‘L.A. at rush hour.’ ‘Disney World.’ American national parks feeling the strain this summer
By Jen Rose Smith
(CNN) — A river of cars greeted Marti Pawlikowski, of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, when she arrived at Zion National Park on a Road Scholar tour this spring.
“It took us 45 minutes to get through,” she said, adding that the delays didn’t stop once she entered the Utah park. “Waiting in line for the shuttle in Zion reminded me of long lines in Disney World.”
Last year, 26 national park sites saw record-breaking visitation. Now, many are in the thick of what looks like yet another blockbuster season.
Yellowstone National Park reported a new visitation record in May, a month that brought jammed parking lots and delays to the park that’s largely in Wyoming with parts in Montana and Idaho.
After scrapping its timed-reservation system early this year, Yosemite National Park in California also saw visitation reach new highs in May, with bumper-to-bumper cars clogging park roads.
“The traffic reminded me of L.A. at rush hour,” said Walter Meyer of Sacramento, California, who visited Yosemite in late April only to discover that every trailhead parking lot he tried was already full. At a gift shop, he met a frazzled employee overwhelmed by the surge.
“If it’s this bad now, I can’t imagine what July will be like,” he recalled her telling him.
As the summer goes on, 250th anniversary celebrations are likely to amplify the crowds in some parks. This year features events spanning historical reenactments, fairs and parades — and a few reached capacity months ago.
Michele Treacy of Kinnelon, New Jersey, visited Mount Rushmore National Memorial for the Fourth of July weekend, when the National Park Service held a massive Independence Day fireworks celebration.
Treacy had never been to a national park and began planning the trip in February. Only after her group booked a nearby campsite were they informed of a lottery to see the fireworks at Mount Rushmore.
“We were kind of blindsided by that,” she said. “All six of us put in for the lottery, and none of us got tickets.”
They wound up watching the fireworks celebration from their campsite about two miles away, along with 75 other people crammed onto a tiny deck.
You could also use the word crammed to describe some parts of the park.
“The gift shop was wall to wall people,” she said. “We asked, ‘Are they giving away the 250th anniversary t-shirts?’ But no, they weren’t. It was just extremely crowded.”
President Trump’s decision to attend the fireworks celebration emerged only after Treacy had booked the trip.
“The fact that the president was there added a whole other layer of excitement,” she said.
It also added a whole other layer of security and traffic, particularly since the sparsely populated area is home to many two-lane roads. Treacy, however, remained bowled over by the “majesty” of Mount Rushmore and the other national parks she’d visited.
The park attendance surge has ripple effects across the travel industry, and some companies are ramping up offerings to meet the increased demand. Tour operator Backroads has expanded capacity on its US national park tours by 12% to keep up. The company said bookings in Death Valley and Great Smoky Mountains national parks rose as much as 60% from the previous year.
Here’s how record-breaking numbers are affecting some parks, what’s behind them — and how travelers can still make the most of summer trips.
How national parks are coping
Booming visitation comes at a moment of crisis for the National Park Service. In 2025, national parks lost nearly 25% of their permanent staff, according to an analysis of Department of the Interior workforce data by the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA), a nonprofit advocacy group founded in 1919.
Park Service facilities are strained following major Trump administration funding cuts that contributed to an estimated $24 billion in deferred maintenance. (While the House recently turned down the most extreme funding cuts proposed for the 2027 fiscal year, the overall NPS budget still sank 1.3%.) The Atlantic recently reported that funds have been further diverted to the president’s renovation projects, including upgrades to the White House.
“It’s a really challenging time for people who work for the Park Service,” said Cassidy Jones, a former park ranger and the NPCA’s senior visitation program manager.
While the National Park Service has described its elimination of timed-entry and reservation systems previously put in place as a strategy to increase access, the NPCA — and many other experts — reject that framing.
“I do not think that’s what’s happening here,” Jones said. “You’re returning to the chaos, unpredictability and lower-quality experiences that were happening before we were experimenting with managed access.”
A spokesperson from the NPS office of public affairs wrote, in an emailed statement, that personnel changes would help accommodate visitors this summer.
