Michael Liss mistakes Arches National Park for an amusement park. He forgets or perhaps never understood that our national parks have a primary mandate “to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wildlife therein [within the national parks] and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.”
Note the clear statement that the parks are to “conserve” and leave the park “unimpaired” for future visitors. This is the directive the park must use in management planning. About 75% of Arches qualifies for designation as wilderness, one of the qualities that must remain unimpaired.
Arches National Park went through an extensive process to determine how to manage the park under conditions of overcrowding and long waits to get into the park. Sometimes the entrance to the park had to be blocked off at the exit from U.S. 191 because the long entrance road to the gate was filled with cars. In essence, the popularity of the park and the temporary overload of visitors locked additional visitors out of the park.
Arches National Park established the most reasonable mode of allowing the public to enjoy the park and to leave the park “unimpaired for the enjoyment” of visitors.
I moved to Moab in 1999 and have watched the increased visitation to the park and a lot of other parts of southeastern Utah. I first visited Arches around 1957, at about age 11 or 12. I remember it being a remote and beautiful place with no people around. I still visit the park regularly. This year my brother and his wife came down to visit and we decided to visit Arches. This was the day before timed entry started this year. We waited in a line of autos for well over an hour to get through the entrance station. A few weeks later I was camping in Arches at the Devil’s Garden with friends from Salt Lake City. No timed entry permit is required if you have a camping permit or a hiking permit to the Fiery Furnace. I waited in the vehicle entry line with all the other visitors for 20 minutes.
The timed entry only lasts for a few months during the heaviest tourist season and even then it only operates from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. You can drive in early or wait until the cool of the evening after 4 p.m. to visit. You still have 4-5 hours of daylight to visit the park.
The National Park Service had to make a difficult decision about preserving the qualities desired in a park visit. They went through a public process to come up with a solution. I think they found a reasonable solution.
Liss is correct that the NPS stopped requiring a timed entry pass this year for Yosemite National Park. What he failed to say is that there are reports of traffic being backed up for 80 miles from the entrance station. There are no campsites available, no parking spaces available and people parking anywhere they can find someplace to squeeze a vehicle off the road. These are the same problems Yosemite had before its timed entry trial. If its stewards are wise they will revisit their plans for visitors in the near future.
Wayne Y. Hoskisson, Moab