People used to complain about Yosemite having a road built to it, because it'd detract from the natural beauty of the valley and bring in too many "lazy" tourists. To some extent those critics were right, but it's pretty undeniable in hindsight that the cause of the parks system has been better served by having parks like these accessible to the public than it would have been by keeping them pristine and largely unvisited. We still have parks like that too. Gates of the Arctic and Isla royale come to mind as inaccessible, and both are tragically undervisited / unknown as a result. It's not like you can't escape the crowded masses in busy parks either. A half hour hike towards the backcountry will free you from the bustle of crowds at almost all of them.
That's not a real via ferrata. Via ferratas in Europe require a helmet, a harness and a double hook lanyard, and being secured to a steel rope at all times.
I think it’s for worse, but NPS obviously disagrees. They seem to have essentially designated most of the Valley a sort of tourist sacrifice zone, what with all the hotels, roads, stores, paved hiking trails, etc.
There was a similar cables route up Longs Peak in Rocky Mountain National Park for decades, but NPS took it out, leaving the Keyhole Route as the easiest (but not easy) remaining way to the summit.
The balance is that if the park doesn't let enough people in, the people stop supporting the park. America is democratic. Parks are not protected by royal proclamation. If the park is inaccessible then people don't visit. Then they don't care about it. Then one day someone wants to drill for oil in the park, and nobody cares enough to vote that down.
I really don't mind the car-camping crowd. They stay inside their gravel circles and don't impact the real wilderness much. But come time to vote they will always far outnumber the dedicated rock climbers. I want the car campers on my side. If that means giving them their parking spots then so be it.
Which is exactly the point. To ensure the national parks stay national parks in a democracy like the US it’s necessary for the parks to have widespread public support.
That work is being done constantly by companies that want access to the land or resources. The only reason it doesn't succeed is that people like parks and use them enough that it's not politically viable.
Re: your democracy comment, note that Trump and Biden have both converted public land reserves and in cases near/impacting national parks into private oil drilling sites. Not to the point of drilling inside national parks yet, but expanding and encroaching. Given the bipartisan efforts to convert public land and the reversals on campaign promises without perceptible consequence, I'm skeptical of relying on the "voting and waiting" strategy to protect our undeveloped lands. You are overstating how democratic this process is.
I don't know where you get that. Parks are old. Older than petty debates between recent presidents. They rely on support from the population over decades, even centuries. This isn't about the ebb and flow of current voting patterns. This is about keeping people on the pro-park side intergenerationally. It is about making sure that people know what a park means, even if they only visited it as a kid decades previous. Current political personalities are irrelevant to that longer perspective.
> We still have parks like that too. Gates of the Arctic and Isla royale come to mind as inaccessible, and both are tragically undervisited / unknown as a result.
Undervisited is a good thing for what remaining wilderness we have.
