It’s summer road trip season. Would you like to take the family to see Arches National Park? Show your children the awesome Delicate Arch? Think again. Arches National Park requires advanced reservations, which usually sell out three months in advance. Your children will probably never see Delicate Arch, except on our license plate.
It’s not because Arches is crowded. It is not. Not because, as this newspaper perpetuated the myth, “we are loving our national parks to death.” We are not.
Your children will never see Delicate Arch because the National Park Service has decided that the capacity of the entire Arches National Park is the capacity of three of its 13 parking lots.
These three parking lots might get busy this summer, but the rest of Arches will be essentially empty. See for yourself. Any day this summer when the gates of Arches are locked and the sign says “Park is Full,” enter through the two dirt road entrances — Willow Springs or Salt Valley Road — no reservation required.
How did this happen? Why are we being locked out of our National Parks?
In the case of Yosemite National Park, the National Park Service tested an advanced reservations requirement last year and told us honestly that it does not work, so Yosemite canceled the reservations requirement this year. Arches, despite all the data highlighting the discriminatory nature of the program, especially against lower income Americans who have limited vacation time and don’t have the luxury to plan their holidays whenever they desire, decided to keep the advanced reservations going. We now find out that Arches Superintendent Patricia Trap is retiring this month, so it was a lot easier for Trap to just keep locking us out than to actually address the infrastructure shortcomings of Arches National Park.
To be fair, the infrastructure issues of Arches have been building up for quite some time. In fact, no substantial infrastructure improvements have been made in 70 years. Arches has been in maintenance mode when they should have started thinking about how to transition from being a national monument in the 1950s to a national park in the 1970s. We are dealing with a national park designed in the 1950s to see only 19 of the more than 2,000 arches, with one entrance, one main road, one campground and 13 parking lots. The Delicate Arch parking lot, access point to the most famous natural wonder in Utah, is not even the largest parking lot in the park.
It’s time to upgrade the infrastructure of Arches National Park. Over the last half-century, Americans have changed. Many of us now like active adventures in nature, but Arches is still a “driving national park.” There are only two hikes in Arches longer than one mile, and there is nowhere safe to bike. We can add seven new, one-mile plus hikes to see over 100 new arches. We can make the Delicate Arch hike a one-way loop hike so you have an adventure on the way back too. This one initiative will create a much better and interesting experience for everyone. We can create a safe and fun bike path network throughout Arches.
This year, the Utah Legislature, spearheaded by Reps. Steve Eliason and Phil Lyman, funded the extension of the bike path from Moab, so bikers can safely bike into Arches through the Willow Springs Entrance. Now it’s up to Arches to make biking safe inside the park. We can add more picnic tables in Arches. Can you believe that the entire Arches National Park has only two more picnic tables than Moab’s 5-acre Swanny Park? We can add a second Arches campground.
Nearby Dead Horse Point State Park serves as an example of how to properly manage a park with the visitor as your priority. In 2022, Dead Horse Point welcomed 1.15 million visitors to the 5,362-acre state park, while Arches welcomed 1.46 million visitors to the 76,679-acre national park. Dead Horse Point welcomes 11 times more visitors per acre than Arches, yet no one has ever said Dead Horse Point is crowded. Because it’s not. Utah state parks effectively manage the entry gate and parking, and even provide flush toilets in heated bathrooms compared to the freezing smelly outhouses in Arches. Dead Horse created biking paths throughout the state park, with both guided bike tours and bike rentals available. Dead Horse Point even offers cool yurts in the campground. Maybe we should give Utah State Parks the contract to manage Arches for the next decade and then see who does a better job.
With more hiking trails, bike paths, parking spaces, campgrounds, yurts and picnic tables, we can enjoy many more of the 2,000 arches in Arches National Park and have a better experience. It’s time to fix Arches and stop locking us out.
(Michael Liss)
Michael Liss was the managing director of Butterfield & Robinson, the outfitter of biking and walking trips, recently rated the #1 Tour Operator in the World by Travel+Leisure Magazine World’s Best Awards. He lives in Moab.