Am I understanding this correctly: you need to pay for a permit for hiking in some places in the USA, and it's a lottery so you might not even be able to go once you've paid the money?
Just to be clear, this applies to only the most popular parts of National Parks. Most National Parks don't require permits or they are easy to get. There are also tons of ways to hike that aren't National Parks. If you have the skills and gear, I recommend wilderness areas in National Forests.
This is like when that new gelato place opens up and has a 45 minute line for $15 ice cream, and the regular ice cream place is basically as good and has normal prices and no line.
I agree. To add my POV, I feel this is just another step in the pimping of national land. The government and American people are once again being taken advantage of by one of the big consulting firms. Big surprise. Places like Gatlinburg have become cesspools as it's pretty much a mini Las Vegas of the East. As someone who came from a rural background, you couldn't pay me to go to one of the bigger national parks so I can wait in line to faux climb a peak.
On the private land side, more and more landowners are leasing their land for hunting. I'm in the rural midwest - not long ago you could hunt on just about any private property simply by walking up to the person's front door and asking nicely. Nowadays more and more properties are leased out and under strict contracts that limit access. In my area many contracts limit foot traffic, not just hunting.
Luckily my family owns land, and we let neighbors on it, but this is becoming more and more outlier philosophy. I totally get it all and understand it from an economic point of view, but it doesn't make it suck any less.
On the public side however, this just doesn't sit right with me. There must be a different solution.
you're not charged for nothing - you're charged for a chance to get something. If the lottery was free, what prevents you from signing up multiple times?
The fact is, demand for these spots are too high. I'd rather see an auction, but that'd be too unfair for people who aren't rich enough - public goods are still public and should be available.
Is the lottery fee really what's preventing people from signing up multiple times? Aren't there so many other services in this world that manage that pretty well without a lottery fee?
I can understand that reasoning, and it does make sense to me too, but only if all the money goes to the park. Ideally then even only for successful applications.
Ideally you should have an option to support the park even if you don't go/don't want/can't go for a hike and in any case you should receive a clear breakdown of the costs in what goes where.
I had no idea about this either. For me this screams of a dystopian future civilization (which is apparently now) where even access to the outdoors has been limited due to overpopulation and is now regulated through a lottery.
I mean, I get it, I understand that they need to limit the amount of people visiting certain sensitive ecosystems, but still... something about this just seems fundamentally wrong to me. Access to the great outdoors, to nature, seems like such a fundamental human right to me.
While I understand the need to protect sensitive ecosystems, restricting access to nature altogether is extremely problematic. There must be better solutions that don't infringe on what should be a basic human right. If overpopulation is truly an issue, we need to find ways to distribute people more evenly and improve infrastructure to handle more visitors in a sustainable way. A lottery system should really be an absolute last resort.
Protected spaces would be over-run without permits and enforcement of said permits. These are fragile places. The dystopia would be a graffiti-laden, human excrement covered Wave with garbage laying everywhere and tourists piling on top of each other.
Allowing the best spots to be completely overrun seems far more dystopian to me. To be clear, you do not need a permit to have an incredible experience at a national park.
Not if you go in the off season... Arches is also unique because it was legitimately seeing permanent damage due to overuse. There are plenty of other national parks in Utah you can go to whenever you like.
For some places would be over run given ease of access and historical features draw huge crowds.
Everyone wants ultimate freedom then complains when they show up and everyone else with ultimate freedom has trashed the place.
The general public has a huge credibility problem of its own to grapple with, but somehow it’s always someone else’s job to sit and reflect, find the solution.
