[ploxiln]

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 ...

[zhoujianfu]

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.

[shp0ngle]

...do people actually read the articles before commenting?

There is a raffle. And the money from the ruffle goes to Booz Allen Hamilton.

[klempner]

The legitimate "raffle" structure in question does not typically require people to pay if they don't win the raffle.

[ghaff]

So long as people have to pay if they win the raffle, I'm hard put to see the justification for a raffle entry fee.

[skyyler]

Isn't it obvious? Revenue!

[giantg2]

No, it appears half the people here did not read the article nor even look at the graphs.

[greenie_beans]

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.

[jefftk]

The article doesn't say that Booz's contract lets them keep the lottery fees--do they?

[clusterhacks]

https://www.wsj.com/articles/national-park-fees-booz-allen-6...

[lifeonlars]

Who do you think gets them if they don't go to the parks service?

[93po]

maybe the hat and tie wearing bears in the parks are running the lotteries and stealing the money for themselves

[cldellow]

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.

[geraldwhen]

If this is queue-it, there are mass automation tools. Even if it isnt, $50 in resi proxies will give you 100 positions in the queue vs 1.

Source: I won a lot of queues by Sony, AMD, and Walmart.

[Retric]

Holding a lottery without limiting people to one entry by say requiring your name to enter is dumb, but I am not surprised this happens.

[geraldwhen]

Gerald, Gerrald, Ger.ald.

Sony was restricting PS5s by address at one point, but adding an apartment number (to a house) or a 0 to an address got around the limit for the first year.

Depending on how valuable the item is, an incredible amount of manpower will go into defeating bot protections. I made a lot of money after spending a lot of time doing adversarial research and bot development.

[Retric]

It’s easy enough to require the name to exactly match the credit card name used or your kicked out of the fast queue.

That’s the thing about these lotteries, rejecting people isn’t an issue.

[ghaff]

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.

[refurb]

This is what they do with The Wave.

I believe they allow 20 per day. 10 are first-come first-served and 10 are a lottery you can enter for a few dollars in advance.

Seems pretty fair to me.

[shp0ngle]

...that is exactly what the actual article is talking about.

The lottery makes most money go to Booz Allen Hamilton.

[refurb]

How do we know the money goes to Booz Allen? Presumably there is some sort of contract between BAH the government to run Recreation.gov?

Does BAH keep the whole fee? Do they keep some of it? Did they get paid $0 and only get the fee?

[giantg2]

A lot of that is in the article. Nice little graphs of it too.

[refurb]

Please point it out? All I see is how much goes to the park, with the assumption the rest goes to recreation.gov, but just because the recreation.gov gets it doesn't mean Booz Allen keeps it all.

[nofunsir]

YES they keep the whole lottery fee.

WORSE YET, they get to set the fee themselves! The park system just goes along with what they pick.

They got in trouble for this because by law there was supposed to be a public comment period regarding fee changes.

They got some judge or official to sign off something saying effectively: "x = whatever BAH decides; Fee = x;"

[lifeonlars]

They keep the whole fee.

[ghaff]

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.

[oh_sigh]

What would stop bot makers from just having thousands of their bots enter the raffle?

[tshaddox]

Charging a nominal fee to enter the raffle might. Like how all raffles work by definition.

[kwhitefoot]

Just make the ticket personal and non-transferable. No need to disadvantage the poor to make it 'fair'.

[throwaway049]

Glastonbury Festival does non-transferable by having a long period to register interest and upload a photo of yourself, then if you snag a ticket your photo gets printed on it and checked at the entrance.

Their primary problem was resellers - it's still a scramble when the ticket sale begins.

[oh_sigh]

Good to fight against resellers but bad for normal users - some people might get sick, or have something else come up, and not being able to give a ticket to a friend is a bad experience.

[giantg2]

That's covered in the article.

[actionfromafar]

That might help a little but rich people will just eat the cost of thousands of fees.

[bell-cot]

IF the money was going to maintain the park, then "$10 for a chance to get in, or $10,000 to buy your way in" sounds relatively unobjectionable. It's not like the current Congress is likely to raise taxes on the rich.

[actionfromafar]

Compared to how it is now, it would be better, which is a low bar.

