This is something where every single person who appreciates public lands should be mad as hell, and letting their elected officials know.
For a more in-depth analysis of the dubious legality of the whole situation, see Matt Stoller's excellent article "Why Is Booz Allen Renting Us Back Our Own National Parks?" [1]
Also, as someone who runs a private, substantially more aggressive availability monitor than outdoorstatus.com (updates every minute rather than every 30 minutes), the unfortunate reality is that the permit scarcity has created something of an automation arms race.
Looking at my analytics for today for a few examples, I see 1 permit availability for the Enchantments that was snagged in less than 5 minutes after being posted, some availability for Lost Coast that disappeared in under 4 minutes, and finally 5 different availabilities in Yosemite's Upper Pines campground that disappeared in under 60 seconds. A 30 minute update rate is, sadly, not going to do you much good if you want to be competitive at reservations for any popular site near the Bay Area on a weekend.
In a lot of cases, the latency of the Twilio -> SMS process is long enough that by the time I get a notification of availability, it's already been claimed by someone else's bot.
This is depressing because, while I have the knowledge and tools to play in this adversarial sandbox of permit acquisition, the majority of people in this country do not. Your access to public lands should not be contingent upon your network programming skills or how many IP addresses you're able to stripe your requests across to avoid ratelimiting.
While I expect to see many more pay-to-play services like Outdoor Status, Campflare, Campnab, Campsite Monitor, etc. pop up over the next few years, what I'd really like to see is a service that disrupts Booz Allen Hamilton with a business model that eliminates its monopoly and the junk fees that are central to how it profiteers off its role as the Ticketmaster of public lands access.
As a non-hiker, I had no idea access to national parks was gated behind some unholy combination of Ticketmaster and gambling. This is asinine--but a uniquely American flavor of asinine. The fact that a private business consulting company collects most of the money makes it even more American Asinine. I feel like my fingers are turning red, white, and blue just typing that out.
I (naively) always thought you just drove to your destination, parked and went hiking.
Most places in the US are like that - just show up. Some places are too popular and would be way too crowded, and the situation is pretty dire for the most majestic and famous places around SF.
I did the popular half dome trail in yosemite, jeez ... 10 years ago, and despite the limits it was quite a crowded line, at the cable you hold while climbing up the slope of the dome. My family goes hiking in Shenandoah in Virginia almost every year (probably 15 times in my life) and we don't reserve entry or trails or anything, and there's no lines.
Anyway, it's a kinda funny situation - do you want to promote the outdoors to the general populace? Do you want them to be accessible to all? Well you just can't, the popular places will be absolutely crushed and destroyed and quite dangerous too. There's plenty of un-popular places people could go, but they're not popular ...
They should just make it a raffle instead of first come first served. That’s what all the online drop collectible places do now after a few years of fighting the bot arms race.
not for every park. permits for backpacking in glacier national park, which is one of the most coveted permits in the country, was first come first served this year.
Canada has some national parks that do something like this. Lake O'Hara's booking system this year is a random queue:
> In lieu of a random draw, Parks Canada will be employing a queuing system to help manage the expected high demand. Users may navigate to the reservation service webpage beginning at 7:30 AM. At 8:00 AM all users waiting will be randomly assigned a place in the queue. This is not influenced by how long users have been waiting. Any users arriving to the website after 8:00 am will be placed in the back of the line. When users reach their turn, they will be alerted via an on-screen message. At that point, they have 30 minutes to proceed to the reservation website and make a reservation.
I'm going to say that, in this day and age, an online reservation system for very scarce reservations that basically requires sniping to win a slot is a bad system.
The issue is that the losers still apparently pay. Take that away and I agree that some variant of this is probably the optimal system given too many people and not enough slots.
This happens for material things all the time (collectibles, snickers, limited edition of anything) but in case of experiences (concerts, access to trails) the id verification at entry is a good mechanism to defend against it.
Auctions are the standard way to find a price that balances supply and demand.
(Give poor people money, if you think they need the help. No need to decide for them what is best for them by giving them help in the form of tickets. Are you afraid they'll buy booze instead?)
Auctions are terrible because of the uneven distribution of wealth.
You end up with a situation where the wealthy can do everything and the poor can do nothing.
