. The sun they have to wait in is not too oppressive, at least, not until the peak of summer when the average temperature is 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

People waiting to get on the Zion Canyon shuttle. The line stretched far beyond this photo with visitors having to wait 45 minutes.

"It feels like Disneyland here," said Don Ferko, who is visiting from Ohio with his wife and two children. A visibly frustrated person from Los Angeles said that the line is "annoying." They did not expect to be waiting 45 minutes while surrounded by hundreds of people.

And why should they? This isn't actually Disneyland and the shuttle isn't taking them to see Sleeping Beauty Castle. This is Zion National Park in southwestern Utah, "one of the greatest geologic wonders in the world," as a recorded voice track on the shuttle says when people finally are able to board. They are here to be in the tranquility of nature. But as Zion's popularity surges and more people arrive every year, lines get longer, hiking trails more crowded and park staff increasingly strained.

Zion National Park is one of 60 national parks overseen by the National Park Service, a federal government agency within the U.S. Department of the Interior mandated to preserve and protect natural and cultural resources for the public to enjoy now and forever.

These not only include iconic national parks such as Yellowstone, Yosemite and Grand Canyon, but also national monuments like Mount Rushmore or national military parks like Gettysburg. In all, the National Park Service administers 417 units. But it's the national parks, places like Crater Lake and the Great Smoky Mountains, that are the most well-known, visited and resource intensive.

America's national parks are currently facing one of the most challenging times in their history. Record crowds are flocking to parks around the country while the increasing threat of climate change and deteriorating facilities and infrastructure because of underfunding and understaffing all threaten the future sustainability of national parks. Their growing popularity is only further intensifying the challenges of natural and historical preservation and the problems facing the government agency assigned to protect it.

While visitors wait 45 minutes to get on the Zion Canyon shuttle, hundreds more are in their cars just trying to get into the park. Two booths staffed with rangers are open at the western entrance to receive fees and hand out maps to eager motorists ready to finally get out of their car and out on a trail.

These rangers are the first impression for visitors who are driving in, however, they have a bit of bad news. In fact, if people paid attention, they already know what it is.

"Zion parking full. Park in town," reads a sign in the middle of the road.

Full parking lot at Zion National Park's visitor center.

Some people heed that warning and turn around. Others make an attempt to get lucky at the visitor center parking lot, usually wandering around aimlessly until having to face facts and exit the park to find parking in the town of Springdale directly outside. Headaches like this are what people who come here expect to escape from, not face.

"People are frustrated by the time they get here," said John Marciano, public information officer at Zion National Park. "Our park staff is well aware of that."

The experience at Zion National Park is unique. At most other parks, visitors can usually drive to all areas that are open and park their car near trails and sites they want to check out.

Not so here.

During the busiest time of year, Zion averages around 18,500 visitors a day, with most of them jam-packed into the 6.5-mile Zion Canyon corridor area. The narrow 2-lane road, curving through the canyon along the Virgin River that carved it, has limited parking areas. Because of this, for 11 months out of the year, cars are barred from entering Zion Canyon unless they are guests at the Zion Lodge.

In 2000, when Zion averaged around 2 million fewer visitors than today, Zion Canyon was still overwhelmed, but back then it was cars causing all the trouble. Years of traffic, lack of parking, air pollution and damage to vegetation because of people parking off-road led park service officials to ban cars and create a shuttle system in its place to "restore tranquility" to the canyon.

"It saved the park," Marciano said.

Visitors who now want a ride into Zion Canyon must hop on a shuttle that will transport them on a nine-stop journey from the visitor center all the way to the end of the canyon corridor at the Temple of Sinawava where the popular Narrows hike is.

While the shuttle bus system reduced the impact that cars have on Zion Canyon, it allowed for potentially many more visitors to experience the park.

And come they have.

Zion's visitation slowly increased from 2.4 million annual visitors in 2000 to 2.8 million in 2013. But since 2013, Zion has been absolutely slammed by an onslaught of visitors, and in 2017 the park had over 4.5 million people enter its gates, a 60 percent increase in just four years.

"When people were driving into Zion National Park, they were limited by where they could park," said Jonathan Zambella, owner of Zion Guru outfitters and a resident of Springdale, Utah, for 22 years. "When the shuttle started running in the canyon, you're limited not by parking, you're limited by seats on the shuttle. So now we have a shuttle that is capable of carrying 15,000 passengers a day. If you build it they will come."

