Your Favorite National Park’s Entrance Fee May Be Hiked Up To $70 Next Year
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Going on a road trip to Glacier or the Grand Canyon could get a lot more expensive during the peak travel season of 2018.
The National Park Service proposed an increase in entrance fees to 17 of the most popular parks next summer in order to pay for maintenance and improvements to the parks’ infrastructure.
Under the new plan, it would cost you $70 to drive a single car into one of these beloved national parks, which is more than double the current prices of $25 or $30 depending on the location. On-foot explorers would pay $30 instead of $10 or $15.
The entrance fee would increase at these 17 parks:
- Acadia
- Arches
- Bryce Canyon
- Canyonlands
- Denali
- Glacier
- Grand Canyon
- Grand Teton
- Joshua Tree
- Mount Rainier
- Olympic
- Rocky Mountain
- Sequoia & Kings Canyon
- Shenandoah
- Yellowstone
- Yosemite
- Zion
You could always still buy an annual pass for $80, which gives you unlimited access to all national parks, forests and monuments, and many national parks are actually free to enter. It’s just the hot spots on many travelers’ lists that are targeted by the hike in fees.
Everyone’s collective 70 bucks would give the NPS a projected $70 million in 2018 to use for roads, bridges, campgrounds, waterlines, bathrooms and other visitor services, according to a press release.
“We need to have the vision to look at the future of our parks and take action in order to ensure that our grandkids’ grandkids will have the same if not better experience than we have today,” U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke said in a statement. “Shoring up our parks’ aging infrastructure will do that.”
In 2017, federal funding to the park service’s budget was decreased by 12 percent. Everyone agrees that our protected land deserves more upkeep, but groups clearly disagree with where the money should come from.
“We should not increase fees to such a degree as to make these places — protected for all Americans to experience — unaffordable for some families to visit,” National Parks Conservation Association president Theresa Pierno said in a statement. “The solution to our parks’ repair needs cannot and should not be largely shouldered by its visitors.”
Now, this isn’t a done deal. The NPS is taking comments on its website, so if you have feelings about the proposal, you can make them known.
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