And then there's the super rich, who could buy out the possibility of anyone else participating, literally turning such places into their private playground for eternity if they so wished.
Like, what price could you price it at where:
1. You could afford to go occassionally
2. Elon Musk couldn't just buy out every single ticket for the next decade to make it their personal playground.
There's simply no feasible solution to that.
Just auctioning everything and letting capitalism take its course just denies a vast segment of society from participating at all for activities where demand outstrips supply.
Supply & Demand only works if supply can be increased, so that as prices rise there's incentive for greater supply.
For things like National Parks or Taylor Swift concerts, price discovery through "supply and demand" does not work because supply can't increase to match supply no matter the price.
It's not like raffle solves the problem. Instead of bots you can multi accounters/users. The logistics is more complicated but doable if the item is desirable enough.
Grand Canyon’s river lottery doesn’t use recreation.gov and has measures to prevent multi accounters including lifetime bans (which have been enforced) if you apply with multiple accounts in the same lottery.
For something physical, specially something run by the government, you can ask people during account creation for some identification like full name + date of birth, not allow duplicate accounts to enter the same raffle, and check the id of the winners when they get there (so you don't have companies creating bots).
What if we tackled the bot arms race differently? Instead of fighting it, embrace it - and fight the market for support services instead. That is, let people script their way if they want to, just make them do it in the open, and treat it as a match-making problem.
The scheme would be as follows. There's N levels on the ladder, with some amount of tickets allocated to each level. Bottom level is for normal people without tech augmentation; most tickets are allocated there, and aggressive bot detection is employed. You can implement a raffle there if it feels more fair. Remaining levels on the ladder are for those who want a chance to get ahead with automation. Apply Elo or whatever chess players or Overwatch uses to make sure people compete at their level of sophistication. This would reward and incentivize individuals learning useful life skills, while making selling the tools less useful.
Of course I can think of 10 reasons why this wouldn't work in practice, but hey, I never heard anyone even considering this idea before, so maybe it can be rescued somehow.
It's getting to the point where areas that are under consideration for becoming National Park land get significant pushback from locals — we don't want to become another Yellowstone, they say!
In the Northeast you do see some spots getting a little crowded but it's absolutely nothing like the tourism-industrial complex that are the big western national parks. Acadia is about as bad as it gets here, but mostly it looks like "theres a lot of folks here." Yellowstone is a mess of badly driven RVs, yahoos ripping around on rented side-by-sides, just a lot of really ugly concentrated MURCA.
Acadia is about all there is in the northeast, in terms of National Parks.
The positive side is that there's a ton of wilderness in the northeast that doesn't suffer from the National Park marketing badge (and thus any draw from the rest of the country), and so are less insane. Even so, some of the state parks within a reasonable trip of NYC (notably Harriman/Bear Mountain) can get a bit crazy.
There is now the Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument in Maine--although that was (and probably still is) controversial among some locals. It's fairly remote by northeastern standards. It's adjacent to Baxter State Park but the latter significantly limits cars in the popular area of the park.
The issue for locals wasn't so much crowding as I recall but concerns about restrictions to traditional sporting uses of the land. I haven't really followed how all that played out.
Acadia is broken up enough that, if you stay away from certain sections of the park loop road and Mt. Cadillac, it's pretty manageable. Though even the western parks are a bit like that. The Yosemite Valley is a mob scene for much of the year. But there are actually pretty large and very nice sections of the park that aren't nearly as bad.
> My family goes hiking in Shenandoah in Virginia almost every year (probably 15 times in my life) and we don't reserve entry or trails or anything, and there's no lines.
I went to look up hikes in Shenandoah since this sounds like it could be part of a nice road trip with my family, and ironically I found that the most popular trailhead requires getting tickets through recreation.gov: https://www.nps.gov/shen/planyourvisit/faqs-oldrag.htm
Old Rag is a fairly unique hike for the area. The upper part of the hike is an exposed rock scramble with good views. The hike, in total, is long enough to be challenging, but not really technical or dangerous. And it's close enough to DC (<2 hours) that weekends were a madhouse, especially during COVID.
The remained of the park, and all the surrounding areas, are first-come, either free or with minimal permit/entrance fees.
Day hiking permits are fairly uncommon on US federal lands in my experience.