Zion National Park is 146,597.40 acres compared to the other top 10 most visited parks. Yellowstone, for example, is over 2.2 million acres, Glacier is a little over 1 million acres, and Olympic is 922,651 acres. Zion is not only more visited and much smaller than both of those parks, its visitors are primarily only using one small area.

The limited space means that trails are crowded. Thousands of people flock to destination hikes like The Narrows and Angels Landing wanting to experience the pretty photo they saw on social media. Angels Landing is a 2.5-mile hike up a 1,500-foot canyon ledge. At certain points along the trail, hikers are encouraged to use chains to stay safe from steep ledges and sudden drop-offs. The trail is very narrow at certain high up precarious places, so when the crowds arrive it not only creates traffic jams, but a potentially dangerous situation.

Another problem the park faces because of cramped space is when people wander off established trails and create what the park service calls social trails. This happens when hikers go off a designated path and over time create a trail that visitors may not even realize is not supposed to be there.

The park service doesn't want people deviating from their trails because of the damaging effect human footsteps can have on native vegetation. They place markers on trails telling hikers to "Stick to the trail!" and "Give plants a chance." But Zambella argues that given the small space and high number of visitors this problem can't be contained.

"My critique of the park is they see it as a social trail problem. The problem is not the social trails, the problem is that the people have no place to go and if we don't give them the opportunity for places to go they will create their own space," he said. "We have to create different channels that don't adversely affect the resource but still allow them to experience Zion National Park."

"In the summer time, literally, 1,500 to 3,000 people a day will hike in the lower Zion Narrows," Zambella said. "These resource areas are just taking a beating because for all intents and purposes it's unlimited traffic that each one of these trailheads can receive."

John Marciano agrees. "This is a river. There are endangered species. There is fish life. There are plants. You can't have thousands of people going up there."

Zion is currently proposing a visitor use management plan that would create a reservation system limiting how many visitors can be in the park on a given day. It would also permit certain popular trails like The Narrows and Angels Landing. It would be unusual for a national park that receives as many visitors as Zion does to protect its natural resource by intentionally restricting how many people are able to visit on any one day.

But they have a mandate to balance.

BALANCING A MANDATE

The increasing crowds' effect on Zion are a microcosm of the challenges facing many of America's national parks. As a whole, the number of visitors to all areas in the National Park Service spiked dramatically in recent years. After stagnating between 1988 and 2008, park popularity has quickly increased, going from 274.8 million people in 2008 to 330.8 million in 2017.

One of the most overwhelmed national parks is Utah's Bryce Canyon, which is just east of Zion and has seen an increase from around 1 million visitors in 2007 to 2.5 million in 2017. That's a 150 percent increase in a decade. Bryce Canyon, which features gangly rock formations called hoodoos that stand vertically like small towers, is struggling to keep its visitors from trampling the landscape.

"It's really difficult when visitors don't understand how important it is to stay on a trail, social trails are really devastating to the environment," said Kathleen Gonder, chief of interpretation and visitor services and the public information officer at Bryce Canyon National Park. "Our purpose is more than just a great place for visitors to come and see. We have a reason to protect these resources."

Despite Bryce Canyon's efforts to tell visitors to stay on trails and not feed wildlife, Gonder says some visitors can have a tendency to think to themselves, "'Well, it's just me. It's just me walking through the woods' or 'It's just me feeding this chipmunk.'"

America's national parks belong to the public. The National Park Service is tasked with preserving these natural crown jewels while at the same time making them accessible to everyone. This means keeping entrance fees as low as possible and not turning people away if conditions are safe to enter.

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Every national park must balance these two objectives. When more people visit national parks, the use and potential abuse of natural and cultural resources the park is entrusted to protect increases. Zion National Park is currently facing a situation where park preservation is becoming compromised because of overcrowding.

"All decisions we make run through that matrix," Zion's John Marciano said, referring to the National Park Service's mandate. "We want to protect our resource into perpetuity. We're in the forever business. We don't want to change the resource."

