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Is Social Media Ruining the National Park Experience?

From feeding wild animals to perilous selfies, tourists risk their lives and the preservation of America’s national parks for fleeting social media fame

It may seem cute and fun for tourists to feed the wildlife at a national park until you realize this isn’t a Disney movie but is, in fact, reality. One woman who decided to feed a grown bull—not in a national park but on a Mexican beach last month—learned the hard way that if you mess with a bull, you may get the horns, literally. The video was posted online, per CBS News.

One Instagram account with nearly half a million followers posted videos of tourists risking their lives to get the picture no one else has to get a temporary sense of fame on social media. The account, TouronsOfYellowstone shares submissions mainly in Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Park but posted one photo of a tourist in Utah who had to be saved by search and rescue after jumping to a hoodoo rock overlooking the canyon thousands of feet below.

The phrase touron, the combination of tourist and moron describes those who don’t think before they act when it comes to interacting with wildlife in America’s national parks.

Bison in Theodore Roosevelt National Park, North Dakota *© Rex Vogel, all rights reserved*

In 2022, influencer Katie Sigmund faced criminal charges after hitting golf balls into Grand Canyon National Park. “I was thinking in my head … ‘I can make golf content. Like, it’s such a pretty view. Let me just golf into the Grand Canyon,’” Sigmund said in an interview.

“Dumbest idea,” she added.

After posting the video of golf balls and part of her golf club breaking off and being thrown below Mather Point at the South Rim of the canyon some of Sigmund’s followers reported her to the park. She was handed three federal violation notices and a $285 fine.

Carmen Holbrook has visited many popular scenic spots through the years and says she has seen a few people in national parks get too close to danger for comfort.

“I haven’t seen people hitting golf balls but I have seen people get way too close to the waterfall and they just don’t understand the power and beauty of nature,” Holbrook told the Deseret News. “It becomes so risky.”

Elk in Jasper National Park, Alberta *© Rex Vogel, all rights reserved*

The National Park Service mortality dashboard from 2014 to 2019 shows that the top three causes of unintentional deaths are motor vehicle crashes, drowning, and falls. Fifty percent of all deaths inside parks are reportedly unintentional and also occur when the individual is participating in physical activity.

While at Yellowstone National Park, Holbrook said she saw multiple instances of people tempting their fates. In one instance, she witnessed a tourist walk off the guided path even though the signs warned of a thin crust that resembled solid ground.

“I felt like I was going to have a heart attack watching him walk on the crust,” she said. “It’s annoying when people do dangerous things. They think it’s only affecting them when everyone else around them is like, ‘You’re destroying the park and you’re stressing us out. You are doing something so disrespectful.’”

Another occurrence happened when she and other tourists were driving along a river in the park when someone spotted a grizzly bear on the opposite side of the bank.

“Everyone was getting out of their cars and standing across the river which was a small river, probably only like 30-50 feet away from this grizzly bear,” Holbrook emphasized. “It was just so sad, because you do hear all these grizzly bear attacks. There was a runner last year in Yellowstone who was attacked.”

“Why can you not just look from your car? Why do you have to get out and get close and risk your life when you could just still enjoy it the same way, just in the safety of your car?”

Here is some more helpful information on bear safety: You Come Across a Bear. Your Next Move Is Very Important. Do You Know What To Do?

Rocky Mountain Goat in Jasper National Park, Alberta *© Rex Vogel, all rights reserved*

Social media for those who behave

The power of social media is that it influences—some for good and others for bad. That said, there have been some positive outcomes for America’s breathtaking landscapes in the digital world.

Research by Georgia Tech’s School of Economics looked at different social media outlets tied to national parks in the last decade and found that “parks with high exposure see increases in visitation that are 16 percent to 22 percent larger than parks with less exposure that see little change.”

“Visitation to national parks in the United States has increased by more than 25 percent since 2010 rising from roughly 70 to 90 million annual visitors,” the study added. “Anecdotes suggest that this increase was driven by the advent of social media in the early-to-mid 2010s, generating a new form of exposure for parks and has led to concerns about overcrowding and degradation of environmental quality.”

One account that provides both comedic relief and interesting information regarding the national parks and the wildlife within is the National Park Service’s social media itself.

“We often get referred to as the dad joke,” Matt Turner, the social media specialist for the National Park Service told The Weather Channel. “I’m like, well … you know, I think that fits with the National Park Service personality, maybe of outdoors and going camping and spending time with family.”

“We often kind of say, like safety with a smile,” he added. “As a government agency, we don’t want to say ‘no’ all the time or ‘stop doing that.’”