Backpacking permits are significantly more common but except for the extreme cases as are mentioned in the article are fairly easy to come by--except maybe at the most extreme times--and are commonly free (except for maybe parking).
Reservations only became required for Old Rag somewhat recently. I think this is a covid thing. I'm really torn, I want people to be happy and healthy outside but covid and social media has made doing this a mad house. Regulating day tickets is a necessity at most places nowadays
The exception that confirms the rule is The Wave, which is located somewhere in the middle of nowhere on the Utah-Arizona border and only accessible via a lengthy hike, but has the distinction of having been the epitome of "instagrammable" already years before Instagram was invented: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wave_(Arizona)
What I meant is that it's not one of the "majestic and famous places around SF", like Yosemite, it's really remote - but due to the strict limitation to only ~64 people per day, it's still the most sought after destination (making the most money for Booz Allen Hamilton).
You can just show up and park. You can buy an annual pass directly from the government for ~$100 that covers campsite/entrance fees in pretty much every national park, or put some cash in an envelope with a form and leave it in a dropbox at the lot.
The problem is peak seasons. If you show up to Yellowstone without a reservation on the 4th of July weekend, you'll be lucky if you can even get into the park, much less stay there or appreciate its natural beauty.
So if you want to visit a park during a holiday, school vacation week, or most of the Summer, you need to deal with the bloated mess of a ticketing system which was created by the cheapest new grads that the lowest-bidding rent-seeking leech of a contractor could come up with.
My advice: get used to cold weather and visit in the off season. Nobody is making reservations to hike in Bryce Canyon in the middle of December.
One caveat. The America the Beautiful pass does not cover campgrounds that have a nightly fee.
In general, I agree about trying to go to parks off peak season (and getting away from the more popular trails). That said, your hiking and other options can be a lot more limited at many parks that get a lot of snow in the winter relative to other seasons even if you have winter gear. (I've been to Bryce in the winter and it was hard to follow a trail in the canyon.)
The post to whom you’re responding definitely overstates it. Most places are mostly just show up, there’s regularly or always ways to simply day hike anywhere — including the Enchantments, which are unrestricted for day hiking and I’ve personally day hiked in a day. Not allowing all comers on all days is prudent because our national parks are a precious resource. I’ve personally seen trails being eroded over years, it stinks, and more people on those trails cause more erosion. But yes you nearly always can simply drive out, park, and hike.
Oftentimes, there is only one physically possible route to the most popular Instagramable view, like Vernal Fall in Yosemite NP or Angels Landing in Zion NP.
They should just auction the ticket off. Very straight-forward, and all the money can go to the park.
(Give poor people money, if you think they need the help. No need to decide for them what is best for them by giving them help in the form of tickets.)
If all the money goes to the park, none is going to the poor people. Seems like you are advocating for a system where rich people get to go to public parks, and poor people get nothing.
And if you are doing a raffle for park tickets, you are not deciding to "help them in the form of tickets" for them. They signed up for the tickets. They want to go to the park. Is it a bad idea to allow poor people that want to access a park to have a chance of doing so?
And auctions are a way of optimizing pricing of stuff. But not everything in life is about money. For instance, organ donation recipients. Do you think an auction system for organs would be a better world than the existing systems? Should we just give the poor people that wouldn't be able to afford an auction for an organ some money, and then let them die?
> If all the money goes to the park, none is going to the poor people. Seems like you are advocating for a system where rich people get to go to public parks, and poor people get nothing.
I don't understand. It seems like you are suggesting mixing up your welfare system with your park system?
I suggest: have one system that gives poor people money. And have another different system to run the parks.
> Do you think an auction system for organs would be a better world than the existing systems?
Yes, vastly superior. Thanks for bringing this up.
>If all the money goes to the park, none is going to the poor people. Seems like you are advocating for a system where rich people get to go to public parks, and poor people get nothing.
Poor people weren't going to enter a lottery for the chance to visit a park anyway. At least this plan gives all the money to the park.
Those lotteries generally do have a relatively high likelihood of getting you a spot. Paying $10 for a fifty percent chance of a permit vs. paying $100 in an auction does make a difference.
I really don’t understand where your claim that poor people wouldn’t enter the lottery is coming from. That seems like a nonsensical conclusion to me.