Some parks like Yosemite and Rocky Mountain have now turned to optional shuttles as a way to reduce the number of cars driving around the park. Zion has gone the furthest with its shuttle by prohibiting vehicle traffic to its most visited area, Zion Canyon, and requiring that people take the shuttle unless they are staying in Zion Lodge.

LESSER VISITED PARKS

Even lesser-known national parks that don't attract millions of visitors every year are still experiencing record crowds. In the past decade, Nevada's Great Basin National Park, featuring the oldest known living trees in the world, the bristlecone pine, has more than doubled. Michigan's Isle Royale National Park, protecting the largest island in Lake Superior, also nearly doubled.

Fred Bunch is the chief of resource management at Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve in Colorado. While Great Sand Dunes might get overshadowed in Colorado by Rocky Mountain National Park, which is the nation's fourth-most visited, it too is facing similar challenges.

"It's a concern for several reasons, one is congestion and the infrastructure; the parking lots," Bunch said. "But it's also a concern, too, for visitor satisfaction and if you have to wait a long time to get into a park or if there's no parking."

Great Sand Dunes has gone from around 285,000 visitors in 2007 to just fewer than 487,000 in 2017, a 70 percent increase in 10 just years. When parking lots fill up, Great Sand Dunes is faced with a difficult choice with how to handle the extra cars that the park infrastructure wasn't originally built for. They're making the tough decision during the peak season between allowing cars to park on the side of the road, which tramples native vegetation and poses a safety risk for people when they walk on the road, or build more parking lots that would overtake the natural environment.

"The dunes as a resource are very resilient, people walking on the dunes have little or no impact," Fred Bunch said. "But getting to the dunes does."

Either way, the park is faced with a compromise. Bunch said at this point that Great Sand Dunes encourages people to park on the side of the road despite the downsides that come with it.

"Well, it's one of the things that it's the only way we can accommodate these people without any additional parking lots," Bunch said. "We actually had a fatality a few years ago where a woman parked her car on the shoulder and didn't set the break and it rolled over on top of her."

Bunch said Great Sand Dunes has experimented on Memorial Day weekends, the parks busiest time of the year, by offering an option for visitors to park their vehicles at the general store at the park entrance and take a shuttle to the visitor center and sand dunes.

Bunch, a 40-year National Park Service veteran, worked seasonally at seven different parks before landing a full-time position at Great Sand Dunes. He was once a seasonal ranger at Zion, and hasn't been back since leaving in 1983, long before the park had a shuttle system.

"I'm kind of afraid to go back to Zion because I hear these stories about how many people are there," Bunch said. "You lived in the ranger dorm, and man you'd get off work and there'd be a place to go swim in the Virgin River, a special swimming hole and all these things. I just have these fond memories that I don't know if I'm ready to go back."

A four-hour drive west from Great Sand Dunes is Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park in western Colorado's Uncompahgre Valley region. Carved by the Gunnison River, the canyon may not be anywhere near the depth of the Grand Canyon, but its sheer steepness and narrow width, which make it so that sunlight rarely touches certain parts of it hence the name Black Canyon, will leave visitors in awe nonetheless.

The National Park Service even promotes Black Canyon of the Gunnison as an alternative to the Grand Canyon, offering a relatively similar experience but smaller in scale and with much smaller crowds.

The Black Canyon.

The majority of Black Canyon of the Gunnison's 307,143 visitors in 2017 squeezed through a narrow, meandering 7-mile, two-lane road on the south rim of the canyon. While Black Canyon receives far fewer visitors than Grand Canyon on its south rim, the relative situation is similar.

"We're finding increasingly that our parking lots are full, people are trying to park in places that are not parking areas," said Sandra Snell-Dobert, who serves a dual role as both the chief of interpretation and education and the public information officer at Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park. "People do get frustrated because they can't find a place to park. It's frustrating. Even though it doesn't look like we have a lot of visitors we have very small space."

FLOODING SCOTTY'S CASTLE

Death Valley National Park is a land of extremes. It has the lowest point anywhere in North America at Badwater Basin, 128 feet below sea level. It also holds the record for the hottest temperature ever recorded on Earth at 134 Fahrenheit. Death Valley averages just under 2 inches of rainfall and lies within a double rain shadow.

