by Nancy Forster-Holt, Clinical Associate Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, University of Rhode Island
A record 332 million people visited U.S. national parks in 2024, followed by roughly 323 million in 2025. That’s a lot of love for national parks and lands. You might think that such big numbers of visitors automatically create windfalls for the towns and businesses that serve them. The National Park Service calls towns or counties within roughly 60 miles of a park boundary “gateway” communities. Gateway businesses operate in those jurisdictions.
Nationally, visitors spent a record $29 billion at the parks themselves and $56 billion for lodging, gas, groceries and other goods and services in gateway communities. That supported about 340,100 jobs nationwide in 2024, the most recent year for which that data is available.
I research Main Street businesses, and I co-owned a company for more than two decades that manufactured oars and paddles. In the summer I live close to Maine’s Acadia National Park, where businesses in the gateway town of Bar Harbor say they’re having an off year in 2026. I’m concerned that gateway businesses face at least four main risks not seen in a typical Main Street ecosystem.
1. Park boundaries can change
A gateway economy and businesses in it, like a guide outpost or small hotel, can certainly benefit measurably from its proximity to protected park lands. But businesses built around those places can suffer setbacks when the boundaries themselves change. That is what happened on July 13, 2026, when President Donald Trump signed proclamations shrinking by about 90% the size of Utah’s Grand Staircase-Escalante, created by President Bill Clinton in 1996, and Bears Ears, created by President Barack Obama in 2016. Both have seen their boundaries repeatedly redrawn, and were briefly fully restored by the Biden administration. The Trump administration said it was able to do this because the 1906 Antiquities Act allows presidents to modify the footprint of a national monument.
2. Congestion-management strategies can disrupt access
Growing numbers of visitors pose a risk because attempts to manage congestion may alter access, timing and travel patterns in ways that disrupt gateway businesses. In recent years the National Park Service has eliminated, changed or reinstated many of its long-standing reservation systems with little warning. Yosemite, for example, has flipped its policy four times since 2020; when it dropped reservations in 2023, wait times reportedly stretched to nearly three hours at entrance stations before the system was reinstated the next year. The National Park Service also abruptly ended in 2026 four years of timed-entry reservations at Arches and Canyonlands. Kai Palmer, co-owner of the Moab guiding company Desert Highlights, said he worries that paying guests could show up for a half-day tour and lose over an hour of it waiting in line, or get turned away entirely.
3. Extreme weather tied to climate change
Colorado’s Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park closed entirely in July 2025 for the first time in its 90-plus-year history, after a lightning-sparked wildfire tore through the South Rim and campground reservations were canceled for the rest of the year. The park and its adjoining Curecanti National Recreation Area had drawn 1.3 million visitors in 2025 who spent $25.6 million in nearby communities. In the Yellowstone gateway towns of Gardiner and West Yellowstone, Montana, drought and rising water temperatures in 2025 and 2026 have repeatedly triggered conditions that closed access to guided fishing. The 2022 flood that washed out Yellowstone’s North Entrance road showed how sudden and lasting that damage can be: Jeannette Mikos, owner of the Yellowstone Basin Inn in Gardiner, said she lost roughly $480,000 that year, since the road was not reopened until October, after the peak tourist season had ended.
4. Workers are being priced out of nearby housing
The high cost of living in gateway communities reduces the number of workers available to staff gateway businesses. There isn’t enough affordable housing for workers employed by gateway businesses near Acadia and other national parks, and that shortage can strain those enterprises. Headwaters Economics, an independent research firm, points to the paradox of what it calls an “amenity trap”: the unparalleled natural beauty and the allure of an active lifestyle draw many second-home buyers and drive the conversion of permanent housing stock to short-term rentals. Parks often face limited buildable land due to natural boundaries, such as at the island-based Acadia National Park, which contributes to the housing crises afflicting these seasonal recreation areas. More than 1,000 workers put up with a 90-mile round-trip daily commute to Zion National Park from towns such as St. George, beyond the gateway town of Springdale, because there’s nowhere closer for them to live.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
