Wild places are overrun.
Crowds flock to the same few places.Guides know somewhere better.
Photo: Michael Melford / National Geographic
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The Mist Trail to Nevada Falls was crowded ten years ago by any standard. Now it is a line — two thousand feet of stair-climb taken single file, and the grand view is the bum ahead of you. Yosemite counted 593,378 visitors that August.
The line is not an accident. Search "things to do" in any given area and you get a clear and constant list. Do the outdoor marketing sites have something to gain from sending people here? Has some social influencer tagged a picturesque scene and a lustrous individual? Does the aggregator just rank whatever's already crowded and call it the best?
Not a great experience for travelers and not great for the land.
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Horseshoe Bend outside Page, Arizona was a dirt path three-quarters of a mile from a wide shoulder on the highway. Then the photographs went around, and the town argued over the cost and built parking for tour buses, a hardened path to keep people off Navajo land, and railing so nobody takes a fatal photo. The buses came. People took a picture or two and left. The businesses promised the traffic still cannot staff a lunch rush that spikes two hours a day, a few months a year.
Antelope Canyon went the same way after a photograph of it sold for $6.5 million, and a slot canyon known to locals, guides, and the Navajo Nation became a march from one end to the other, dodging somebody else's shot. The land keeps its own books. Short-cut trails braid and erode a mountainside. Cryptogamic crusts — the lichen and liverworts a desert starts from — take 50 to 250 years to regrow, and nobody feels them break underfoot.
The parks have lived with overtourism longer. Yosemite Valley covers about 21 square kilometres and holds more than a thousand buildings; on a summer day it takes close to 20,000 visitors, and there are two months a year when the cars outnumber the parking spaces. Dirt trails that ran for a hundred years have been paved over, and black oaks cut down to widen the views for visitors who spend about five minutes photographing the falls. In the 1960s the park killed as many as 40 bears a year for going after food. It still kills one to five.
The visitor gets the managed version. Plenty arrive in shoes with no tread, on a trail named Mist, and nobody is checking gear at the trailhead. The ones who make it up get a turn at the railing and a photograph identical to the one that brought them there.
The outdoor trade is not a bystander. More than 500 concession contracts operate inside the parks, grossing over a billion dollars a year, and their holders lobby against limits. Destination marketers and gear brands buy the same few locations over and over. A guide who tells a client to go somewhere else is turning down work. Local outfitters and groups like Leave No Trace and American Rivers have pushed the other way for years.
What a guide knows never makes that list. Which week the water comes up. Which meadow to stay off in June. It stays in the boat and the truck, and goes home at the end of the season.
So we built Wally Guides.
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