Water is so scarce and precious here that a few years in its recorded history it didn't even rain. Zero inches of rainfall, all year. Death Valley is a desert's desert; hotter, dryer and lower than most places in the entire world. So it might seem odd that one of Death Valley's most powerful and dangerous forces actually happens to be water.

The brown streak on the wall is the mudline from when Scotty's Castle flooded in 2015.

On October 18, 2015, a storm dumped 2.7 inches of rain over the northern region of Death Valley, the same amount it receives at that elevation all year. The bare desert mountains, thirsty for any rain at all, suddenly had far more water than it could handle. Water ran down its sides and funneled down into the valley, leaving a destructive wake in its path.

Fortunately, since Death Valley is a national park there wasn't much human infrastructure in the way. Unfortunately, the infrastructure in place that got damaged is even harder to repair because it's in Death Valley.

Fast forward to March 2018. Abby Wines unlocks two large wooden doors that lead to a floor of a building built into the side of hill. A sign reads "staff" on them. Wines is officially a management assistant at Death Valley National Park, but in reality she serves many roles including public information officer. She is experienced at giving tours, at least for what she used to do here.

"I came in here, I was wearing galoshes the first day I came up here, waded through the mud into this room, just sat on my chair and cried my eyes out," Wines said. "This was a really hard experience for me and others who love this place."

The room was an office area for the park staff who managed Scotty's Castle, a 1920s-style mission villa built in the northern area of Death Valley. This had been one of the park's more popular attractions, and visitors who had an opportunity to take a tour of the villa were treated to park rangers wearing old timey clothing, transporting them back 80 years to experience a taste of the old rugged west.

Wines once ran Scotty's Castle and provided tours, but for the moment she is relegated to showcasing how Scotty's Castle is now.

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"Everything on the desk, yay high or so was totally fine, papers untouched like nothing had happened," Wines says pointing to a visible mud line on a wall about a foot and a half off the ground. "Everything below that level completely destroyed. So all my personnel files, all the records I had been keeping for 10 years working here, gone."

The October 2015 rainstorm in Death Valley leveled Scotty's Castle, flooding it with water and mud and causing around $52 million in damage to both the buildings and roads. The area has been closed to the public and is scheduled to reopen in 2020.

While it may seem like five years is a long time to get a popular area like Scotty's Castle back up and running, for national parks, projects this big are really difficult to accomplish quickly. The storm that damaged Scotty's Castle did not just affect Death Valley, but also impacted other national parks with maintenance needs. The park service placed Scotty's Castle as a high priority to get fixed, however it meant reprioritizing other maintenance projects with the limited funding the agency receives every year.

MONUMENTAL TO-DO LISTS

Even though the mission of national parks is to preserve natural resources, they also require infrastructure to support visitation and house staff. Things like roads, bridges, hiking trails, visitor centers, bathrooms, campgrounds water and sewer systems are all vital to maintain a safe and enjoyable visitor experience.

Built either during the 1930s by the Civilian Conservation Corps, or in the 1950s and '60s through the Mission 66 initiative, the infrastructure at many national parks is now old, decaying and needing to be replaced.

But every year the National Park Service comes up short of what it receives from Congress to cover its costs. Many parks can't afford to replace old infrastructure years past its expiration point, let alone make repairs on them, increasing the rate into which assets fall into disuse.

"We average one water line break per week. It feels like we're always in emergency mode," said Death Valley National Park Superintendent Mike Reynolds in a press release. The park has an operating budget of $8.5 million. It's deferred maintenance needs? $139 million.

Because of limited funding, national parks compete with others in their region for maintenance project money. The greater the need, the more likely a park is to receive money. Scotty's Castle is an example of a project the park service deemed a high priority.

"Usually you're asking for something five years out," Abby Wines said. "Which is frustrating because those of us on the ground are like, 'Oh my god this is a huge problem we really need it now.' But so does this other park and so does this other park. So we wait in line."

To fund the repairs at Scotty's Castle, Death Valley had to shelve all of its other projects to focus exclusively on repairing it.

National parks must choose between which maintenance projects to work on now, and which to defer until a later date. Any time a project that needs to be accomplished gets put on hold for at least a year, it is then considered deferred maintenance and gets added to the backlog. The estimated backlog of deferred maintenance needs has grown substantially in recent years, from $4.25 billion in 1999 to $11.6 billion in 2017.