But perfect is the enemy of good, so if a price tag $10,000 meant some rich bought their way in and a good chunk of normal people got in anyway, that's effectively a tax on rich people, so I'm for it. (Of course, you'd spin it differently so rich people can pose as doing something for the environment and whatnot.)

[throw9away6]

Why not just make it a reverse auction at that point? That’s the end state anyway

[bluecalm]

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.

[eru]

Why a raffle and not an auction?

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?)

[et-al]

If all one cares about are that only their fellow millionaires get to savor some publicly-owned campsites, then sure that's a great solution.

[eru]

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.

Giving them a ticket is equivalent to giving them money, but restricting it be spent on park tickets only. Very condescending and paternalistic, isn't it?

Are you afraid they are going to spend their ticket money on booze?

[unionpivo]

Not from USA, but my opinion on raffles vs auctions:

Raffle is not giving them money. Raffle is giving them a chance. No matter how much money you give to poor people, rich people will always be able to afford to outbid them.

So sure, giving money to poor people (or better jet, making sure they get decent pay in the first place) is good idea.

And raffle makes sure, prices stay reasonable so that even poor/middle class people can on occasion enjoy the parks.

You do auctions when you want to maximize profit. You do raffles when you need to rate limit access to a limited resource.

[eru]

If you allow people to resell tickets they won in a raffle, it's no different from an auction.

(And why would you want to keep poor people from re-selling their tickets? Perhaps they need the x dollars that the ticket is more than the they need the ticket?)

[et-al]

Uh, it wouldn't be just poor people. It'd be the bottom 98%. You're proposing turning certain national/state-owned campsites into luxury experiences.

(Though arguably with bots and scrapers, that's maybe what they are now anyway.)

[eru]

Yes, if you don't have an auction, you just get bots and scrapers, and an auction-like secondary market.

> It'd be the bottom 98%. You're proposing turning certain national/state-owned campsites into luxury experiences.

I don't see how that works. We don't see the top 2% win all auctions on ebay, do we? Nor do we see them buying up all tickets to see Justin Bieber in concert (to bring an example where supply is limited, Mr Bieber can only give so many concerts in his lifetime). Rich people don't even own all houses, either.

[lozenge]

There are enough rich people to make the auction price of a ticket at a desirable location $1,000 and we know there is never going to be enough redistribution to prevent that. What you're suggesting would realistically make the activity inaccessible.

[ghaff]

$1,000/night is pretty much in the range of relatively primitive camping on private land in primo locations. I've been shocked at the price tag associated with so-called glamping (which isn't quite like pitching a tent but close enough) in locations I don't even think are that primo. Absolutely an auction for Yosemite slots on a summer weekend would be at least in the high three figures.

[mnky9800n]

This is a very top down thinking approach. Yes we should give poor people money. But actually is that the job of parks? Perhaps parks should try to be as equitable as possible to let whoever wants in entry. Then a raffle not an auction is the best way to do it.

[eru]

If supply exceeds demand, you have to have some form of rationing.

Charging everyone the same fee (set via auction) seems very equitable to me. It's a form of rationing that treats everyone the same.

Raffles are designed to produce inequality. Some get lucky, some don't.

And if you allow people to resell tickets, Raffles essentially turn into an auction anyway. But the profits go as windfall to a lucky few, not to the park.

(Naturally, you could ban poor people from reselling their ticket. On the grounds of 'we know better' than them that they really need their ticket, instead of the thousand dollar they could get for it on the secondary market. They'll probably just spend it on booze! /s)

[olivermuty]

This argument is nonsensical unless you suggest the tickets should be sellable.

False equivalent argumentation.

Edit: Excellent idea to give poor people money either way though. UBI!

[eru]

Yes, of course, the tickets should re-sellable.

Naturally, you could ban poor people from reselling their ticket. On the grounds that 'we know better' than them that they really need their ticket, instead of the thousand dollar they could get for it on the secondary market. They'll probably just spend it on booze! /s

[karmakurtisaani]

You face a lot if opposition, but I fully agree with you. This is basic economic thinking.

Somehow people are fine with having healthcare, education, housing, transportation etc. being driven by market forces, but parks not? In my opinion the state should absolutely cash in on the lucrative public parks. Otherwise you will and up with scalpers and other perversions that will take their cut in pricing the true value of this good.

