One of the best ways to enjoy the outdoors is to visit America's national parks. Since Congress established Yellowstone National Park in 1872, the United States has created a system of national parks occupying huge tracts of land. In 2004 the 83.6-million-acre National Park System encompassed 388 parks, monuments, preserves, memorials, historic sites, recreational areas, seashores, and other areas. In addition to providing recreation for more than 266 million visitors each year, the parks preserve habitats ranging from arctic tundra to tropical rain forest and protect many thousands of North American plant and animal species. (See Table 3.3.)

The park system is administered by the National Park Service (NPS), a Department of Interior agency. Established in 1916, the park service employed more than fourteen thousand permanent personnel in 2003 along with approximately four thousand temporary or seasonal workers. An additional twenty-five thousand people worked for some 630 concessionaires, private businesses that the NPS contracted with to provide lodging, transportation, food, shops, and other services in 128 of its park units.

The National Park Service manages national parks, such as Yosemite National Park in California and Yellowstone National Park, mostly in Wyoming; national monuments, such as the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.; and national commemorative sites, such as the Gettysburg battlefield in Pennsylvania, the Vicksburg battlefield in Mississippi, and the Ellis Island Immigration Museum in New York. The system also includes some lakes, rivers, and seashores. The most popular sites to visit in 2003 included the Blue Ridge Parkway in the Appalachian Mountains, with 18.3 million visitors; the Golden Gate National Recreation Area near San Francisco, with 13.9 million; and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, located on the border between North Carolina and Tennessee, with 9.4 million. (See Table 3.4.)

NPS sites are found in forty-nine of the fifty states (all but Delaware), the District of Columbia, American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. In 2003 sites in California received the most visits (34.2 million), followed by those in the District of Columbia (22 million), Virginia (21.9 million), and North Carolina (20.4 million). (See Table 3.5.)

Camping enables visitors to stay overnight in the national parks; during 2002 nearly 3.4 million tent campers, over 2.4 million RV campers, and about 2.5 million backcountry campers stayed on NPS grounds. Not surprisingly, park visitation was greatest in the summer months, in 2003 peaking at about 1.3 million visits per day in July. It was lowest in January, when just under 368,000 Americans visited NPS sites on an average day. (See Figure 3.1.)

In addition, many millions more visited national forests or lands administered by the Bureau of Land Management for car or motorcycle tours, hunting, fishing, boating, and winter recreational activities. Others traveled to state, county, and city parks and recreation areas.

America's public lands rely to a significant extent on volunteers to perform many vital tasks, including serving as guides, helping restore wildlife habitats, and assisting with geological or archaeological surveys. More than 125,000 volunteers spent time working for the NPS in 2002, donating more than 4.5 million hours of service, which gave the parks the equivalent of two thousand additional full-time workers.

TABLE 3.3

TABLE 3.4

FIGURE 3.1

TABLE 3.5

A 2003 survey by Roper Starch Worldwide for the Recreation Roundtable found that 21% of Americans said they would be interested in volunteering their time to do work on publicly owned land. Of those who expressed interest, nearly a quarter said they had given of their time during the previous year. Those who expressed the most interest in volunteering tended to be those who actively participated in outdoor recreation—57% of canoers and kayakers, 52% of skiers, 47% of both backpackers and climbers, 46% of wildlife viewers, 44% of hikers, and 43% of mountain bikers, said they would be interested in donating their time to work on public lands.

Many railways around the country have been abandoned by the railroads. Almost every state has turned some of that acreage into public trails for hiking, jogging, biking, and even horseback riding. According to information published on the Web site of the Washington, D.C.–based nonprofit Rails-to-Trails Conservancy (RTC) (www.railtrails.org), the ten states that had done the most converting of rail mileage as of 2004 were Wisconsin (1,394 miles), Michigan (1,311), Minnesota (1,244), Pennsylvania (1,185), New York (583), Washington (578), Iowa (546), Ohio (536), Illinois (490), and West Virginia (442). The most popular individual trail was the W&OD Railroad Trail in Virginia with about three million users per year, followed by the Minuteman Bikeway in Massachusetts with an estimated two million users per year; the Pinellas Trail in Florida and the Iron Horse State Park Trail in Washington, each with 1.2 million; and the East Bay Bicycle Path in Rhode Island, with 1.1 million annual users.