"Maybe I'm going to do a roof and if I got on it in time I could just go in and replace the shingles and the felt and be done with it," said Steve Kovar, chief of facilities management at Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky. "Sometimes I can't get the money to put the roof on in a timely manner and it leaks and some of the boards, the decking and maybe some of the rafters underneath get rotten. And so in addition to having to replace the roof, I've got to go in and do some structural repair."

Of the $11.9 billion deferred maintenance backlog, only around $1 billion is for infrastructure that is less than 40 years old. When infrastructure is in need of mending, but gets shelved for repair at a later date, it means that the cost to fix it in the future will be even greater.

By kicking the can down the road on these projects, deferred maintenance ultimately hurts the American taxpayer because once the park service is able to address a project in need, it is likely more expensive to fix than it would have been if the maintenance had occurred right away.

John Garder, who is the senior director of budget and appropriations and government affairs at the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA), says the public should be concerned about the backlog because of how it affects their visitor experience when bathrooms and trails that need repairs are closed.

"But that's not the only reason. Another one is our cultural and natural heritage," Garder said. "You certainly don't want wastewater sewage seeping out into these wonderful places with sensitive ecosystems. You've got historic sites, historic buildings. These are the places that preserve and provide opportunities to interpret our uniquely American heritage. In the long term these places are threatened with irreparable damage."

GRAND CANYON NATIONAL PARK IN CRITICAL NEED

It's a sunny March Saturday at Grand Canyon National Park's South Rim. The south side of the canyon receives the majority of the parks visitors, and today is extra crowded because it's spring break for high school and college students.

Grand Canyon National Park is the second most visited national park in the country. On this day, there are around 17,000 people in the park. But when visitors need to go to the bathroom they will be surprised to find no running water.

"Water has been shut off due to mandatory park wide water rationing," reads a sign taped on a bathroom mirror. "Hand sanitizer has been provided for your use in place of soap and water."

Visitors to bathrooms at Grand Canyon National Park on April, 17, 2018, were greeted with this sign.

Over at one of Grand Canyon's restaurants, diners are treated to views overlooking the South Rim while enjoying their meal. But instead of standard restaurant tableware, food is served on paper plates with plastic utensils. It's not exactly what a park goer might find in a place dedicated to preservation and environmental stewardship.

"Starting the last week in February, the Transcanyon Waterline has experienced the first of five breaks and each time the pipeline breaks our crews have to shut off the water flow entirely so they can safely remove the damaged piece of pipe and weld a new piece in," said Emily Davis, public information officer at Grand Canyon National Park. "So every time there is a break in the pipeline it causes a slight disruption in our water delivery system for about two-to-four days."

Today is one of those days.

The Transcayon Waterline draws water from a natural spring and pumps it 12.5 miles to Grand Canyon National Park's South Rim. The waterline is 52 years old and, according to park officials, 20 years past its expiration date.

"The pipeline was installed between 1965 and 1966, and at the time to get all the equipment into the canyon, helicopters didn't have the capability of flying with as much weight as they can now," Davis said. "So they had to fly with the lightest material possible, and that was aluminum. It's not as resilient as something like steel would be for example. So that's one reason why it experiences breaks."

Scrolling through Grand Canyon National Park's news releases on its website shows a regular occurring pattern of waterline breaks. Every time there is a break, it costs around $25,000 to fix. One recent waterline break to the North Rim was so severe that it cost the park service $1.5 million to repair and caused the lodge there to cancel reservations for two weeks.

The estimated cost to replace the Transcanyon Waterline ranges from $100-$150 million and is among the most expensive items on the National Park Service's deferred maintenance backlog.

HISTORIC AND CULTURAL RESOURCES IN NEED OF REPAIR

After earning his bachelor's degree in history, Jason Theuer started working as a carpenter, taking care of historic homes owned by private individuals. He enjoyed the work, and thought that the resources he was helping to maintain were important.

"But the time and effort and the work that I was doing could only be experienced and appreciated and enjoyed by a very select few group of people," Theuer said.

Theuer decided to take his skills and apply them in the National Park Service where he is now the cultural resources branch chief at Joshua Tree National Park. He said the work he could do at the National Park Service "really spoke" to him because he could have the "greatest impact and greatest effect for the largest number of Americans and largest number of people for the world."

