Should You be Worried About Safety in National Parks?
Brief History of National Parks and National Park Service
When Yellowstone was designated a national park, it became the first such park in the world. Yellowstone became the first national park in 1872, but the National Park Service was not established until 1916. For four decades the nation’s parks, reserves, and monuments were supervised at different times by the departments of War, Agriculture, and the Interior. Stephen Tyng Mather, the first Superintendent of Parks, was a leader in the transformation of the poorly managed and underfinanced national parks and monuments into the centrally administered National Park Service. Under his dynamic leadership, Grand Canyon, Acadia, Bryce, Zion, Lassen, Hawaii, and Mount McKinley National Parks were established. He successfully lobbied for enabling legislation that ensured the future creation of other parks, including those that involved purchase from private owners in the eastern United States, such as Great Smoky Mountains, Shenandoah, and Mammoth Cave.
On August 25, 1916, President Woodrow Wilson signed the act creating the National Park Service, a new federal bureau in the Department of the Interior responsible for protecting the 35 national parks and monuments then managed by the department and those yet to be established. The National Park System of the United States now comprises more than 400 areas covering more than 84 million acres in 50 states, the District of Columbia, American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, Saipan, and the Virgin Islands. Today more than 20,000 National Park Service employees care for America’s 400+ national parks and work with communities across the nation to help preserve local history and create close-to-home recreational opportunities.
Park Visitors
People love the history of the creation of national parks and how they came to be. Every year, millions of people visit the over 400 national parks in the country. To many it’s a family vacation and to others it’s a getaway from the realities of life.
Over the past decade, 2010–2020, the top ten most visited national parks saw a collected total of 464,044,884 visitors. If we were to rank the top ten parks by annual visitors, Great Smoky Mountains National Park ranks first, followed by Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Yellowstone, Rocky Mountain, Zion, Olympic, Grand Teton, Acadia, and ranking tenth is Glacier.
Great Smoky Mountains National Park saw a constant pattern of having the most amount of annual visitors out of all the national parks every year over the past decade. The park saw the lowest decline of visitors between the year 2019 and 2020, with total recreation visits decreasing by only 3.4%, despite the COVID-19 pandemic, which caused the park to close for a portion of the year.
Park Closures and Eventual Reopening
Beginning in March 2020, majority of national parks across the entirety of the United States saw closures. Some parks closed off certain attractions such as campgrounds and visitor centers while others closed completely. Grand Teton, Yellowstone, Olympic, Great Smoky Mountains, and Yosemite National Parks closed their entrances to all visitors on March 24 and didn’t open them back up until April/May. Other parks such as Grand Canyon didn’t close until later, on April 1 and opened back up on May 15, around the same time period as all the others. Yosemite and Glacier National Parks closed and remained closed for the two longest periods of time out of any of the ten top national parks. Both closed in late March and didn’t open back up until the middle of June.
How COVID-19 Has Affected Park Visitation
Complete and partial closures impacted the parks in different ways. Glacier National Park, number ten on the most visited national parks list, closed on March 27 and opened back up on June 13, but faced several problems due to park closure.
“The East side of the park remained closed all summer, and visitors concentrated on one area of the park after it reopened which led to more crowds. The park also had to close all entry 25 days last year due to it being too crowded to allow more vehicles inside,” Christina Adele Warburg-Hon, a national park ranger for Glacier National Park, said. She also mentioned the effects on employees in the park, stating that “employee housing reduced to one person per bedroom which led to staffing being cut in half. These staff cuts limited a lot of what could open in the park, and in turn affected park visitation, and this summer, summer of 2021, will be the same way.”
The Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the number one most visited national park, on the other hand experienced minimal negative visitor impacts due to the closure of its park. When it reopened it had one million more visits between June and December than was experienced during this same time period in 2019 and also had 2.3 million more visits than the 10-year average for this time period. After the park reopened all of its frontcountry campgrounds in September, use increased more than 33% for the remainder of the year over the same time period in 2019. In the backcountry, camping had an increase of 47% for the same time period between June and December in 2019.
There have been many changes throughout all of the national parks since their reopenings. Many of these include signs spread out through the parks which promote social distancing, mask requirements in places like visitor centers and monuments, as well as restrictions on lodging, trail permits, and parking lots with timed systems for entry and other methods to try and decrease crowding.