To me a lottery seems like the perfect solution, it‘s just that some of the current implementation details suck.
The fee to enter should be quite low, its only function to reduce gambling the system (besides having policies in place that also do that). It should not be possible to enter multiple times.
The service provider of the lottery should not be paid proportional or in relation to how many people enter the lottery. At least not in any kind of directly coupled way. All income from the lottery should first go to the parks and then they pay the service provider from that income.
And that‘s the problem solved.
Lotteries are fair, at least if you can’t enter multiple times and if the chance of getting a permit is still somewhat decent.
> Poor people weren't going to enter a lottery for the chance to visit a park anyway.
What? Poor people like to take vacations also and national parks were traditionally a rather cheap way to do so.
Theres also a lot of poor folks who's purpose in life is literally visiting those parks. Recreation.gov owns big wall climbing permits for Yosemite for instance and a significant number of young dirt bag climbers that live in their cars in order to climb full time and are very definitely poor apply for those every year.
All the money could go to the park from the lottery if they set up the contract that way. Alternatively, they could set up a contract such that the park gets a fixed amount per visitor no matter what the auction price ends up being.
I think they should do half the tickets by lottery, half by auction. Lottery tickets should require ID and/or photo upload when you enter to prevent reselling. The lottery/auction operator should get a percentage of the total money, with the park service keeping most of it.
If you give poor people money so every can equally bid on the auction, then why not just make it a lottery and not bother giving poor people money they’ll just give back through auction?
Presumably they are talking about giving poor people money out of a different bucket, so it isn't "just" going back through the auction, the people that receive it have the opportunity to allocate it to their needs and desires.
i think you'd need to complain to your federal representatives since the national parks and the booz allen contract are overseen by the federal government
If you find yourself stressed by the process of reserving campsites online, I’d encourage you to just go to random public land and camp there. It’s legal by default to camp on BLM and Forest Service land and you do not need permission from Booz Allen Hamilton to do it. There are endless adventures to be had and plenty of room for everyone. People competing to fill out online forms so they can be allocated appointments to enjoy specific small segments of the great outdoors is a truly bizarre phenomenon. If you enjoy participating in that system, more power to you, but if you don’t, then just go anywhere in the much larger portion of public land that isn’t administered in that fashion.
The core problem is a tragedy of the commons scenario. Basically, the demand for tourism to natural parks (or, such as in the case of Venice, Amsterdam and others, entire cities) is way too large to allow unfettered access by the public.
So there's two options - limit access to those who can afford it (e.g. by raising serious tourism taxes), or do it in a lottery. Both have obvious downsides: making it expensive is direct discrimination against the poor, and lotteries risk families not being able to go because not everyone gets a ticket or, as we're seeing here, people gaming the system to bypass the lottery or a black market run by scalpers.
> the demand for tourism to natural parks is way too large to allow unfettered access by the public
I'm not sure this is true. The United States has a huge amount of wilderness and federal land. The problem is that most people want to go to a small number of very popular places.
Allowing as many people as possible to have a nice time in nature, whether by providing facilities, informing potential visitors of their options, managing access to popular or vulnerable sites, etc, is exactly what the Bureau of Land Management are supposed to do. The fact that there is a single agency in control means that it's not really an example of the tragedy of the commons, either.
> The problem is that most people want to go to a small number of very popular places.
That is because they are the prettiest and most desirable destinations. This is unsurprising. People want to see Yosemite, not some barren nothingness out near Ridgecrest, CA or Kingman, AZ.
Just because land is owned by the USFS or BLM and has public access doesn't mean it has any real recreational or attractive value that would draw visitors.
Nothing has intrinsic recreational or attractive value, including the Grand Canyon, the Niagara Falls and Yosemite. Desire is often mimetic.
The counterparts to this are that a) many people would rather go somewhere slightly less attractive that isn't overcrowded and b) lots of people are attracted, at least in part, by going somewhere novel.
The fact that there is a certain challenge involved in getting as many people as possible (but no more) to the prettiest sites while finding less pretty but still enjoyable alternatives to those who can't make it is exactly why land management and tourism agencies exist.