His job requires him to concentrate on a part of the National Park Service's mandate that might sometimes get overlooked. They are tasked with conserving "the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wildlife therein." Scenery, natural objects and wildlife might be obvious, however at least areas designated national parks, the historic part may not.

The reality is that every national park has human history within its boundaries that predates the legislation to protect them. This ranges from historic Native American archeological sites at Mesa Verde, abandoned mines in Death Valley, lighthouses in Acadia and spa baths at Hot Springs. National parks are mandated to preserve these historic objects as a means for people to learn about America's past.

"The cultural resources and the historic resources tell the story of us as a country, of us as a people and where we've been and where we're going," Theuer said. "That old adage of those who do not know their history are condemned to repeat it is very true."

He is responsible for overseeing a team that maintains over 2,000 archeological sites and 160 historic structures. An example for Joshua Tree National Park is that it was once the site of over 300 gold mines during the California Gold Rush of 1849, and the preservation of Lost Horse Mine saves this history.

But the job to maintain old cultural resources becomes tricky when parks don't have the funding to match what they need to cover all of their project costs.

"Buildings that are occupied and lived in or used daily are easier to maintain in good condition because they are never allowed to deteriorate," Theuer said. "Historic structures are a different story because we're not in them every day. They frequently go long periods of time without any work being performed on them or people being able to monitor them and do condition assessments and identify work needs."

Joshua Tree National Park operates on an annual budget of around $6 million. Meanwhile, its total deferred maintenance is over $46 million. The park struggles enough to maintain resources needed for daily visitor operations like roads and campgrounds.

"If you were to buy a house without a roof on it already, how would you keep your stuff in good condition?" Theuer said. "It's much easier to have a building in good condition and maintain it in good condition than to let something get into poor condition and try and maintain it with a very piecemeal approach with only occasionally working on things."

STAGNATING FUNDING AND STAFFING

Zion National Park in 2017 had 173 full time employees during its busiest time of year. The park received 4.5 million visitors throughout the year. On its busiest days the park averaged around 18,500 people per day. Essentially this meant that for every one ranger there were 107 visitors.

By comparison, Yellowstone received 4.1 million visitors, but had a full-time staff of 634 during peak season.

Interpretive rangers are the friendly, forward facing faces at national parks who interact with visitors by answering questions and leading tours and programs. They're hired because they may be an expert in astronomy or geology and can educate the public on the natural assets parks have. But the current situation at Zion is so dire when it comes to lack of staffing that rangers have to serve different duties than what they were hired for.

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"We'd like to have more roving trail rangers out there on the trails to manage some of the crowds and to interpret and answer questions," John Marciano said. "We just don't have that and that's something that bothers us because what we're doing is we're taking our interpretive rangers and we're having them staff the visitor information desk because it's a constant all day thing, or we have them going to cleanup the bathrooms and waste cans that are overwhelmed because of the visitation."

Marciano says that more visitors create the hidden challenge of cleaning up human waste in the park. In fact, summertime gets so busy that there is a park ranger whose job is dedicated to hiking up a 1,100-foot ascent to Scout Lookout every day on the way to Angels Landing just to clean two outhouses.

"That's not why they joined the National Park Service," Marciano said. "But we have to have someone do that."

Funding and staffing levels are inextricably linked, which, according to John Garder of the National Parks Conservation Association, make staffing levels a good indicator for how the parks are being funded. While visitation throughout the National Park Service has increased significantly since 2013, staffing levels have actually gone down. This means that Congress has not met national parks' increasing popularity and staffing needs with additional funding.

Since National Park Service funding from Congress has been stagnant in recent years, the Trump administration in October 2017 proposed a plan to cut into the deferred maintenance backlog by raising entrance fees to $70 for private vehicles entering 17 of the nations busiest parks during peak season.

Public backlash swiftly ensued over the idea that a fee hike would make it harder for people of lower socioeconomic backgrounds to visit parks, as well as not doing all that much to eat into the deferred maintenance problem. Because of the public feedback, the National Park Service instead is expected to raise entrance fees by a rate of no more than $5 at 117 National Park Service sites.

The park service estimates that this will generate $60 million in additional revenue. Currently the most any national park charges for private vehicle entrance is $30, which is the most common way people arrive. The entrance fee increase will raise the price of entry to places like Yosemite National Park to $35 and is expected to take effect starting June 2018.