Bison in Custer State Park *© Rex Vogel, all rights reserved*

Here are a few great articles to help you stay safe in national parks:

Worth Pondering…

I love the term touron. It’s a delicious portmanteau.

—Aspen Daily News

Why National Parks Need Selfie Stations

US national parks are overcrowded. Some think ‘selfie stations’ will help.

Arches National Park had to close its gate more than 120 times this summer when parking lots filled up creating a safety hazard for emergency vehicles. Yellowstone National Park reached 1 million visitors in July for the first time in its history. At Zion National Park, the wait to hike Angels Landing was a Disneyland-long four hours. And with the visitors came graffiti, trash, and reckless behavior.

Arches National Park *© Rex Vogel, all rights reserved*

It’s no secret that this summer has been the busiest summer ever. Preliminary visitation statistics show that the most popular 12 to 15 national parks are seeing record numbers.

On Facebook, the National Park Service (NPS) encouraged visitors to have backup plans when arranging a trip and included information on lesser-known parks with equally stunning sights and hikes.

Zion National Park trolley stop *© Rex Vogel, all rights reserved*

“Travel off the beaten path,” the NPS wrote. “There are more than 400 national parks across the country. We love exploring the lesser-known ones. They can be a great option for travelers looking for all the beauty of nature, hiking trails, and rich history, with fewer crowds and lines.”

Have a plan…and a backup plan…Check

Pack your patience…Working on it.

Don’t pet the fluffy cows…

Grand Canyon National Park *© Rex Vogel, all rights reserved*

Summer is here and a little trip planning can ensure that your only surprises when visiting a park are happy ones. To help everyone have a great experience, National Park Service rangers have shared their top 10 insider tips to #PlanLikeAParkRanger.

The record-setting crowds of people surging into public lands this summer have set off new challenges for park managers. They are using counterintuitive tricks like encouraging selfies in one place to prevent them in another and they are rolling out algorithms and autonomous vehicles to manage the throngs of recreation-seekers.

Great Smoky Mountains National Park *© Rex Vogel, all rights reserved*

They are also acknowledging a hard truth: perhaps there simply isn’t enough space at America’s most iconic attractions for everyone who wants to visit them. In an earlier post, I provided a framework for adding more national parks.

One of the biggest issues facing parks is the many visitors all aiming to get the perfect photo. At popular spots in Yosemite and the Grand Canyon, some have even fallen to their deaths in the process prompting the NPS to create a guide for safe selfie-taking. And in 2018, the tourism board in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, made an unusual request to visitors heading toward Grand Teton National Park after local trails were overrun with photo-tourists: stop geotagging photos.

Joshua Tree National Park *© Rex Vogel, all rights reserved*

Enter the selfie station: a humble wooden stand in front of a stunning vista, ready to hold a camera for a safe and easy photo experience. They are part of an effort to corral people’s natural desire to take photos and to promote less-well-known areas.

Tom Hazelton, who leads Iowa’s County Conservation System, has overseen the installation of more than a hundred selfie stations in his state. Some of the stations celebrate quirky parts of history like the first train robbery west of the Mississippi while others point people to a lake, vista, or nature center they might not otherwise come across. Similar efforts exist in Wisconsin and Minnesota.

White Sands National Park *© Rex Vogel, all rights reserved*

This is Iowa’s third season using the sturdy, cedar stations and they installed another 15 during the past few months. They are getting used and they are low maintenance and easy to build: the signs are $30 and the wood is another $60.

Another tactic to reduce the strain on parks is to cut the number of visitors permitted to enter them in the first place. The NPS oversees a total of 423 protected places that include national seashores, national lakeshores, national recreation areas, and national monuments, among others. Popular places like the summit of Haleakala on Maui or Muir Woods in California require timed entry slots available on Recreation.gov. More public lands are turning to such systems to reduce the number of visitors in one part of a park especially as the pandemic trimmed staffing numbers.

Sequoia National Park *© Rex Vogel, all rights reserved*

The Recreation.gov program uses algorithms to show where there might be less-trafficked attractions in the vicinity that you’re searching in real-time. The Park Service also launched an app with tools to explore more than 400 NPS sites. You can download content from entire parks for offline use. It’s especially handy if you’re exploring remote areas in parks or concerned about data limits. And it can point visitors to other potential public lands outside the parks.

Shenandoah National Park *© Rex Vogel, all rights reserved*

In the future, the Park Service is focusing on rolling out predictive technologies that will allow people to anticipate crowds and plan accordingly. They are taking tools used in urban planning and congestion planning and repurposing them for recreation and parks. That could mean a future where a hiker scans a QR code to check-in at a trailhead sending information back to when the trails are most clogged with people. That way, the next group could be advised to wait an hour or come another time to take the same adventure. It also could mean that traffic is routed to less popular areas of the parks.