With the reopening of parks, there have also been impacts on the parks themselves. National parks, spaces which are supposed to be safe and preserved from human touch, have been overrun by people like those wanting to come out of quarantine and those who want to take vacations but can’t go far. Andrew Chow, a writer for TIME wrote, “Virginia State Parks rangers have reported illegal all-terrain vehicle use, trash dumping, and boulders thrown from landmarks. At Arizona lakes, visitors have left behind dirty diapers, shoes, broken glass, and entire grills.”
Chow speaks about state parks, but the national parks have shared the same fate. Thankfully those who work for the NPS have responded to these incidents with humor, using their social media accounts to share things like safety tips. One post, an infographic shared on July 16, 2020, visualizes the proper distances that visitors should have when near animals while also promoting social distancing guidelines.
The impacts on national parks because of the COVID-19 pandemic haven’t all been bad. One good thing that has come from park closures and new guidelines is less people in parks are being injured and dying. There are two causes of death that people associate most with national parks, falling and wildlife attacks.
Deaths in National Parks
Of the 464,044,884 visitors that have visited the top ten national parks over the last decade, only 635 died. Those deaths, which happened inside the various parks, were the result of multiple causes of death such as drowning, falling, and medical or natural causes like heart attacks.
Many people assume that falling and wildlife attacks are two of the major causes of death that happen inside the parks. These assumptions are partially incorrect, as data from the NPS shows that falls are the top cause of death with medical/natural deaths being the second highest.
Out of the 635 people who died in national parks, 159 of those died from falling. This number accounts for roughly 25% of the total deaths in the parks over the past decade. Another 128 deaths were the result of medical/natural causes and made up 20.1%.
Zion National Park, the sixth park on the list, had the third highest amount of fall related deaths, 22, totaling approximately 51.1% of its total 43 deaths. Meanwhile, Grand Canyon and Yosemite National Parks both had the highest total deaths, as well as the highest number of deaths by falls.
Although Grand Canyon and Yosemite National Parks had the two highest numbers of fall related deaths, Grand Canyon had more medical/natural deaths. The number one cause of death within the park was medical/natural related. Medical/natural deaths are defined as deaths exclusively due to natural causes, such as heart attacks, cancer, and infection.
Grand Canyon National Park had 42 medical/natural related deaths over the past ten years, making up 31.3% of its total 134 deaths. The park also saw other causes of death such as drowning, poisoning, and motor vehicle crashes. There was only one case of a person dying by being poisoned in Grand Canyon while there were six total cases throughout all ten parks. One cause of death that isn’t listed for Grand Canyon National Park, or most of the parks for that matter, is the widely assumed wildlife attacks. Over the last decade, there were only four total cases of animals attacks throughout all of the ten parks. What does this mean exactly? From this information it can be assumed that majority of people that visit national parks actually do follow proper procedures when it comes to wildlife encounters, and that those videos that are seen online of animals attacking people, are more rare than originally thought to be.
Safety in National Parks
Almost all of these causes of death can be avoided by following the proper safety procedures that each national park has in place for its visitors. The NPS has a list of safety tips and procedures specific to each national park. The agency uses both its website and its social media platforms to spread awareness of the parks as well as provide safety tips to those who follow them.
The National Park Service uses humor to get the attention of their audience, using well designed infographic posters to give information such as staying away from certain animals in order to remain safe. On the official NPS website, there is also a section all about safety, aptly titled ‘Keep Safety In The Picture’, which discusses tips like keeping your distance from wildlife, how to avoid slips, trips, and falls, and what to do when an area is crowded.
Being properly prepared when you visit a national park can help you avoid problems, as well as accidents. The best way to be prepare for a trip to a national park is to read up on park procedures for the park you’re going to visit, check for any park alerts, and follow proper safety protocols that are set in place for the safety of not only you, but everyone around you as well.
Sources
National Park Service (NPS),
Christina Adele Warburg-Hon, Glacier National Park ranger
Cited Works
“Quick History of the National Park Service (U.S. National Park Service).” National Park Service, www.nps.gov/articles/quick-nps-history.htm. Accessed 25 Mar. 2021.
“Park Experiences More Than 12 Million Visits in 2020 — Great Smoky Mountains National Park (U.S. National Park Service).” National Park Service, 2 Mar. 2021, www.nps.gov/grsm/learn/news/park-experiences-more-than-12-million-visits-in-2020.htm.
Chow, Andrew. “National Parks Are Getting Trashed During COVID-19, Endangering Surrounding Communities.” Time, 22 July 2020, time.com/5869788/national-parks-covid-19.
All data used in this story came from the National Park Service via a Freedom of Information request.
