As the National Park Service begins planning for its 100th birthday in 2016, the venerable agency has reason to wonder who will show up.
By the service's own reckoning, visits to national parks have been on a downward slide for 10 years. Overnight stays fell 20% between 1995 and 2005, and tent camping and backcountry camping each decreased nearly 24% during the same period.
Visits are down at almost all national parks, even at Yosemite, notorious for summertime crowds and traffic jams. Meanwhile, most of the 390 properties in the park system are begging for business.
"Most days, we'd be delighted to see 10 people," said Craig Dorman, superintendent at Lava Beds National Monument, a seldom-visited site near the California-Oregon border that is even emptier these days. "It was pretty crowded around here during the Modoc War," he said, referring to the 1872 Modoc Indian uprising. "But there probably haven't been that many people here since."
Typically, families with children recede from the parks in the fall. Now, the retirees who traditionally take their place in the fall and winter are choosing to go elsewhere. Last year, about 569,000 vacationers went to Yosemite in July, nearly 20% fewer than in the same month in 1995. In January, there were 94,000 visitors, about 30% fewer than in January 1995.
Agency officials admit that national parks are doing a poor job attracting two large constituencies -- young people and minorities -- causing concerns about the parks' continued appeal to a changing population.
A study commissioned by the park service and released in 2003 found that only 13% of the African Americans interviewed had visited a park in the previous two years.
For more than a year, the appropriations committee of the U.S. House of Representatives has been asking the park service to explain how it intends to attract more minorities to parks.
"Let me assure you that the leadership of the service is talking about this and spending a fair amount of time trying to understand the trends," said Jon Jarvis, director of the park service's Pacific West region. "You don't have to have statistics and surveys to recognize that the visitors we are seeing do not reflect the diversity of the United States."
Meanwhile, the parks' most loyal visitors over the last several decades are vacationing elsewhere. Baby boomers are changing the way they play. Some of the more adventurous have embraced mountain biking and similar sports that are not allowed in many national parks. But as they age, most boomers are less interested in pitching tents and sleeping on the ground.