Giving poor people money in form of UBI or tax breaks is the way to go in distributing all public goods.

[eru]

Thanks for the support.

> Giving poor people money in form of UBI or tax breaks is the way to go in distributing all public goods.

Be careful, that's not the orthodox definition of public goods. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good_(economics)

> In economics, a public good (also referred to as a social good or collective good)[1] is a good that is both non-excludable and non-rivalrous. For such goods, users cannot be barred from accessing or using them for failing to pay for them. Also, use by one person neither prevents access of other people nor does it reduce availability to others.[1] Therefore, the good can be used simultaneously by more than one person.[2] This is in contrast to a common good, such as wild fish stocks in the ocean, which is non-excludable but rivalrous to a certain degree. If too many fish were harvested, the stocks would deplete, limiting the access of fish for others. A public good must be valuable to more than one user, otherwise, the fact that it can be used simultaneously by more than one person would be economically irrelevant.

Public goods (by the orthodox definition) don't need to be auctioned off, and can't be auctioned off: by definition, there's no way to keep the loser of the auction from enjoying the public good anyway.

You are right that most government provided goods, like public parks etc, should be charged for. And that includes roads.

However I wouldn't necessarily make a blanket statement that _all_ government goods should be provided like that. It's just a very strong default, and exceptions need a strong argument to convince me.

For example, some goods are very cheap to provide and very hard to exclude. Or their use has very big positive externalities.

An example that springs to mind are childhood vaccines. They are easy to exclude, but they are cheap to provide and other people benefit from you using them. So I am very sympathetic to an argument that the government should provide standard childhood vaccines for free, and perhaps even pay people to take them.

[hnbad]

Or just raise the ceiling income tax rate and introduce a wealth tax so there are fewer ultra-rich people skewing the "market price". You could then use the extra tax income to fund public services like housing, transit, medical care and food so the poor have more freely disposable income.

Wait, I thought we were talking about parks?

[eru]

Income taxes have lots of deadweight effects. Raising them mostly leads to more and more avoidance.

Establish a land value tax, if you want efficient taxation. You can't hide land, and you can't pass such a tax on, either.

[lazyasciiart]

Then you need to give all the poor people enough money to outbid all the rich people - otherwise no individual poor person can win the auction. Sounds a lot more expensive than letting people self select and assigning tickets based on some method other than money.

[eru]

> [...] otherwise no individual poor person can win the auction

I don't see how that works. We don't see only rich people win all auctions on ebay, do we? Nor do we see them buying up all tickets to see Justin Bieber in concert (to bring an example where supply is limited, Mr Bieber can only give so many concerts in his lifetime). Rich people don't even own all houses, either. Nor do they eat all the meat.

[lifeonlars]

Does this apply to all public goods, or are there limits to this principle?

For example, is it paternalistic to supply clean water via a municipal utility? Do you think that the commonwealth should give poor people enough money to buy clean water in a public market?

[eru]

It doesn't apply to any public goods. It can't.

Access to national parks isn't a public good.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good_(economics)

> In economics, a public good (also referred to as a social good or collective good)[1] is a good that is both non-excludable and non-rivalrous. For such goods, users cannot be barred from accessing or using them for failing to pay for them. Also, use by one person neither prevents access of other people nor does it reduce availability to others.[1] Therefore, the good can be used simultaneously by more than one person.[2] This is in contrast to a common good, such as wild fish stocks in the ocean, which is non-excludable but rivalrous to a certain degree. If too many fish were harvested, the stocks would deplete, limiting the access of fish for others. A public good must be valuable to more than one user, otherwise, the fact that it can be used simultaneously by more than one person would be economically irrelevant.

How would you even run an auction on a good that's non-excludable? By definition, you can't keep the losers of the auction from using the good.

> For example, is it paternalistic to supply clean water via a municipal utility? Do you think that the commonwealth should give poor people enough money to buy clean water in a public market?

Sounds reasonable.

Most municipal utility (at least in the places I lived in) charge for the water they provide. Usually those charges are very reasonable.

It sounds like a lot of hassle to give poor people a weekly water ration in kind. At the very least, you need to involve the water utility in the bureaucracy that administers welfare. Seems like a lot of hassle.

