At national parks, rangers ready for reopening as bears are wandering empty roads and tortoises are sunning themselves on tarmac.
On a sunny, 74-degree May morning in Joshua Tree National Park, wildlife ecologist Michael Vamstad pulled over when he spotted an unusual lump on the road. It turned out to be an Agassiz’s desert tortoise, an endangered species that Vamstad works to protect. This one was sunning itself on the warm tarmac of the busiest highway in the park, which is about 150 miles west of Los Angeles and saw 3 million visitors in 2019.
Story continuesAs protected areas, national parks are not under direct threat of destruction, but experts say bringing millions of people into a previously wild place will always have an impact. Too many campers in one place will compact the soil and can cause erosion or damage to plants in the area, the noise caused by crowds of people pushes some wildlife far from where they’d normally be found, and cars frequently hit animals on roads built to provide easy access to yet more people.
Allyson Gantt, chief of communications for the Everglades, has worked in the park since 1995. When she started as an intern, visitors mostly came in the winter, but now they see more and more people in the spring and fall, and even the heat of the summer. “Where you have people, you generally don’t have tortoises,” he said. “They’re used to having these areas closed off to them, but this time they woke up and went to see if the grass was greener on the other side of the hill.”
McCool hopes the park closures can give managers a chance to plan new ways to reduce human impact and improve visitor experience. He says running a park can be chaotic, and it can be difficult to get ahead of the immediate problems that keep popping up.“They’ve had all these bushfires to put out, and now they hopefully have space to think about the long term,” McCool said.
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