On a summer season morning a few years in the past, we went for a hike at the fabled Brilliant Angel Path, one of the in style trails in Grand Canyon Nationwide Park.
As students of tourism and outside sport, our dialog inevitably became to the customer revel in on the Grand Canyon and a query that has plagued the parks since their inception: Are the nationwide parks overcrowded?
It’s no longer a easy query, however we consider that individuals had been answering it incorrectly for over a century, as many American citizens have come to a decisive conclusion: Sure. In fact, some particular places inside parks can get overcrowded, and a few persons are extra delicate to crowding. However continuously other people wrongly suppose {that a} busy park way a crowded one, or that having people round is inherently dangerous.
Outdated Devoted in Yellowstone Nationwide Park is a significant appeal that many guests to the park wish to witness.
Neal Herbert/Nationwide Park Provider
Then again, our research, in addition to paintings via others, has discovered that being in public parks and herbal environments with different guests is a formidable alternative to improve studies in those puts fairly than detract from them. We word that the belief that nature is very best skilled in solitude or handiest inside one’s personal team displays a most often western and elitist standpoint and does no longer align with how other people continuously in fact revel in parks or the standard in their studies within the presence of others.
Gazing the break of day on Cadillac Mountain in Acadia Nationwide Park in Maine may also be an stress-free collective revel in.
Kent Miller/Nationwide Park Provider
Past crowding, towards ‘communitas’
Mountaineering at the Brilliant Angel Path that morning in 2023, we spotted vignettes that problem the crowding assumption. The path used to be busy. It used to be early, and the south wall of the canyon used to be nonetheless blanketed in coloration. Two households, one mountain climbing up, the opposite mountain climbing down, had been chatting and sharing insights at a bend within the path.
A tender hiker shared her binoculars with an aged guy, focusing them on , uncommon desolate tract bighorn sheep. An older couple smiled as a bunch of youngsters ran uphill and previous them, racing to the ice cream promised to them at the canyon rim. Some other hiker identified a California condor crusing above. In combination, we marveled at its attractiveness.
Regardless of the selection of other people at the path, we didn’t really feel crowded. Slightly, we felt a spontaneous sense of group and togetherness. Anthropologist Victor Turner referred to as this sense “communitas,” a shared revel in that an individual may stumble upon throughout a pilgrimage, surrounded via different vacationers with a shared adventure and function.
Others have written, too, in regards to the worth of experiencing nationwide parks within the presence of others, discovering a shared sense of awe and confirmation of values. Customer surveys carried out within the Cleveland Nationwide Woodland close to San Diego in summer season 2025 display that the extra other people revel in communitas, the fewer most likely they’re to really feel crowded.
In reality, in 1922, greater than a decade earlier than Leopold’s lament about “over-crowded hospitals,” conservation recommend Robert Sterling Backyard described the sharing of house and time as the most important parts of the nationwide park revel in. He famous that an individual “sits around the evening camp fire with a California grape grower, a locomotive engineer from Massachusetts, and a banker from Michigan.” He persisted: “Here the social differences so insisted upon at home just don’t exist. Perhaps for the first time, one realizes the common America – and loves it.”
It’s an issue of standpoint
Are those crowds or potential partners at Bryce Canyon Nationwide Park in Utah?
Bing Pan, CC BY-NC-ND
You will need to needless to say each and every particular person has the facility to shift how they react to the selection of other people round them in parks. Being crowded isn’t an purpose state; this can be a unfavourable belief of social prerequisites. For example, when other people see guests as other from themselves, they’re much more likely to really feel crowded. However via spotting that tendency and reframing the interplay, persons are much more likely to seek out communitas.
Communitas, too, is within the eye of the beholder. When other people view social interactions in parks as alternatives to percentage in a bigger collective revel in, they open up the opportunity of experiencing communitas.
This summer season, we urge you to go into The us’s nationwide parks with possibly a unique standpoint. Revel in the collective awe of staring at Outdated Devoted erupt with a couple of hundred of your fellow pilgrims in Yellowstone Nationwide Park. In finding wonderment in sharing a break of day from Cadillac Mountain in Acadia Nationwide Park or sundown from Olmstead Level in Yosemite Nationwide Park. Search the facility that comes from seeing the Grand Canyon for the primary time, in combination.
Most significantly, be the one that issues out that condor, offers a neighboring camper that additional sizzling canine, or takes that photograph for every other circle of relatives. In finding your communitas, lend a hand others to do the similar and, in combination, believe the grandeur of the shared revel in of The us’s nationwide parks.