National parks are major economic engines for nearby communities. The Department of the Interior released a report that said the 330 million visitors to the 417 National Park Service sites in 2017 spent an estimated $18.2 billion in area communities while generating $35.8 billion for the overall national economy. According to the National Park Service, for every taxpayer dollar spent to manage the parks, $10 is inputted back into the U.S. economy. The total budget for the National Park Service in fiscal year 2017 was slightly over $3.5 billion.

Despite the benefits that national parks contribute to the U.S. economy, John Garder says Congress simply hasn't prioritized funding the National Park Service to a level that it can adequately address its deferred maintenance backlog and staffing issues. He says the reasons Congress is not investing into an agency that is an economic boon are not so clear, but that in order to get change it would be a matter of political will in a legislative body that is rife with gridlock.

"Congress has to decide that our national parks are important enough that they want to make a more robust investment," Garder said. "To their credit they have made improved investments over the last five years. They've been incremental. They're not enough to take care of the park services needs."

Garder added, "There is currently a very significant outpouring of support across the country for making a robust investment into deferred maintenance with local businesses, county commissioners, diverse public interest groups, bipartisan members of Congress."

National parks are not insulated bubbles isolated from the effects of what happens beyond their boundaries. Wildlife migrate in and out of parks, industrial emissions miles away float into the parks' air and river pollution upstream flows down through wilderness areas.

Climate change is even threatening the natural features for which certain parks are named. Glacier National Park's glaciers are either melting or have disappeared entirely, and experts expect the park to completely lose all of its known glaciers sometime between 2030 and 2080.

Joshua trees at Joshua Tree National Park are ailing from warmer temperatures and increasing periods of drought. The National Park Service expects Joshua trees' natural range to gradually move to higher elevated areas that experience more rainfall.

Joshua Tree is losing its Joshua trees.

Mature Joshua trees in lower elevation where most visitors go are fine, for now. But seedlings need steady, intermittent rainfall in the harsh and arid Mojave Desert, and because of drought, old Joshua trees are dying at a faster rate than young ones are replacing them.

Mature Joshua trees like this one can withstand the effects of climate change. Its seedlings are having a tougher time.

Disappearing glaciers and dying Joshua trees are just a few examples of how a changing climate harms natural resources inside of national parks. While those situations might be easy to notice over time, another aspect of climate change is a little subtler: invasive grass.

"They can outcompete native species," Jason Theuer said.

These invasive grasses reproduce faster and spread out over more space than native grass. Not only does it harm natural plant life in the park, but it also increases the threat of fire because of fuel loading, which is what it sounds like, fuel for fire.

Native grasses grow in isolated pockets, so when they dry out and burn the fire is also isolated, however, "The invasive grasses will create these blankets, Theuer said. "That fuel then loads up over seasons and so when fire starts they can spread whereas when you see spot fires."

Invasive plant life is inside of Joshua Tree because of what people have done for years outside of it. Tamarisk trees used for shade and wind-breaking; fountain grass planted for its aesthetic. These are several plants not native to California's Mojave Desert that humans have decided to use here. Seeds from these plants in areas outside of the park float in the wind and migrate in.

The National Park Service estimates that before invasive plants entered this region, large fires in the Mojave Desert occurred around every 100 years. Now they say these fires happen every five to 30 years. Not only is the likelihood of intense fires greater now, but changing weather patterns are also exacerbating them.

"One of the things we do plan on seeing is with changing weather patterns, increasing intensity of storms," Theuer said. "It's going to result in increased erosion, increased fire threats that go hand in hand with increased aridity, increased fuel loading of invasive species and non-native grasses. Those types of things pose lots of threats to historic structures and cultural resources."

Joshua Tree is slightly over 100 miles away from the Los Angeles and San Diego metroplitan areas, which combine to make up a populaiton of over 20 million people. (Graphic courtesy of K Corley)

Joshua Tree National Park is one of the most easily accessible national parks to visit because of its close proximity to Palm Springs while only being a several hour drive from the major metropolitan areas of Los Angeles and San Diego that combine to make up a total population of over 20 million people. Air quality in Los Angeles is notorious for being poor, being the nations worst according to the American Lung Association. San Diego doesn't lag too far behind at number six.

