Entrance Fee Trivia
With all the recent hoopla surrounding the soon-to-arrive America the Beautiful pass, here's some entrance-fee trivia:
* The national park with the system's greatest annual visitation, of around 9 million folks, Great Smoky Mountains, is, and will remain, free to enter. Now, imagine how much money the Park Service would enjoy if this park charged $20 per vehicle...(Of course, it can't under the park's founding legislation.)
* Other national parks with no entrance fees include Glacier Bay, Channel Islands, Isle Royale, Voyageurs, North Cascades, Congaree, Great Basin, Redwood, and Mammoth Cave. Combined, these parks had 2005 visitation of roughly 3.5 million folks. Imagine how much money the Park Service would have received had each of these units charged a $20 entrance fee?
This is not to advocate that these units begin charging fees. But if you think of how much money they could be generating in entrance fees, and then consider how much of the revenues generated by other parks' entrance fees go to help pay for their operations, you begin to see some of the inequities in the current system.
Now, try to wrap your arms around the upcoming ATB pass system and try to fathom the inequities it might create down the road if all pass revenues eventually end up in Washington and then are redirected out to the five participating agencies.
Parks that are boosting their daily/weekly entrance fees on the coattails of the ATB pass include Crater Lake, where the fee is doubling, from $10 to $20 for vehicles, and Big Bend, which is replacing its $15 entrance fee with a $20 fee for vehicles.