With high volumes of visitors streaming into Yellowstone National Park again this year, Superintendent Cam Sholly expects annual visitation will be close to 5 million, which would be a park record.
Staff levels need to grow to handle the crowds, he said. In order to achieve that, the park will weigh options for increasing revenues — including raising fees.
“You need people to manage people, and you need people to protect this park, and it’ll be really important for our revenue streams to keep pace with visitation,” Sholly said.
Evaluating fees is the latest in an ongoing discussion of crowd management as more and more people flock to America’s first national park. Visitation growth at Yellowstone since the turn of the century resembles a hockey stick — 3 million in 2003, 3.2 million in 2013 and 4.5 million in 2023.
The park has tallied more than 4.3 million visits through September 2024, it announced Wednesday. Mild October weather and other factors will help determine if annual visitation breaks the record set in 2021, when the park hosted 4.86 million visitations. Even if the park doesn’t break the record, the trend line is continuing up.
“When you have roughly 30,000 visitations a month in the winter months, and in the range of a million a month in the summer months, you’ve got a lot to manage,” Sholly said. That includes all the less obvious, and less glamorous, logistics.
“So you think about cleaning 500 bathrooms three times a day instead of one, or emptying 1,500 garbage cans four times a day instead of two,” he said. “That has a direct impact on staffing capabilities.”
The park experienced as many as 80 medical calls per week this summer, he said, plus a significant number of law enforcement incidents and rescues. Park crews truck out a million pounds of garbage per month, and will treat 270 million gallons of drinking water in 2024.
When staff gets into financial planning later this year, he said, they will take a hard look at what the right amount of staffing is to meet needs, and how to get there.
“The revenue streams are generally flat, and the visitation line is increasing substantially,” he said. “So that delta is impact, and the bigger that delta is, the more impact there is on staff and infrastructure and operations … so we really need to think about strategically what we’re going to be doing in the future.”
Managing increasing visitation was among the topics Sholly talked to WyoFile about during a recent interview near the end of a busy — and tumultuous — summer in the park.
Infrastructure projects, housing
With annual visitation surpassing 4 million over the last decade, the park has thus far relied on a strategy of reallocating staff in certain areas to manage increased workload demands, Sholly said. “But you can only reallocate to a certain degree.”
That’s where the evaluation of staff levels comes in, along with “what other types of actions need to be evaluated from the future for managing visitation.”
It costs $35 for a private vehicle to enter the park — which Sholly notes is affordable. Fee revenue provides around $14 million a year on average, Sholly said. The bulk of the park’s revenue, meanwhile, comes from a federal appropriation of roughly $40 million annually.
Visitors walk along the Midway Geyser Basin boardwalk in Yellowstone National Park in September 2024. (Katie Klingsporn/WyoFile)
However, Yellowstone has received several allocations in recent years for infrastructure — which has helped it fix roads and build housing. Those included $118 million from the Great American Outdoors Act to replace the Yellowstone River Bridge, and $16 million from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act for road, bridge and other projects after devastating historic floods in 2022. The park also received an anonymous $40 million gift in early 2024 to expand and improve NPS employee housing.
The park has put close to $50 million into employee housing projects since 2019. Crews replaced all the trailers in the park with new modular housing and rehabilitated non-trailer housing. The $40 million donation, meanwhile, will be used to build 70 new employee housing units. About half of Yellowstone’s 800 employees live in park housing.
The housing projects aim to address a shortage of park employee dwellings exacerbated by skyrocketing real estate in park gateway communities. Those shortages have made it tough to attract and retain workers.
“On the infrastructure side, I feel very good with the track that we’re on in relationship to the improvements that we’re making,” Sholly said. “On the staffing [level] side, that’s another story we need to figure out.”
‘A hard summer’
Along with the typical tasks involved in managing millions of visitors inside the 2.2-million-acre park, Yellowstone staff has had to deal with several unexpected challenges this season.
“It’s been a hard summer,” Sholly said.
Park rangers shot and killed a 28-year-old concession employee in Canyon Village on July 4 after the man approached a public building while firing a semi-automatic rifle. One ranger was injured in the exchange of gunfire, and law enforcement officers were hailed for preventing more loss of life. That incident is still under investigation.
The park brought in additional law enforcement help as well as counseling services, Sholly said.
“We’ve done as much as we can to provide support to staff that were directly and indirectly involved,” he said.
Another incident that could have injured or killed people occurred on July 23, when a hydrothermal explosion in the popular Biscuit Basin blasted boiling water, boulders and debris roughly 100 feet skyward, destroying a section of boardwalk and spurring frightened tourists to flee. The park closed the basin for the remainder of the season.
A photograph shows damage to the boardwalk near Black Diamond Pool, which erupted forcefully on the morning of July 23, 2024. (NPS/Jacob W. Frank)
Though geologists monitor seismic conditions in the park, conditions did not indicate an impending blast, he said. “There were a substantial number of people on that boardwalk and a substantial number of very, very heavy rocks thrown up hundreds of feet in the air, landing on the boardwalk, right on the ground. It’s a miracle no one was killed or injured.”
On Sept. 21, Yellowstone launched a search and rescue operation after hiker Austin King failed to return from a solo backcountry trek in the remote southeast corner of the park. More than 100 people, search dogs, helicopters and drones were involved in the search around the park’s highest peak, which King had submitted. The search was scaled down to a “recovery” after 11 days, and King has yet to be found.
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