this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2024
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It depends. Generally speaking they're free. I was told by a ranger at the Great Smokey Mountains National Park that they don't enforce (or at least specifically weren't that day) parking passes and only give people courtesy notices to pay for parking. They were only ticketing people parking in places that weren't actual parking spots or blocking areas.
Generally speaking I think you can expect to pay about $5 on average, some places maybe more (like if it's a trail in a city, then parking is usually more costly). But in tons of places it's just totally free.
My point is that anon thinking he was being used was hilarious because it's extraordinarily cheap.
The smokey mountains is strictly enforcing parking passes now anywhere without the park. They will tow vehicles and mail you the fee without question if you dont have a pass.
This was in November 2023. It may have just been that day or it may have changed since then.
I get the point about it being a cheap activity in general, but aside from parking, who do pay the money to? Is there like a ticket-booth at the start of some trail which you couldn't reasonably get to walking from other places?
Some places use an honesty system where you drop money into a box and get a thing to put on your dash. Other places have a gate house or booth where you can pay.
You aren't forbidden from walking in. It's usually just not a practical choice. Usually trails are in very remote places so you'd probably walk further than the length of the trail to get to it lol. Other places which are in more urban environments (like a trail through a city or places like Stone Mountain Georgia) might have easy places to park and walk in but it's technically private property. And again, still usually just extra walking. For things like bike trails this is more viable probably.
In Finland there is no trespassing on private property. Well, not if it's not gated or your yard or something. And you can't gate large pieces of land like that, so...
I understand that the nature is very different, for instance we have no mountains. So for me, I'm just thinking "just use another road", but some places just have one road going there, I guess. Here, I'll show my point:
I've highlighted the parks in yellow. Kansallispuisto = national park, luonnonpuisto = "nature park" (which sounds silly, I hear it). My point is that the trails in those areas start from a few places, and going to the national park, there's several parkin places you can go to, and you can get to the areas from so many different places. And this isn't a national park that requires any park rangers. I don't even know if we have any, but if we do, they're in the national parks which are up North in Lapland. This is a very small one. Just a big marsh with a lake in the center, essentially.
So you couldn't really set up a gatehouse or a booth anywhere there.
We have plenty of places like that here as well. The places where you have to pay to park are generally very popular and the fee is largely used to reduce how many go (i.e. reduce destruction) and fund maintenance and cleanup efforts.
In my area, the only places that charge are state and national parks, and not even all of them. I have dozens of hiking trails within a few miles of me without any parking fees, and there's a massive federally owned swath of land nearby also with no parking fees.
If you go to the handful of extremely popular parks, you'll pay a fee (and you can get an inexpensive yearly pass if you want), but if you go to literally anywhere else (dozens if not hundreds within 50 miles or so), there's no fee. So Grand Canyon or Yellowstone = fee, local falls or BLM land (federally owned, but not a "national park") are free.
I just don't understand how you can "fee" Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon. Those places are huge.
You have a booth on every road?
I don't believe there's a single place like that in Finland, what with our everymans rights
Yellowstone has limited access by road, but you could hike into it.
The Grand Canyon has visitor's centers and a few established areas with infrastructure for various activities, but you could hike to it, but getting into the canyon is another matter.
The other thing is that going in by road and paying for a pass let's people know you are there and if you haven't come back. Both areas are dangerous and people get in over their head because they have no understanding of the dangers of nature.
So by "limited access by road" you mean that "yes, there is a booth on every road leading there"?
So some company basically owns the rights to do that..? Have booths and whatnot on every road leading there?
It's just... weird for me, is all.
Federal or state government owns it depending on the park. And the fee is mainly just to pay for maintenance on the parking area. No one is chatging you to go to yellowstone or the grand canyon. They are charging you to park there or use some special service like guides, campgrounds, or picnic areas. Generally speaking though you can just walk onto any national park without paying anything. Yellowstone is a bit of a special case in certain areas because they really don't want people wandering around off trail because they're lible to fall through the ground into a hot spring that will melt their skin off before they get a chance to even scream and then the park rangers need to spend time dredging what little is left of them out of the hot spring. So those areas generally charge people to use the raised wooden trails because of maintenance costs. But at most parks no one is going around checking people for passes. They're only checking vehicles.
Also the costs are very low if you're paying at the park. You can also buy an anual pass to literally every US national park for $80. If you're a senior then you can get a lifetime pass for $80 and an anual pass for $20. There are also all sorts of ways to get those for even more discounted prices.
Usually it's the federal park service (government agency) that runs the parks, and they're the ones that take payment. It's not for-profit, and the fees don't completely pay for maintenance of the park in most cases, they just offset the cost of so many people going (mostly tourists).
And there's usually only one or two roads going to the parks (Yellowstone has 3 IIRC), and they're usually really out of the way, so you're not going to be able to just walk there. Many parks don't connect the entrances either, so they're purely a destination. My brother lives right outside Glacier National Park, and it's still a good 20 miles from the "city" (Columbia Falls is ~5k people) to the park entrance (again, there are two, one at each end of the park).
