Craters of the Moon Administrative History

Chapter 9:
DEVELOPMENTS

OVERVIEW OF NPS DEVELOPMENT TRENDS

To build public support for parks in its founding years, the National Park Service encouraged tourism. By welcoming automobiles, and developing roads, campgrounds, and hotels, the agency enabled more Americans to enjoy the nation's wonders, and visitation soared. The Service's leaders, however, never intended to grid the parks with roads and mar the landscape with subdivisions, but rather to make the most spectacular sites accessible to tourists and concentrate other developments in a central location--leaving the majority of park lands as wilderness. While this approach reflected the Park Service's mission to balance visitor use and resource protection, park promotion attracted larger and larger numbers of tourists pressuring the agency to increase development. [1]

During the 1930s, the New Deal emergency work relief programs injected park management with the necessary manpower and appropriations to meet these growing demands, marking one of the most important phases in park developments. The next phase, perhaps the most significant, responded to an even greater crisis. The war years had backlogged critical maintenance and development projects, and a visitor explosion in the 1950s had swamped the already inadequate park physical plants. In the mid-1950s, Mission 66, the Park Service's ten-year rehabilitation program, arrived and with over a billion dollars in appropriations renovated the overwhelmed facilities of the national parks. The program strove to upgrade all areas, some for the first time, repairing and constructing thousands of miles of roads, campgrounds, employee housing, and sanitation systems. Innovations such as the visitor center incorporated interpretive facilities and administrative offices, containing in some instances concessionaire services and auditoriums. Since this period, development programs in the Park Service have concentrated mostly on maintaining Mission 66 facilities, but as has often been the case, increased visitation and staffing have outpaced the capacity of existing park developments. [2]