Blue Ridge Parkway *© Rex Vogel, all rights reserved*

To cut down on traffic, some parks are experimenting with autonomous cars. The Wright Brothers National Memorial in North Carolina tested out a driverless shuttle this summer and Yellowstone is also trying a shuttle. That park is expected to run out of space for additional cars by 2023. The idea is to stop people driving between the sights in the Canyon Village area—the area around the famous Yellowstone River and Tower Waterfall—and get them in the driverless shuttle instead.

Capitol Reef National Park *© Rex Vogel, all rights reserved*

Despite the crowds and the traffic and noise, the park service says it’s a good thing that more people are getting out to experience parks and public lands. The Park Service wants people to have exceptional experiences and they’re looking at ways to enhance opportunities for people to plan to have the best experience and stay safe.

Worth Pondering…

National parks are the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst.

—Wallace Stegner, 1983

Selfies Don’t Kill People

Height, water, trains, and animals lead the list of factors involved in selfie deaths

259 deaths worldwide have been attributed to the selfie between 2011 and 2017.

While that statistic may sound alarming, there are well over 1.4 million accidental deaths per year worldwide. Risk taking is not a new phenomenon nor is doing it in an attempt to become famous. That we are all talking about selfie deaths is likely just the result of the media’s obsession with reporting about them.

Canyonlands National Park, Utah *© Rex Vogel, all rights reserved*

No one has ever been killed by a selfie. A lot of people have been killed by stupid behavior. No beautiful destination has ever been ruined by an Instagram post. A lot of beautiful places have been ruined by irresponsible assholes.

selfie

[sel-fee]
noun
An image that includes oneself (often with another person or as part of a group) and is taken by oneself using a digital camera or smart phone, especially for posting on social networks.

In 2016, Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, an associate professor with Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) Delhi in India, served as the principal investigator with researchers at IIIT and Carnegie Mellon University on a study called “Me, Myself and My Killfie: Characterizing and Preventing Selfie Deaths.”

Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, Arizona *© Rex Vogel, all rights reserved*

Kumaraguru, a computer scientist who is interested in following societal problems and patterns and developing solutions through technology, said he read an article about someone who died while taking a selfie and was intrigued. He lives in India which leads the world in “killfies,” the word sometimes used to talk about deaths tied to selfies.

He and his team collected newspaper articles on selfie-related fatalities to document and categorize the problem. Height, water, trains, and animals were the leading causes of death in the 127 cases the team studied. They also found that the victims were primarily young and male: The majority was 24 years old or younger and 75.5 percent were male.

In 2016, a man was taking a selfie by the Ganges River in India when he slipped and fell in. Six others tried to save him and all seven died after being swept away. “It is not about just me trying to take a selfie and making my life dangerous, but I’m actually putting others also at risk,” Kumaraguru says.

The so-called selfie deaths aren’t anything new. There’s hasn’t been an increase in the frequency of accidental deaths since the advent of Instagram—people have always managed to find stupid ways to die. Smart phones could stop working tomorrow and a teenage boy will still find a way to put his life at risk in order to impress a girl even if he can’t snap a photo in the process. The biggest change would just be that the rest of us wouldn’t see a photo of the shenanigans and would never get the chance to get outraged about it.

Dead Horse Point State Park, Utah *© Rex Vogel, all rights reserved*

When people get the opportunity to visit a really cool national park or see a neat wild animal, it is only natural that they want to document the experience and share it with their friends. Again, this is not a new phenomenon. Are Ansel Adams’s photos of Yosemite Valley really that different from an Instagram photo that tourists snap in the same spot?

Every time I see a news story about national parks and other public lands being “loved to death,” and blaming social media for a boom in visitation, I can’t help but see a missed opportunity. More visitors should equal more dollars for the places that we love; the only reason that it doesn’t is that the media and politicians would rather grandstand about other issues.

Every time I see a news story blaming a selfie for a death, I also see a missed opportunity. If social media was powerful enough to draw a person to that place and inspire them to take a photo then surely it can also be powerful enough to reach that person with a powerful message about responsible recreation.

Are you practicing safe selfies? It might be time to examine your photo-clicking habits and put caution first. Consider these suggestions for practicing safe selfies:

Snake River at Twin Falls, Idaho *© Rex Vogel, all rights reserved*

Stay focused on your surroundings, not your shot. Tripping, slipping, and falling have all led to selfie deaths. A single distraction or moment of inattention could mean the difference between life and death. Keep your eyes focused on where you’re going and where your feet are when taking a selfie. Make sure your feet are planted firmly before you line up the shot, and then don’t move once you do that.