Yes, these places are massive, but they're also really far from normal traffic, so you'd have go at least a half hour out of the way to get there (often multiple hours driving). Someone needs to pay for maintenance of the infrastructure to get there, and that's what these fees are for.
Sometimes it's as low as $2 or so, sometimes it's like $50 (for more popular parks). It gets adjusted to preserve access for those that really want to visit and prevent abuse. Sometimes it's just a suggested donation.
Yup, for Yellowstone, that's 3 entrances, so three sets of booths. It's largely to cut down on traffic (traffic gets really bad as-is) and maintain the infrastructure.
The only reason you'd go to any of the entrances is to visit the park, there are no through roads or anything, and it's like an hour or two from the major highways, and several hours from a city larger than 10k people (aside from the tourism towns just outside the park). And the traffic to get into the park is backed up for an hour in the morning for people looking to get lucky with extra passes (there's a maximum capacity).
You can hike in if you like, the passes are only required for cars IIRC.
It's genuinely hard to imagine how large America is.
And Finland isn't one of the tiny Central-European countries.
Driving from Fresno to Yellowstone is pretty much the distance it is to drive from where I live (Southern end of Finland) to the Northern end of Finland.
But yeah at the Northern end in Lapland it starts getting more like that, only a few roads going to the larger national parks. Here in the South you can just go around anything really, there's backroads and footpaths everywhere. Like no matter how deep in the woods I go, I'd feel awkward taking a shit, since there's always some dogwalkers to be met.
This makes me want to go hiking up North.
There are areas like that here too. I live next to a few mountains where there see dozens of interconnected trails all largely accessible from an intercity arterial bike path, with free parking near the more popular entrances to the trail network. Much of it is federal land (part of a national forest), but none of it is designated as a national park.
Maybe there's a two terminology difference here. Here's the terms we use:
Most of the trails I'm talking about are in the last 3 groups, and they're all free. Yellowstone, Grand Canyon, and Glacier are all in the first group and all have entrance fees. If you're "going hiking," you'll go on the last four, and the first two are for vacations unless you happen to live right next to one.
Oh. I think for us the first three would be hiking and the last four would just be walking.
But yeah, there's definitely a difference of terminology, seeing as there's two completely different languages. But I do take your point.
I don't know about any trails that have bike paths leading up to them though. I mean, unless you count a road as a bike path. It's just very much more organic here, you've made it into a whole thing that can be used for profit, it seems like. The infrastructure to ours, like duckboards and whatnot are paid for by taxes, but our taxation policies are quite different so we won't get into that, lol.
There's no profit here, it's just a different form of taxation where the users of a service pay more for its upkeep than those who don't use it. The only time a private org gets involved is if you make a reservation (and even then, many sites use a government agency) or arrange for a guided tour or something.
Everything here is publicly owned, except maybe the handful of hotels that are operated inside Yellowstone (not sure how those work). So whether you're paying with income tax or park fees isn't particularly relevant since it's all federal or state land.
I meant "profit" in the sense of that profit being the taxation. As in, people walking around the park don't actually cost anything to anyone, so it is profit when you charge people to walk around, but the people wouldn't be able to come there in the first place were there not the infrastructure which is upheld by said profit.
Well, they do. They leave litter, destroy trails, vandalize formations, etc. Keeping things nice takes a lot of work, especially with how much foot traffic these parks get. Yellowstone gets over 4 million visitors every year, and that's with the park fees, quotas, etc. Glacier is a bit less popular and still gets around 3 million visitors every year.
National and State parks are funded with both income taxes and park fees. Park fees keep the number of visitors down to a manageable level to preserve the natural beauty.
And walk-ins generally don't need to pay, though some of the larger parks also have walk-in rates.
OK yeah I'll admit cleaning up after shitheads does cost, and probably a fair amount because of how famous those places are. (So it's very much non-locals most of the time, I'd wager.)
Yup. The annual visitors to Yellowstone and Glacier is like 4x higher than the total populations of their respective states. I would be surprised if even 5% of yearly visitors come from the state they're in, and I bet more than half are from outside the country.
In America we don't have any sort of "right to roam" law, sadly. If you want to feel even more smug and mock my country, wait until you watch this: https://youtu.be/yBrtWXBhuuo
In the west there is a grid pattern of land like a checker board. Like this:
The Xs are private property and you cannot access them. The Os are public property. The ?s in the middle are public property, but how do you get to them? The only way is by crossing through a corner. Obviously, the private land owners would prefer to view the public land as an extension of their private land so they believe that corner crossing should be illegal because it passes through their property. (Even if you don't step on it you have to cross through their airspace so to speak.) Meanwhile, everyone else says, "hey, you can't just double your land like this! Let me have access to the public land! What the hell do you mean airspace? I'm not a plane! I'm a person! And I didn't step on your property!"
Genuine curiosity being read as "smug and mocking" is a bit troublesome I feel. I've just not traveled a lot. I know things, but I haven't been there personally, and reading about Yellowstone, it doesn't exactly highlight that some company controls access to it, more or less.
Thank you for the info on that though, seems horrible, and is exactly the type of behaviour our laws exist to prevent.
Light hearted banter being read as troublesome is also troublesome.