What is L.A.'s and San Diego's problem is also Joshua Tree's problem.

Nitrogen and sulfur compounds that originate in big cities float through the air and are deposited in places like Joshua Tree. Invasive plants thrive on high levels of nitrogen deposition. Meanwhile, native plants are accustomed to low levels of nitrogen deposition, increasing the invasive species problem.

"The increased numbers of people results in increased opportunities for fires to start," Theuer said. "Whether it's people having illegal campfires, or it's people flicking cigarettes out their car window, there's simply an increased statistical likelihood of fires starting."

REGIONAL HAZE RULE

The National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA) is a non-profit, independent advocacy organization with a stated goal of working to protect America's national parks. NPCA was founded by the first director of the National Park Service, Stephen Mather, and exists to engage the public in keeping the agency accountable to its mission as well as ensure that the parks are protected from internal or external threats.

Cory MacNulty is a senior program manager at the NPCA's regional office in Utah and her work primarily focuses on Utah's national parks. A big component of what her office does is work on issues pertaining to energy resource extraction in Utah and how it environmentally affects the national parks and the visitor experience to them.

"That's been an increasing issue in the past year with the push for energy dominance," MacNulty said.

One of the ways that parks suffer from dirty air is not just when pollution particles fall to the ground, but also when they're floating in the sky. When sunlight hits pollution particles, it creates haze that limits the visibility of landscapes. It's not just cities that are ailed by this; industry and urban development many miles away can contribute to impaired visibility in America's national parks and wilderness areas.

In 1999, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) created the Regional Haze Rule under the Clean Air Act to prioritize improving air quality in 156 of America's national parks and wilderness regions, known as Class 1 Areas. The Regional Haze Rule directs states to come up with solutions to mitigate poor air from pollution sources that undermine places like national parks by 2064.

"In Utah there are two plants that are the oldest and dirtiest coal plants that fit under this rule and are supposed to reduce their emissions and we've been fighting to have the best technology put on those facilities," MacNulty said.

Those two facilities are coal-fired power plants in central Utah that are part of Rocky Mountain Power. The state of Utah did not do everything it was instructed to do under the guidelines of the Regional Haze Rule to regulate emission standards on those power plants.

Out of concern about how the plants were dirtying the air in Arches and Canyonlands National Parks along with other wilderness areas, the EPA in 2016 came up with a plan that called for a 76 percent reduction in nitrogen oxide pollution from those sources. The state of Utah and Rocky Mountain Power sued the EPA; in 2017, the U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals put that lawsuit on hold pending a decision in a similar suit against the EPA.

CHALLENGES REMAIN ON THE CLEAN AIR FRONT

The plan to clean up emissions from several of Utah's coal-fired power plants was initiated under President Obama's EPA, and a new administration rolled in during the time of the lawsuit with a different set of priorities. New EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt directed the agency to reconsider its original clean-up plan for Utah power plants.

The EPA, under Pruitt's guidance, is revisiting changes that the Obama administration added to the Regional Haze Rule, which gave federal land managers more influence in determining the pollution sources in their parks and wilderness. The EPA received petitions from several energy companies and the state of Alaska that pressured the agency into considering these revisions.

In addition, President Donald Trump signed an executive order in March 2017 that directed the EPA to revise aspects of an Obama-era policy called the Clean Power Plan that intended to combat climate change by cleaning up dirty emissions from power plants as well as push for the use of renewable energy. The Trump administration's goal is to have an "energy independent" America, and the EPA is proposing to scrap the Clean Power Plan entirely pending public response and litigation.

"We were trying to move toward another phase where we were able to look more comprehensively at pollution sources and how they affect parks and systematically with the states and EPA to really tackle those sources of pollution," MacNulty said. "And we've stalled out in some of the progress on that under the new EPA director."

The changes proposed by the current EPA are potentially a blow for people who are fighting to clean up the air in public lands. They are just another challenge in the long list of burdens facing America's national parks and those who love to protect them.

Listen to an Audio Story About Yosemite's Dying Trees

Yosemite National Park Public Affairs Officer Scott Gediman explains how the drought-caused bark beetle infestation is to blame for Yosemite's rapidly dying trees.