“The National Park Service continues to prioritize positions that directly support visitors and park operations, including visitor services, public safety, maintenance and resource stewardship,” the statement said.
In parts of the park visitors don’t see, from IT to research and conservation programs, staffing has been hollowed out, Jones said.
She added that in many places, experienced permanent employees have been replaced with seasonal staff who might arrive weeks before the summer travel season begins. The most serious impacts of funding cuts may only be apparent over the longer term, as resources and research decline, she said.
“Visitors should really think about what kind of parks their children are going to get to visit,” she said.
What’s behind the blockbuster numbers?
In a year when many Americans are feeling financially strained and airfare prices remain high, it seems intuitive that national parks would rise in popularity. After all, a park vacation featuring hikes and picnics is a relatively affordable alternative to an international trip.
But the reality is more complicated.
Historically, visitation at national parks has actually fallen in tough economic times. High fuel prices also tend to keep Americans away. A recent summer travel survey by Deloitte found that just 45% of Americans are planning a summer vacation with paid lodging at all, the lowest number in six years.
Those who are traveling, meanwhile, aren’t necessarily choosing close-to-home vacations. While some initial surveys suggested Americans planned to prioritize domestic over international travel this year, the actual shift has so far been slight.
Flights by US citizens to international destinations were down just 0.5% in May when compared with the previous year, according to data from the National Travel and Tourism Office — still far higher than pre-pandemic levels.
Yet national park visitation keeps going up. “This is more of a sustained trend that we’ve been seeing for the last 10 or 12 years,” said Casey Wichman, an associate professor in the school of economics at Georgia Tech, who has studied national park visitation. “Each year, aside from Covid, has brought an increase at some parks.”
Wichman’s own research has found that social media exposure helps drive visitation at popular national parks. “Parks that are more photogenic, like Joshua Tree, saw the biggest increases when social media became more popular in the mid-2010s,” he said.
When combined with declining funding and staffing, that poses problems. But Wichman said that while traffic jams, congestion and strained physical infrastructure are important issues, he sees parks’ growing popularity with Americans as a largely positive thing — notwithstanding annual headlines about overcrowding.
“What a lot of these stories miss are the benefits of having hundreds of millions of people go out and appreciate our national parks,” he said. “Some of them leave with a greater appreciation for protecting the environment. Maybe they’ve learned about our environmental and cultural resources, and appreciate those public goods more.”
‘Visitors can still find that sense of discovery’
Funding shortfalls and layoffs impact the hundreds of sites (433) overseen by the National Park Service, which include 63 National Parks as well as National Monuments, National Battlefields, and National Historic Sites.
But the crowding is not distributed equally — in 2025, the busiest 10 national parks fielded more than half of all national park visits. Last year, just 7,786 people made it to Alaska’s Kobuk Valley National Park, a vast landscape of caribou-trodden dunes that’s the least-visited national park in the system.
For travelers, those top-heavy numbers present an opportunity, said Leigh Barnes, president of the Americas for tour company Intrepid Travel.
“There are incredible parks and monuments across the country where visitors can still find that sense of discovery,” he said. A recent survey commissioned by the company found that two-thirds of American travelers think visiting a quieter park would be more rewarding than touring a famous one.
Now, the company is encouraging travelers to visit parks they might not already know — but should.
Instead of Washington state’s busy Olympic National Park, Intrepid is steering visitors toward backpacking in North Cascades National Park. In place of overcrowded Bryce Canyon in Utah, they recommend hiking in Capitol Reef National Park, where a landscape of natural bridges and arches sees far less traffic.
“Some of the most rewarding experiences can be found in places that remain surprisingly overlooked,” Barnes said.
Matt Nelson, a traveler from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, has discovered the same thing.
Nelson visited his 300th NPS-run site in June — California’s Lassen Volcanic National Park.
And while he still loves the iconic destinations, like Yosemite and Yellowstone, he tends to visit those during the shoulder season. In the summer, he encourages Americans to branch out beyond the most famous names.
“I love the big Western national parks,” he said. “But I’ve learned some really cool things at the smaller ones, too.”
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