Hikers along the trail to Emerald Lake in Rocky Mountain National Park, July 2021
NPS Photo
Long-Range Day Use Visitor Access Planning In Rocky Mountain National Park
For 108 years, Rocky Mountain National Park has been a place of inspiration, reflection, wonder, history, and wilderness adventure. Park visitors across the United States and the world continue to come to Rocky Mountain National Park to discover a wide variety of experiences found only in this incredible place.
Rocky Mountain National Park is also one of the busiest national parks in the National Park Service; third in the country in 2019, with over 4.6 million visitors. Rocky Mountain National Park has experienced a 44 percent increase in visitation since 2012. Rapid growth in day use visitation and changing use patterns in the park have degraded natural and cultural resources, diminished quality of the visitor experience, increased negative impacts to visitor and staff safety and created a heavy strain on the park's facilities and ability to perform daily operations.
In response to these negative impacts, the park has piloted various visitor use management strategies. From 2016-2019, this included managing vehicle access to first come, first served visitors in the highly congested areas of the Bear Lake Road corridor, the Alpine Visitor Center parking area and the Wild Basin area of the park. This strategy had some limited success initially, but over time began to lose effectiveness; the length of time they were necessary kept expanding and impacts were pushed elsewhere in the park.RMNP piloted park-wide timed entry permit reservation systems in 2020, 2021, and 2022.
Park staff continue to learn from these various pilots which are helping to inform long-range day use visitor access strategies. This includes developing desired conditions, defining zones, and identifying indicators, thresholds, strategies and capacities.
In summer 2021, we invited you to join us in envisioning the future of day-use visitor access at Rocky Mountain National Park. Your feedback was instrumental in helping National Park Service staff develop the preliminary management strategies represented below using a similar process to what has been used in other parks across the National Park Service. We have outlined ideas for different strategies to help the National Park Service protect park resources and values while providing for high-quality experiences for today's visitors and future generations.
Park Staff Recently Hosted a Virtual Public Meeting
A virtual public meeting was held on December 15, 2022. If you were unable to join us, please check out the recording of the meeting below. Staff from the National Park Service project planning team shared information on Rocky Mountain National Park's day-use visitor access planning process and answered your questions.
A recording of Rocky Mountain National Park's Virtual Public Meeting, held on Thursday, December 15, 2022 from 6 - 7:30 p.m. MST. At this meeting, staff from the National Park Service project planning team shared information on Rocky Mountain National Park's day-use visitor access planning process and answered your questions.
Click below to explore our initial ideas and strategies:
