Yellowstone National Park is wrapping up its busiest year on record, logging roughly 1 million more visits than it did a year ago. But even as the park approaches 5 million annual visits, Superintendent Cam Sholly rejects the idea that visitors are overrunning Yellowstone.

“The reality is that the overall health of the Yellowstone ecosystem, it’s in better condition than it was before Yellowstone became a [national] park,” he told Park County commissioners on Tuesday.

Only about 6,400 of the park’s 2.2 million acres — or just 0.23% of the park — are occupied by roads, housing and other developments. But while the vast majority of the park remains wide open and wild, Sholly sees growing impacts on operations, staffing, infrastructure and visitor experience from the increasing number of people crowding into the most popular areas.

Traffic at Yellowstone’s West Entrance can back up for a mile or more into West Yellowstone, Montana, he said; parking areas on the North Rim Drive of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone and in the Norris Geyser Basin are becoming “sheer gridlock” at certain busy times; and simply having the additional number of people in the park strains all of the park’s personnel and systems. And given the labor shortage, Sholly said many of the food and beverage operations couldn’t keep up with the number of people staying in the park’s hotels, cabins and other accommodations last summer.

“We have a very, very large problem in a very small part of the park,” Sholly said. “And, you know, it’s something that needs our focus.”

While conversations about managing visitation sometimes raise the spectre of caps and reservation systems, Sholly said the National Park Service won’t be making any sudden, dramatic changes.

Rather, he said managers can start with smaller changes. For instance, Sholly said closing the bathrooms at Artist Point had an “unbelievable” impact on reducing the amount of time people stayed in the parking area. Even on busy days in July and August, Sholly said he found perhaps one out of every five spaces open. 

Another option could involve temporarily closing the roads into the North Rim Drive and Norris Geyser Basin when the parking areas fill up, he said, while Yellowstone will study the feasibility of launching a shuttle system in the Old Faithful area to move visitors around the famed geyser and the Midway Geyser Basin. A summer pilot program involving driverless shuttles in the Canyon area worked “amazingly well,” Sholly said. Following some improvements to things like battery life, park leaders see the automated vehicles as a solution in certain small areas. (The superintendent added that he considers a park-wide shuttle service as prohibitively expensive and not what visitors want.)

As for the strain on employees brought on by rising visitation, Sholly noted that Yellowstone is halfway through a $45 million housing improvement project, including replacing half-century-old trailers and upgrading older houses. But he still sees more trouble ahead with housing, particularly as prices rise in neighboring Gardiner and West Yellowstone, Montana — and as more people come to the park.

“Once we get past COVID and ... Americans start traveling internationally and more internationals start coming back into parks, I don’t know how that’s gonna balance out,” he said. “But I think it’s safe to say the upward trend is going to continue.”

Yellowstone logged its first 1 million visit year in 1948, hit 2 million in 1965, 3 million in 1992 and then 4 million in 2015. Now, just six years later, the park is set to finish 2021 with around 4.8 million visits.

“We’ve had the luxury in the past of having 20 years, plus or minus, in between millions,” he said, but now “we’re seeing … an incredibly rapid pace.”

Some of the growth in popularity of national parks has been attributed to the National Park Service’s own “Find Your Park” campaign, which launched in 2015 and encouraged people to visit. Sholly said he finds some irony in national parks now moving toward the more “extreme” options of visitation caps or reservation systems.

“That is not something we’re going to implement in the near future,” he said. “But it is something that we are thinking about.”

Sholly said he didn’t know what threshold of visitation would trigger more severe measures to manage visitation, but said all of the discussions would take place over a number of years.

“What I do promise is that it’s not going to be a surprise and that we’ll work together on whatever that long-term solution is,” he told commissioners.

Sholly added that the Park Service is eyeing “opportunities for increased revenue” to offset increased costs of managing Yellowstone. He said a hike in fishing license fees brought in an extra $700,000 a year — from $900,000 to $1.6 million — that will be used on projects like restoring native fish. And he suggested the Park Service should raise the $35 fee it charges for a three-day vehicle pass into Yellowstone, given the impacts each visitor has on operations.

“I think that’s got to be looked at at some point downstream,” he said.

Commissioner Lloyd Thiel asked the superintendent to help organize a meeting about emergency closures of the Beartooth Highway, saying people were stranded on the mountainous route last year after someone mistakenly shut the road’s gate behind them. The county also wasn’t notified when a forecasted snow storm led to an emergency closure in October, Thiel said.

Sholly said the Park Service probably didn’t do the best job communicating about the closure and that he would help facilitate a meeting. He also noted the complicated history of the “orphan highway” and said the agency is short on the staff needed to maintain the route.

Within Yellowstone, the Park Service plans to soon replace the Lewis River Bridge between the South Entrance and Grant Village, which will lead to some delays, Sholly said. That work will start in the spring and continue through the fall of 2023, along with 2 miles of road rehabilitation between West Thumb and Old Faithful.

The big upcoming project, he said, will be replacing the Yellowstone River Bridge between Tower and Cooke City, Montana. The roughly $80 million job will start in the fall of 2022 and continue through the fall of 2025, Sholly said.

As the busy year winds down, the superintendent also praised the work of his team and all of Yellowstone’s personnel, particularly amid the pandemic.

“COVID will continue to present a lot of challenges to us and our partners as we move forward,” Sholly said. “And hopefully we come out of that soon.”