You've forgotten the effect of advertising. There's enormous induced demand for these things, which could be instantly reduced by a prohibition (or time limitation) of advertising, broadcast rights etc. Right now BAH are enormously incentivised to promote the hell out of these places, as are third parties that help you 'game the system'. Take the money out of the system and you limit it to organic reach - you aikido the pay to speak nature of contemporary social media.
Instagram is enough these days to completely wreck any place suitable for pictures.
Here in Germany, the Königssee waterfall had to be completely closed for at least five years to give nature a chance to rebuild, after Instagram users caused enormous devastation [1] - trash, fires, noise scaring wildlife including some species of rare, protected birds, 3km worth of trails through the bushes, erosion caused by the trails... and it's by far not the only place.
Purchases/lotteries/whatever allow one entry per natural person, using an ID. You have to indicate ownership of that ID to take up the entry ticket. Then you have to show the ID on entry. Typically such places will buy back tickets and you get a refund if they sell.
You can use 'receipt of state assistance' (in the UK this is called 'benefits') as a marker for poverty [definitely not perfect!] and only allow access to, for example, a low cost lottery on entry for such poor people.
At best, this article makes an argument that the tragedy is not inevitable. It does nothing to dispel the idea that it is the default and most common result.
Off topic, but I realized that I can initiate a backpacking trip by walking out of my front door near El Camino, over the foothills, and all the way to Half Moon Bay. Maybe secretly camping in a state park up there in between.
This is extremely novel to me, being from Houston, and I definitely want to try it now.
Have a peek at https://doingmiles.com/hike-sf/ for some longer itineraries like this. Lots of options if you're willing to do a little stealth camping (please be ethical/considerate [1])
It’s not a lottery, it’s all 100% reservable on October 1 for the next year. I’ve been 10 times in the past 15 years and every year the permits are harder to get because of the demand and the bots. The irony is that the permits are so popular and the fees so low that I’d estimate 30%+ of the permits that are bought actually don’t get used. On my most recent visit, we saw less than 10 people total on our first day a few weeks back.
Yeah, there are a relative handful of places in the US/North America that, during remotely popular times, access has to be rationed for good reasons. The Enchantments are definitely one of those--I'm resigned to never be organized/lucky enough to go there (and that's not even a national park). And once you're going to ration, it's just a question of how: very high fees, lottery for applications within some window, first-come first-served x days in advance, queue at the ranger office on the morning of and hope you get lucky or have to go somewhere else...
Excessive fees going to a for-profit company is a separate matter but doesn't change the fact that, for any reasonable fee structure, way more people want to camp/stay/hike in certain places than those places can reasonably support.
Different approaches just have different drawbacks. In general, I'd probably disfavor technological sniping approaches for most sites in this day and age in favor of a lottery with a wider window. (And for most public properties just increasing pricing isn't really the right answer.)
Here in Minnesota, the Boundary Waters Canoe Area (BWCA) adjacent to Canada is on a permit system as well. Within 3 minutes of the permits opening in January for this season, all the traditional weekend sites entry points on the Grand Marais side were gone. In the 20-30 years I've been doing it, I've never seen anything like it before.
Our camping group is absolutely coding bots for next year. Going in as a human a couple minutes after the bell does not work. This should not be.
One common solution to this type of problem is a (different kind of!) lottery. You should register for one or more time slots (up to N), and there should be a lottery to decide who goes (just randomly). After winning, your other reservations should reset.
I solved the response-time problem in a different way, but that would be one option you could use to cut down how much a notification pipeline contributes to your time-to-claim-permit latency.
Saying it goes to "recreation.gov" misses the point.
It goes to Booz Allen Hamilton.
Booz are effectively stealing insane amounts of taxpayer dollars to run an extremely simple CRUD website. And no, it's not "actually complex and just looks like CRUD". It's really just CRUD built on AWS services.
IMO? If the grift cannot be killed then Access Fund should team up with the open beta guy and submit an insanely competitive bid when the contract comes up.
The complexity comes in the fact that there are different data formats and rules in play for almost every single management agency's permit/reservation system on Rec.gov - the JSON responses for, say, a trailhead in National Forest in Inyo Country, CA are different from a trailhead in National Forest in Deschutes County, OR. And those are both different for the JSON response format for a trailhead in the King Range National Conservation Area. Which is different from a trailhead in any National Park. And so on.
