Rush Hour in the Wilderness

"All sorts of human stuff is being poured into our valley this year," lamented Conservationist John Muir about the crush of crowds in California's Yosemite Valley. That was in 1870, when Yosemite counted its annual visitors in the thousands. This year 1,700,000 people are expected to come geysering into the national park, and the overcrowding is becoming so severe that many will wonder why they ever left home.

The trouble is that though Yosemite sprawls over 1,189 square miles, more than 80% of the visitors insist on huddling together in one seven-square-mile valley that is easily accessible and is ringed by spectacularly beautiful cliffs up to 7,000 ft. high. The valley has campsites for 9,348 people, lodge and hotel accommodations for another 4,500. That is scarcely sufficient for the 20,000 tourists who jam the valley every day all summer, let alone the 45,000 who swarm there on holiday weekends.

Tent Peg to Tent Peg. The result is citified chaos. Campsites are packed tent peg to tent peg, and latecomers drive around for hours to find a spot. On weekends, raucous teen-agers contribute heavily to a delinquency rate --mostly underage drinking and petty theft--that would do discredit to a city of 25,000. Bumper-to-bumper traffic jams constantly bring back unloving memories of the freeways. At night, a soupy pall of smoke curls from thousands of campfires in the tent city. Cracks Camper Mike Hemel, who fled the smog and traffic of Los Angeles for Yosemite: "It makes you feel right at home."

While the crush is worst at Yosemite, other national parks are feeling the pressure. Wyoming's Yellowstone ought to be able to handle its more than 2,000,000 annual visitors without crowding. After all, it's the biggest park in the system, with 3,400 square miles--almost triple the size of Yosemite. Yet most of the campers are determined to set up at Old Faithful, and the experience of Navy Chief Harold Loveless is typical: "We moved into an empty campsite, and within 15 minutes we were surrounded by campers, all doubling up on the same site. There's absolutely no privacy."

There is not much privacy at nearby Grand Teton National Park either. Last year a record 2,500,000 people trooped through the park; this year the rate is running 17% higher, and campgrounds are usually completely filled by 10:30 a.m. Campsites at Utah's Zion National Park have been crammed to capacity since early June, and a new "overflow" area is overflowing. The Great Smoky Mountains National Park, stretching across parts of Tennessee and North Carolina, draws 6,000,000 visitors a year, highest of any park in the system, and traffic on summer weekends backs up for 20 miles on either side of the two main entrances.

Auto Ban? The ideal solution would be for the U.S. to develop more national parks, but that is hard to do because the rapidly urbanizing nation is running out of suitable land. The park service recently completed a ten-year, $600 million program that doubled the number of campsites in existing parks and added more than 100 visitor centers. Since 1961, however, the Government has enlarged the total system by barely 3%, adding 844,000 acres through the acquisition of such areas as Massachusetts' Cape Cod National Seashore and New York's Fire Island National Park. Cramped for space, the park service is encouraging tourists to make wider use of less popular areas.

The demands of tourists will almost certainly continue to outstrip the facilities. Says Yosemite Superintendent John Davis: "Our problem is to find out how we can handle visitors without destroying the only things they came to enjoy." Among the proposals that the service is gingerly considering for the most seriously overcrowded parklands: banning autos and shortening permissible visiting time from the present seven- or 14-day limits to as little as three days.

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