Years ago I read a story titled “Loving our Parks to Death.” It was talking about how many people were visiting Yosemite NP, and how the shear number of people was hurting the environment and how the experience of visiting the park was degraded by the crowds. I was reminded of this article with several visits to the Hocking Hills during the week of October 9th. It was sort of a perfect storm. The weather had been pretty nice and the fall colors were just coming on. We had some recent rain so I decided to stop in at the Upper Falls on a drizzling Monday morning on my way to work. I was amazed to find there were quite a few people already at the park. I had to wait for people to get off the bridge so I could get a shot without them in it. Many of the trees around the falls are evergreens, but one of the deciduous trees was bright after the rain.
I stopped in later in the week to see what the water looked like. It was afternoon on Thursday, and again there were lots of people there.
On Saturday I had arranged to hike the gorge trail with a friend. The parking lot was already about half way full when we arrived at 10am. People were everywhere. I managed to get a few shots, but the wait to get people out of the shots just wasn’t worth it. By the time we made it from the Upper Falls to the cave we decided it was time to leave the crowds. Waiting in line to get through narrow parts of the trail just wasn’t any fun.
We decided to go to the camp where I work. There was an event going on there, so finding parking wasn’t easy, but once we were on the trail, crowds weren’t a concern. A quick hike to Hidden cave without a bunch of people was a nice change.
After leaving the camp we drove back towards the Old Man’s Cave Parking area. There were police directing traffic, the main lot was full and the grassy area on the opposite side of the road was full too. Cars were parked up and down the road. I can’t even imagine what the trails were like with that many people. While the increasing number of people visiting the park has to be helping local businesses, I have to wonder what having that many people on the trails is doing to the park and the experience of visiting it. Are we “loving our parks to death?”