And all of these different permit systems trigger different forms, agreements, vehicle information collection, etc. once you move to the checkout stage. It truly is a massively complex system - if not technically, then logistically, by the sheer quantity of requirements-gathering and accommodation of hundreds of different individual land management agencies' unique systems for managing user access. I've read some of the source code for the web client (last I checked, they were still publishing source maps to prod) and it's a pretty impressive feat that it works and holds together as well as it does.
As you can tell from my comment above, I'm just as incensed about the business model as you are. It is highway robbery. Taxpayers subsidized the creation of the site, and now we're being doubly ripped off as a huge portion of the profits collected are being funneled straight back into the pockets of Booz Allen (and, no doubt, also being channeled into lobbying efforts designed to maintain this monopoly through the renewal process for the Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act this October).
However, I don't think that unfairly diminishing the technical and organizational achievement the site represents is going to help with trying to find a solution to the economic grift that it also represents.
> the JSON responses for, say, a trailhead in National Forest in Inyo Country, CA are different from a trailhead in National Forest in Deschutes County, OR. And those are both different for the JSON response format for a trailhead in the King Range National Conservation Area. Which is different from a trailhead in any National Park.
Are you guessing here? I don't really know what you mean by the JSON response (from who to who?).
I tried to look into whether recreation.gov has per-agency or even more granular schemas. I found a manual to the Recreation.gov agency portal that suggests the answer. Note that even though it's hosted on the usfs site it has no usfs-specific branding. The section "Adding New Inventory to Recreation.gov" doesn't describe any agency-specific options explicitly, though it does have vague manual processes that could in theory involve custom development.
You can browse the site and look at the network traffic in your browser's devtools. There are some radically different response structures for the various different land management agencies.
I just did. There's a whole bunch of junk and duplication. I focused on finding the available campsites at a campground because that seems like a core feature to me. You apparently make a GET to
I'll give some credit to Booz. This seems like a decent API. Plus it's nice theres no auth whatsoever. It certainly looks to me like they're using the same data model to store both examples.
This is of course just one example. There are a ton of other JSON requests in the flow of reserving one of these specific campsites, and then there are all sorts of other processes like backpacking permits.
In my personal experience I've seen two backpacking permit reservation system styles. There's one that looks like it was shoehorned into the campsite reservation model, and another where it looks like the agency gets to define a bunch of free text fields and then has a human manually review and enter into a system.
In general I get the vibe from recreation.gov that whenever there's complicated logic there's a human in the background doing the actual work. I base this on the amount of free text inputs and the fact some actions take hours to weeks.
That's it for me looking into this, but if you post an example of what you're talking about I'd be interested.
The board is a list of titles. Titles should capture the main point. The title stands as the money going to a gov agency rather than the park which isn't nearly as infuriating as calling out Booz Allen Hamilton / a co.
I wish the government was capable of building an extremely simple CRUD website, but all the evidence points to them not being able to. If they can't build it in house they have to pay someone to build it for them, this website required no upfront payment, the pay structure seems reasonable imo.
Dude, what? First off, OpenBeta kinda sucks. It's slow, and honestly, has some pretty bizarre UX/UI decisions. MP is vastly more comprehensive and looking at my local areas it's clear he/she just scraped MP (or straight up copied payloads from their API) to populate the db. There's no clear connection between operating a meager route database and implementing a timed reservation and permit system for national parks and campgrounds. There's literally nothing about OpenBeta that would make one think: "Yes, this (potentially singular) person has the skills, knowledge, and resources to run a nationally available service with all the SLAs that accompany gov't projects in a domain that's only veeeeeeerry tangentially related to OpenBeta."
The article suggests the 100% lottery fee goes to BAH, but I found out part of it goes to the BLM.
"Of the $9 [lottery fee], $5 ultimately goes to Booz Allen and $4 goes to the Bureau of Land Management, which manages the site, a BLM spokesman said."
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.
Sad as government should be building this out. Heck I’d argue this is perfect for a public university to partner on, providing students a real-life (but low risk) way to build production services in prep for joining the workforce.
This website was envisioned soon after the obamacare fiasco which proved that the government is incapable of building websites. They felt they had no choice but using an outside contractor.
