Ted Kerasote writes:

Like a cinnamon river overflowing its banks, thousands of elk have been making their way across Jackson Hole, Wyo., to their summer range below the high, jagged peaks of Grand Teton National Park.

This is one of the world’s most spectacular migrations, protected by the creation and expansion over the last half century of what is now a 485-square-mile park. As the weather has warmed, cars and vans carrying tourists from far and wide have been lining the roads, watching and photographing the elk and keeping an eye out for wolves, bears, moose, deer, bison and pronghorn antelope.

With more than 3.6 million visitors last year, Grand Teton is one of the most popular national parks. In 2023, the $738 million spent by these tourists in nearby hotels, restaurants and shops supported more than 9,300 regional jobs — not a bad return for a park that runs on a budget of about $15 million a year.

The pattern is similar across America. That same year, the most recent for which figures are available, the 325 million visitors to national parks, monuments and historic sites spent an estimated $26.4 billion in surrounding communities. Visits to the parks swelled last year to a record of nearly 332 million.

These figures should come as no surprise. Americans love their national parks and visit them avidly. Last year, the National Park Service received the highest rating of all federal agencies in a survey by the independent Pew Research Center, with 76 percent of respondents viewing the agency favorably.

Clearly, America’s national parks have been a golden goose. The question now is whether President Trump will gut them in his effort to slash federal spending. Even before he took office, the Park Service was running lean, on a slim operating budget of about $3 billion. But since January, an estimated 13 percent of its staff has departed through pressured buyouts, early retirements and deferred resignations.

And the outlook for the national parks next year is especially grim. Mr. Trump has proposed hacking the Park Service’s operating budget by roughly 30 percent, which would be catastrophic, and transferring less visited national parks and other Park Service locations to states and tribal governments. Theresa Pierno, the president of the National Parks Conservation Association, an advocacy group, has warned that the system “would be completely decimated” should such cuts be imposed.

The group estimated that reducing the operating budget by $900 million, as the Trump administration wants to do, would require closing 350 of the 433 parks, monuments, historic sites and other locations overseen by the Park Service. [Continue reading…]