People Love National Parks!

It's Friday, August seventh. I'm heading to the Redwoods tomorrow for a backpacking trip, and the only reason we're backpacking instead of car camping is because every car camping spot in the Redwoods has been booked for months. Which tracks, because Redwoods National Park had a 91 percent increase in visitors last year, going from about 634,000 to over 1.2 million, and getting a campsite there now is harder than getting a dinner reservation at a popular restaurant. And this isn't just the Redwoods. The entire National Park System had 323 million visits in 2025, down slightly from the record year before, and 26 parks set new all-time visitation records. Americans are going to national parks in numbers that would have been unimaginable a generation ago, and the system is straining under the weight in ways that most visitors don't see while they're taking pictures at the overlook. The National Park System includes 63 national parks and 433 total units when you count national monuments, memorials, historic sites, battlefields, seashores, and recreation areas. There's at least one NPS site in every state. Great Smoky Mountains in Tennessee is the most visited park at nearly 12 million visitors per year, which is more than some small countries receive in total tourism. Zion and Yellowstone follow with about 5 million each.

The economic impact is enormous relative to the system's budget. In 2024, visitors spent $29 billion in communities near national parks, which supported 340,000 jobs and generated $56 billion in total economic output. For context, the National Park Service's annual budget is roughly $3 to $4 billion, which means the system generates somewhere between 14 and 18 dollars in economic activity for every dollar the government spends on it. There are very few public investments with that kind of return.

The COVID pandemic accelerated something that was already trending upward. When indoor activities shut down in 2020, Americans flooded to the outdoors. National park visits dipped initially because of closures but rebounded fast, and by 2022 the system was hitting record numbers. The outdoor recreation economy in the US now generates over $1 trillion annually, which is larger than mining, utilities, and farming combined. A friend of mine bought a van during that period for about $22,000 with 97,000 miles on it, put another $30,000 or $40,000 into converting it for camping, and he wasn't unusual. RV and campervan sales spiked during COVID as people who had never camped before decided they wanted to be outdoors, and a lot of them never went back to hotels. The outdoor industry grew by double digits during the pandemic, and even as the initial surge has leveled off, the baseline shifted permanently higher. The problem is that the infrastructure these 323 million visitors are using was largely built decades ago for a fraction of that traffic, and the funding to maintain it hasn't kept pace with the demand.

The National Park Service has a deferred maintenance backlog of over $22 billion, which is the cost of all the repairs, upgrades, and infrastructure work that needs to be done but hasn't been because the money isn't there. That includes roads, bridges, water systems, campgrounds, trails, visitor centers, and employee housing. Some park roads haven't been resurfaced in decades. Water and sewer systems in several parks are so old they pose health risks. Trail erosion is accelerating because the same paths are absorbing ten times the foot traffic they were designed for.

And the staffing situation has gotten worse, not better. The Park Service saw a roughly 24 percent cut in its workforce recently as part of broader federal spending reductions, which means fewer rangers, fewer maintenance crews, fewer interpretive staff, and fewer people managing the safety and logistics of parks that are more crowded than they've ever been. During the 43-day government shutdown in late 2025, parks were left partially or fully unstaffed, and the damage during those periods, overflowing trash, vandalized facilities, visitors going off-trail and damaging sensitive ecosystems, took months to repair after the shutdown ended.

The parks are in a bind that mirrors the transit episode from a few weeks ago: the more popular they become, the more they need investment, but the funding model doesn't scale with demand. Entrance fees cover only a fraction of operating costs, and most of the budget comes from congressional appropriations that have stayed roughly flat in inflation-adjusted terms for years. A system generating $56 billion in economic output is running on a budget that wouldn't cover the cost of a single major sports stadium. The other thing I've been thinking about as I plan this trip is how much it costs to visit a national park, which sounds counterintuitive because the parks themselves are relatively cheap to enter: $35 for a seven-day vehicle pass at most parks, or $80 for an annual pass that covers every park in the system. That's pretty affordable compared to almost any other form of recreation.

But the total cost of a national park trip includes getting there, which often means a long drive or a flight because most parks are in remote locations far from major cities, plus lodging or camping gear, food, gas, and potentially taking days off work. A family of four driving from Los Angeles to Yellowstone is looking at a multi-day road trip and several hundred dollars before they even enter the park. And the gear barrier is real: backpacking requires a tent, a sleeping bag rated for the conditions, a pack, a water filter, cooking equipment, and proper footwear, which can easily run over $1,000 if you're starting from scratch. The parks belong to everyone in theory, but accessing them requires time, money, and equipment that not everyone has.

The van life and RV trend made this more visible during COVID because it highlighted the gap between the people who could afford to convert a van and spend weeks in national parks and the people who couldn't take a single day off work, which connects to the federal holidays episode we did about how the US is the only advanced economy that doesn't guarantee paid time off. Public lands are public in name, but the ability to use them is filtered by the same economic factors that filter everything else in America: income, flexibility, and geography. I'm going to the Redwoods tomorrow and I'm looking forward to it, but I keep thinking about the 91 percent increase in visitors and what that means for a park system running on a budget that hasn't kept up. The parks generate $56 billion in economic activity on a $3 to $4 billion budget, have $22 billion in deferred maintenance, and just lost a quarter of their workforce. They're more popular than they've ever been and less equipped to handle it than they need to be, and the question of who gets to enjoy them depends a lot on who can afford to get there.

Stay informed, stay curious, and we'll see you Monday.