Just giving poor people money that they can use to pay their utility bills seems much simpler in comparison. And that's eg what they do in Germany (the country where I know the most about how government welfare is run).

At most, you sometimes hear people suggest that the poor need some extra money, if eg electricity or water prices are suddenly higher than before. But I haven't really heard anyone seriously suggest giving poor people a water allowance. Is that common where you live?

[throw9away6]

If the number of entries is unlimited then it’s essentially an auction anyway

[eru]

Yes, if the number of tickets you can buy for the raffle is unlimited, and the number of winners per day is fixed; then the raffle is just a more complicated, less predictable equivalent of an auction.

[xnorswap]

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.

[Sankozi]

Not sure how you come up with point 1 when talking about auctions of a very limited resource. Lets focus on the point 2.

You are vastly overestimating buying power of the richest people. Lets assume that some of them are really irrational and want to buy access to the single place by selling whole their wealth.

X entries per day, 365 day in a year, that is 3650*x tickets to buy out to cover 10 years.

Musk wealth: 171 000 000 000

Divided by 3650 = 46 849 315

If we sell only 50 tickets daily it is less than million of $ that Musk have available for each ticket.

There is over 60 million people with wealth higher wealth than that. (https://www.statista.com/statistics/203930/global-wealth-dis...).

If park increases number of tickets to 500 daily (~21 per hour) then we are talking about 600 million richest people that can try to outbid Musk on a single ticket.

In reality people like Musk probably would never spend even 1/100 of their wealth for any single attraction. If they had, they would not be that rich. Additionally park could easily increase number of tickets if those are not used.

[HWR_14]

> If we sell only 50 tickets daily it is less than million of $ that Musk have available for each ticket.

Wow, and for anyone else for only a million dollars people can buy an entire day in what was once a free federal location!

Meanwhile, let's look at Yellowstone. Over a decade, they will sell about $110MM in passes (just a 10x of what they generated recently.) Let's say at an auction the passes go for an average of 20x that. So for $2.2 billion, someone can buy exclusive access to a 2.2 million acre federal park for a decade.

A 20x multiple is pretty high too.

> reality people like Musk probably would never spend even 1/100 of their wealth for any single attraction.

Musk spent approximately 20% of his wealth on an internet toy.

[eru]

Sure. But he has only five twenty-percents to spend in total.

[eru]

Give poor people money, if you want to help them.

Giving them a park ticket is equivalent to giving them the auction price for the ticket but restricting them to use it on park tickets. Very condescending and paternalistic.

> Supply & Demand only works if supply can be increased, so that as prices rise there's incentive for greater supply.

No? Where did you get that idiosyncratic notion from?

Auctions work just fine for eg van Gogh paintings, and they have been in decidedly fixed supply since 1890.

Auctions also work well for things that are in fixed demand. Of course, in that case you have suppliers bid, not buyers.

You can also have a two-sided auction where both suppliers and buyers bid.

[xnorswap]

If the goal is for everyone to own a Van Gogh, then yes those auctions have failed.

A goal of national parks should be that everyone has the opportunity to visit at least one over their lifetimes.

Or we're left with needing charity to step in and buy tickets on behalf of the needy.

[vel0city]

> A goal of national parks should be that everyone has the opportunity to visit at least one over their lifetimes.

There are many national parks which do not have any limitations, timed entries, or reservations. There are then also many which do have reservations, but reservations can be pretty easily obtained. There are a few which have limited resources available with massive numbers of people wanting to attend which do have these lottery issues.

Most locations run by the NPS allow people to just show up without restrictions. Everyone already does have the opportunity to visit at least one over their lifetimes.

[eru]

We are only talking about auctions, because the number of people who can visit certain parks is lower than those parks can admit.

No matter how you shuffle, auction or raffle the tickets, that doesn't increase their supply.

So by your metric, all methods fail?

If the market clearing price for tickets would be so high that poor people couldn't afford to win an auction, then in the alternative that they get lucky and win a raffle, their best course of action would be to sell the ticket on the secondary market and enjoying the money.

Unless, of course, you ban poor people from re-selling their tickets. I mean, they most likely would spend it all on booze, wouldn't they? /s

> Or we're left with needing charity to step in and buy tickets on behalf of the needy.

Give poor people money. They know best what they need.