Worth Pondering…

As Yogi Berra said, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”

Over the Edge: Death in the Grand Canyon

Woman dies from fall at Grand Canyon, the fourth park death in less than a month

A 70-year-old woman died after a 200-foot drop last week at the Grand Canyon’s South Rim—the third person to fall to their death in the national park, and the fourth body recovered in the area in less than a month, AZ Central reported.

Rangers at Grand Canyon National Park received reports at around 1 p.m. of a person in need of aid near Pipe Creek Vista, officials said. The woman fell before rescue efforts could begin. A technical rescue team was deployed via helicopter to locate the woman’s body, and a group of about 15 people later assisted in recovering the body, officials said in a statement.

On March 28, a 50-year-old tourist from Hong Kong died after falling hundreds of feet while taking photos at Eagle Point in Grand Canyon West. Less than one week later, a 67-year-old man fell over the canyon edge. His body was recovered about 400 feet below the rim. A fourth body, identified as a possible international tourist, was also recovered in March in a wooded area south of Grand Canyon Village.

How Not to Die at the Grand Canyon

About a dozen people die each year in the park, and while that’s a small number compared to overall visitors, there are ways to make sure you don’t become one of those fatalities.

Watch your step. It may sounds like a cliché, but it’s a salient bit of advice in the wake of a third death in 10 days in (and near) Grand Canyon National Park, whose centennial celebration is expected to lure five million visitors to its rims this year. National Parks are often so well manicured and lighted and signed that selfie-snapping tourists tend to forget they’re in a dangerous expanse of a park that lies between 7,000 and 8,000 feet of elevation, where rattlesnakes roam, where temperatures easily creep past 100 degrees, and where there are a dozen ways to die.

How to survive the Grand Canyon, therefore: Don’t underestimate it. This may be a National Park, but it’s also a wild place.

What goes down must come up. What those who stumble down from various points into the canyon itself can too easily forget is that the route down is twice as easy a trek as the way back out when it’s likely to be hotter, windier, and steep. People need to know their limits. It’s easier in than it is out with the return typically taking twice as long. It never hurts to train for a few weeks before your trip. Not a lot of people live in an area that’s nearly 7,000 feet in elevation.

Get wet. With water, that is. Many of the 685 deaths catalogued adroitly in the oft-updated book Over the Edge: Death in the Grand Canyon by Thomas Myers and Michael Ghiglieri are from dehydration and heat stroke, which can be prevented by hauling enough of that precious stuff of life to keep you hydrated for the long haul: A minimum of a liter per hour. And be sure to add some salty snacks, to keep the electrolytes flowing.

Get dressed. But leave the Instagram-cute outfits back at the Airbnb and be sensible about your wardrobe choices especially if you plan on hiking into the canyon. Flip-flops? Nope. Sturdy boots or trail runners. Tank tops and crop tops? No! Layers, bandannas, even a couple not-so-cool trekking poles. Consider that depending on the time of day and time of year you start your hike, the way back may be windy and frigid.

Watch the weather. The Grand Canyon can see monsoons from July to September, often accompanied by thunder and lightning strikes. Be on the lookout for bad weather and be ready to call it a day.

Take the path more traveled. While the designated trails are well-maintained (and often paved) in the park, visitors craning for a better view (or selfie) often sneak a few feet off the trail, where they may not realize until it’s too late that what presents as stable ground is actually paper-thin, thanks to millennia of the very same erosion that carved that canyon wall in the first place.

Pay attention to your surroundings. Among the more modern dangers in the Grand Canyon or anywhere is distraction from people who are on their dang phones walking and texting, not looking where they’re going.

Increasingly, people endanger themselves in that never-ending quest for the epic selfie which is doubly dangerous on an unstable trail because it typically means you’re neither looking at the ground nor how close you might be to the edge of a cliff. Selfie taking is scary, in part because your focus is typically on the camera. Put the phones away and enjoy yourself.

None of this advice is to suggest the Grand Canyon has turned into a deathtrap locale best avoided altogether in favor of the sanctity of a Florida theme park. About a dozen people die each year in the park but the odds of that tragic end are roughly 1 in 400,000, which is less than those of being attacked by a dog, killed in an airplane crash, or stung by a bee, according to the National Safety Council.

Worth Pondering…

Take care of yourself. You’ll find it hard to get a replacement.