And, at the local (say town) level that's probably true. So what happens is they farm it out to an existing service for "free" and the service tacks on a fee. As a result, I either write a physical check or have my bank do so for town fees because if I paid directly online I'd pay a surcharge.
I don't really understand (I mean, I do understand on some level) why we don't have a decent US government agency that specializes in consulting work like this. Why didn't the BLM get the USDS to work on this website and then train them to maintain it?
I guess I don't understand why Booz Allen Hamilton is able to employ contractors for this work but the USDS is not. Is this truly the cost of building and running such a website (i.e. 2-3mm/yr according to this website)?
I think that we've had previous discussions on this very story, here. It's familiar.
Sadly, it's not unique. Many charities and whatnot also end up trading their good name, to enrich corporations. My mother used to run a nonprofit, and told me about it. In her case, I think they only made about 5% of the proceeds, and were happy about it.
The "Trade on a nonprofit's name, and make money" model is quite old (My mother's org was doing it 30 years ago).
This system is only employed at the most popular locations -- your random rural land isn't going to be competitive with a top-10-in-the-world attraction.
Too many liabilities, squatters, delinquents, etc for private landowners. It's a legal headache to create a "camping ground" on your property in the US.
True, though some states have 'recreational use statutes' that limit landowner liability for allowing public access to private land. But there are still many risks and headaches involved, even with those protections.
this is content marketing for the site's campsite status tracker. so i'm gonna plug my similar reservation tracking tool for glacier national park, except the money goes to a trail maintenance organization: https://old.reddit.com/r/GlacierNationalPark/comments/12ivo1...
if anybody is interested in another park, i can make one for you.
Someone please explain to me, how I am supposed to access our national parks and resources that are ONLY available on recreation.grift if I don't agree to recreation.grift's privacy policy[1]?
One compelling reason is the nature of the US Civil Service. In the vast majority of cases, US government employees are extremely hard to fire or lay off for any reason. As a result, each government agency only keeps a small core of staff that are direct employees and the vast majority of work is done by contractors whose employment can ebb and flow with the whims of congressional funding.
If Oregon had directly hired software engineers they could have built that portal with probably a team of 6 in less time. If we continue making governments have to pay billions for shitty websites, then we'll continue to have to increase taxes and ... big government -> socialism.
What is the problem here? The contract was "I agree to pay you later for the system you provide and maintain now for millions of users. You will be paid through money spent on lotteries and other financial activity in the system."
This is as agreed upon between the US Government and the recreation.gov providers.
Gambling is such a sick thing in general. An occasional play is fine, but that isn't where the money is made.
Like alcohol, the industry is fuel by addicts.
I want to believe in some freedom utopia, but the human brain is manipulated. I don't have a solution outside of education. Warning people how the brain can be manipulated.
For a more in-depth analysis of the dubious legality of the whole situation, see Matt Stoller's excellent article "Why Is Booz Allen Renting Us Back Our Own National Parks?" [1]
Also, as someone who runs a private, substantially more aggressive availability monitor than outdoorstatus.com (updates every minute rather than every 30 minutes), the unfortunate reality is that the permit scarcity has created something of an automation arms race.
Looking at my analytics for today for a few examples, I see 1 permit availability for the Enchantments that was snagged in less than 5 minutes after being posted, some availability for Lost Coast that disappeared in under 4 minutes, and finally 5 different availabilities in Yosemite's Upper Pines campground that disappeared in under 60 seconds. A 30 minute update rate is, sadly, not going to do you much good if you want to be competitive at reservations for any popular site near the Bay Area on a weekend.
In a lot of cases, the latency of the Twilio -> SMS process is long enough that by the time I get a notification of availability, it's already been claimed by someone else's bot.
This is depressing because, while I have the knowledge and tools to play in this adversarial sandbox of permit acquisition, the majority of people in this country do not. Your access to public lands should not be contingent upon your network programming skills or how many IP addresses you're able to stripe your requests across to avoid ratelimiting.
While I expect to see many more pay-to-play services like Outdoor Status, Campflare, Campnab, Campsite Monitor, etc. pop up over the next few years, what I'd really like to see is a service that disrupts Booz Allen Hamilton with a business model that eliminates its monopoly and the junk fees that are central to how it profiteers off its role as the Ticketmaster of public lands access.
[1] https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/why-is-booz-allen-renting...