[unionpivo]

> Give poor people money, if you want to help them.

Giving poor people money will not help the situation. How much money do you need to give to a family, that would want to have a picnic over the weekend, so that Bill Gates and Elon Musk and others, could not outbid them.

Yeah wont happen in real world. I wont assume bad faith from you, but generally speaking saying just give them money is a huge copout.

> Auctions work just fine for eg van Gogh paintings, and they have been in decidedly fixed supply since 1890.

Glad you brought that up.

Van Goh sold his paintings and owners of such paintings then sell them on auctions etc.

There are people in the art world who would argue that such paintings do belong in Museums, so that public can enjoy them. So they band together and collect money so that their local museum can afford to buy such Van Goh painting.

After such painting are displayed in Museum where anyone can view them, for a fixed price, that generally covers the upkeep.

Which is the same situation as here. there is a public park (that is by definition there to be used by the public), that sells tickets, that should cover the upkeep. But since the demand is too high, it sometimes need to raffle them.

Auctions would defeat the purpose.

[eru]

> Giving poor people money will not help the situation. How much money do you need to give to a family, that would want to have a picnic over the weekend, so that Bill Gates and Elon Musk and others, could not outbid them.

And that's why Bill Gates and Elon Musk bid on and win all ebay auctions ever? Whenever a house goes for sale, they snatch it up, too. Don't they? /s

Basically, the same forces that make the paragraph above untrue, would also be at work here.

> Which is the same situation as here. there is a public park (that is by definition there to be used by the public), that sells tickets, that should cover the upkeep. But since the demand is too high, it sometimes need to raffle them.

If demand is so high, then a poor person who wins a ticket in a raffle is better off selling the ticket in the secondary market (to Bill Gates perhaps) and enjoying the money.

Naturally, you can forbid poor people from reselling their ticket to prevent that. We all know they would only use the proceeds for booze, wouldn't they? /s

[actionfromafar]

So in your envisaged ultra-communist society, where wealth has been distributed enough for the (formerly) poor people to bid on a level playing field against the (formerly, relatively speaking) rich people, now what do you do?

[eru]

Where do you get the communism from?

Modest levels of redistribution gets you something like Germany or Scandinavia or the US.

[lukas099]

This would be politically unviable. Just look at responses to your comment.

[eru]

Indeed. Though that doesn't mean it's a bad idea.

You know how eg abolishing slavery or letting women vote was once politically unviable.

[bluecalm]

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.

[cowsandmilk]

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.

[bluecalm]

I was answering to a comment any collectibles. There multi-accounting is rampant and little can be done about it. When it comes to non-physical goods then a lot more can be done about enforcement.

[greiskul]

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).

[throw9away6]

Harder to game, if desired enough people will still game it by buying entries for others

[TeMPOraL]

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.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

I want to go hiking, not play some stupid game.

[0_____0]

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.

[InitialLastName]

> Acadia is about as bad as it gets here,

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.

[ghaff]

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.

[InitialLastName]

Ah, I didn't realize that had been nationalized (not technically a "National Park" though).

I've paddled through the "waters" bit a few times (geez, 20 years ago); lack of access would definitely help the overcrowding.

[ghaff]

Relatively recent. Basically a big land donation from the Burt's Bees co-founder finally helped made it happen. And, yeah, although the National Parks tend to be "better" (i.e. more compelling), the distinction is mostly a political one. (I see they allow hunting in certain areas which also probably helped move it over the finish line.) At least in the vaguely recent past, most properties become National Monuments before they become parks. Acadia was Lafayette National Monument before it became a national park.

I haven't been up there yet. Soon. But like a lot of Maine lands in that general area, it's probably more paddling/fishing oriented than hiking (at least if you're into summits). (Even a lot of Baxter other than Katahdin is like that.)

[ghaff]

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.

[allturtles]

> 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

So perhaps the problem is spreading?

Luckily it seems it's not nearly at "The Wave" levels of scarcity, you can actually get tickets on most days: https://www.recreation.gov/ticket/10088450/ticket/10088451

[alistairSH]

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.

[ghaff]

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).

[foobar_______]

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

[rob74]

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)

[tshaddox]

I’m not sure what you mean about that being an exception. The Wikipedia article details an extremely strict application process to access that place.

[rob74]

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).