“I’ve never seen it this crowded before, but why do I need a reservation?”

By Kirk Nichols


What keeps you returning to our national forests, national parks, or a favorite slightly wild county park? Are the cascading creeks talking to you, do the birds sing to you, and does the wind in the leaves calm your soul? Do you lose those valued experiences if you cannot connect to them because someone is yelling for their dog, child, or spouse? Does searching for a parking spot (wondering, was that spot actually legal?) and walking the highway edge back to the trailhead stay with you as an irritant all day? 

Crowding and conflicts have changed our wild places. We are the crowds; we cause the conflicts. It is us. What will we collectively do about it? 

Some special places are one-of-a-kind or one-of-a-few and perhaps we can look back into the history of unique places for solutions to bring forward more broadly today. Rivers come to mind and I’ve been running them for nearly 60 years, observing the changes. 

Even before my time, river running was regulated and limited by permits, first for safety reasons and then to protect the water and beaches from the increasing crowds. The National Parks Service started restrictions on river trips in the 1940s and then in the 1970s, froze the number of people running the river to protect the river and to maintain experiences that people valued. River permits (reservations) have gone from easy to acquire to highly competitive). Reservations have problems, but few want to eliminate them and overwhelm the rivers and the experiences. Reservations have a long history in public land management. 

National Parks come to mind next. In addition to reservations to run rivers in national parks, many trails have reservations, think Half Dome in Yosemite and the Subway in Zion. Now, entire National Parks require entry reservations with limits including, Arches, Muir Woods, Rocky Mountain, and Zion. As with rivers, reservations require planning and luck, they are a nuisance, yet worth becoming accustomed to for most people. 

I am often asked, “What is the Carrying Capacity of this place? Give me a number.” If you value the feeling of a rock concert while hiking, the “number” would be quite high. If you value hearing and seeing predominantly the natural world, the “number” is lower. Crowding is not a number, but a cognitive and emotional response. Biology, geology, geomorphology, psychology, and sociology or, in general, the sciences can inform our decisions about land management. We need social scientists to help us sort out capacities, not road engineers.

I teach students to measure vegetation loss, evaluate trail widening and entrenchment, and count areas with multiple trails. These students also learn that to enhance our understanding of our values concerning experiences in the outdoors; we must ask the right questions. We need to ask, would you come here more often if the trail had fewer other parties on it? How many fewer? Do you avoid particular trails now? Would you come more often if the parking took 5 minutes or less? How long did it take you to park and get back to the trailhead? Would you come more often if you could ride a bus or shuttle to the trailhead? 

Informally, I have asked over one hundred people if they would visit the Central Wasatch Mountains more often if they were sure the parking was easy and the trails less crowded; 100% said they would, at least twice as often. Meaning, anything we build or design, will be overwhelmed immediately. We cannot build or engineer our way out of congestion. Latent Demand is the term for this extant desire for more experiences. 

From surveying people’s experiences, we can build outlines of social norms. Then to meet those social norms and to meet our acceptable limit of the physical vegetation loss and trail widening, we might narrow our range of “numbers”. We might say that the status quo is fine. We might say, “Remember back 10 years ago, things were okay, so how many people were visiting then?” Either way, to achieve our desired future conditions, what limits are acceptable and how do we apply those limits? 

We have guidance, led by the National Park Service, the Interagency Visitor Use Management Council has spent the last decade contemplating these issues. 

We must consider what we value, describe our desired condition, consult with current and past visitors, and perhaps then we can find acceptable limits. Reservations, with limits, do require a “number,” and can be tested with evaluations and adjusted over time. 

 

 

Kirk Nichols is a former CWC Stakeholder and long-time Central Wasatch advocate. He is a professor at the University of Utah, Department of Parks, Recreation, and Tourism. Formerly he was an ecologist, backcountry avalanche observer, and public input (comments) evaluator for the US Forest Service. Kirk has served on the Big Cottonwood Community Council for 11 years. He has served on Utah State Parks access and management teams, the Utah Mountain Accord, and the Central Wasatch Commission’s Stakeholders Council. In January 2025 he started his second 50 years of teaching at the University.

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