Park Visitation Is Up, Staffing Down. How to Prepare for the Rest of Summer

Visitation to national parks this summer already is shaping up for another record year. People love our national parks and public lands — Yellowstone National Park, for example, reported this May as its busiest on record with 566,363 recreational visits, an 8% increase from a year ago and nearly a 20% increase from May 2021. Glacier National Park also experienced its busiest May on record, up 12%. So far this year, Zion National Park visitation is up 7% compared to last year, which was its second highest on record.

But those visitation numbers come at a time when the National Park Service is experiencing a full-blown staffing crisis as part of federal downsizing.

Parks are welcoming visitors but only under a semblance of normalcy.

The Park Service, which has been understaffed and underfunded for decades, has suffered a 16.5% cut in park staffing since 2023 due to pressured buyouts, early retirements, deferred resignations and ongoing vacancies — an estimated 3,600 fewer rangers and other personnel. That’s on top of a 20% reduction parks have experienced over the last decade. All that expertise, experience and knowledge just gone.

Adding insult to injury, the Department of the Interior in April ordered all parks to “remain open and accessible” this summer and for Park Service staff to present business-as-usual operations despite these devastating staffing cuts. So, parks are welcoming visitors but only under a semblance of normalcy.

Parks are seriously short-staffed and stretched thin. To fill gaps in visitor services, we’re seeing some parks reduce their visitor center days and/or hours, rely on a single ranger to staff the entrance gate all season, reduce or stop interpretive programming, and assign rangers to tasks they weren’t hired to do. Biologists, for example, now clean restrooms.

Our national parks are forever, not just for this summer.

Such redistribution of already limited staff means that the important work that keeps the parks protected in perpetuity — such as research, restoration, Tribal consultation, outreach and education, long-term construction — goes undone. Vital projects in national parks that keep air and water clean and wildlife healthy and help parks plan for the future are grinding to a halt.

Parks are also for everyone, whether designated for their natural beauty or their cultural and historical significance. The National Park System is the model for many other countries’ park systems and are beloved by people around the world. Parks welcomed a record 331 million visitors in 2024, and many of them stayed in nearby hotels, ate in nearby restaurants and shopped in nearby stores. Our national parks are not “cost centers,” as Interior Secretary Doug Burgum recently described. Far from it, as parks drive billions of dollars into local economies and support thousands of American jobs.

In March, I shared information on anticipated impacts to national parks, both seen and unseen, because of changes to the federal government and how visitors could prepare for and respond to them. As the rest of the summer visitation season unfolds, here are my latest recommendations.

Park Planning Tips

• Be kind to rangers and fellow visitors. You may experience traffic jams or other closures that don’t match your expectations. A little kindness goes a long way.

• Bring a plan and a backup plan!

  More Visitation Tips

  Get more information on these and other tips for visiting national parks in 2025. Read our blog.

• Be ready to participate in systems that help manage large crowds, such as shuttle services and reservation systems. Acadia, Arches, Glacier, Mount Rainier, Rocky Mountain, Shenandoah, Yosemite and Zion are among the parks that require reservations or permits for park or trail access. NPCA’s Know Before You Go webpage offers up-to-date information.

• Bathroom facilities may be closed or have unmet maintenance needs, so bring a personal hygiene kit with toilet paper, hand sanitizer and a double-bag system for packing out your waste. Known as a W.A.G. bag, this system contains chemical crystals that gel and deodorize waste. The bag can be sealed and then disposed of in a trash can or carried out in your backpack. Plan for you and your two- or four-legged friends.

• Bring extra water to avoid dehydration. A sizable number of search and rescue incidents involve heat illness of some kind. As temperatures build this summer (and traveling to higher elevations exacerbates dehydration), please be proactive about your physical wellbeing in the heat by taking hydration seriously and protecting yourself from the sun (bring your shade with you — wear a hat!).

Stay Safe

Search and rescue (SAR) operations always require a great deal of park staff time, risk and emotional energy. This year, with staffing reduced at many parks, every SAR will stretch park staff capacity very thin.

Take care to prevent the kind of incidents that would require a SAR response. Stay on trails and boardwalks, keep a safe distance from wildlife, stay hydrated, avoid exerting yourself in excessive heat, and follow park rules and safety signs, barriers and railings.

Respect the Land and Its History

Remember that ancestral landscapes are sacred, and Tribal Nations continue to be in relationship with these spaces for their religious and cultural practices.

Leave fossils, bones and cultural objects undisturbed; avoid touching rock imagery; and keep children and pets out of cultural sites.

Also, stay clear of ancestral structures — do not climb or lean on them.

Speak Up!

The most essential way to support a good park experience — now and into the future — is to use your voice. Park lovers have a role to play speaking up in their communities and online to make clear the importance and value of parks — all 433 of them. Decision-makers across the board need to hear that people value parks and public lands, and parks need elected officials to advocate on their behalf.