Who Really Gets Into America's Most Coveted Parks? A New Study Exposes the Income Gap Hiding Inside the Reservation System
Every outdoor enthusiast knows the drill. You set an alarm for 10 a.m. sharp. You open three browser tabs pointing to Recreation.gov. Your credit card is already autofilled, your preferred dates memorized. The clock ticks over, you hammer refresh, and within two minutes — if you're lucky — you've locked down your spot. If you weren't fast enough, or didn't know exactly when to show up, you're shut out for the season.
That frantic ritual, repeated millions of times each year at parks from Maine to Hawaii, has long felt like a pure test of speed and dedication. A new peer-reviewed study from the University of Colorado Boulder suggests it is something else entirely: a quiet, systematic filter that disproportionately funnels access to the most spectacular corners of America's public lands toward people who already have more money.
Published in the journal Nature Communications, the research by CU Boulder economist Jonathan Hughes found that people from higher-income neighborhoods in the United States are more likely to successfully secure the most competitive permits, including timed-entry reservations for Rocky Mountain National Park. The findings arrive at a moment when the National Park Service is under increasing scrutiny over whether its crowd-management tools — designed to protect ecosystems and visitor experience — are quietly reshaping who America's wild places actually serve.
The Study: Five Million Reservations, Seven Parks, One Uncomfortable Pattern
Economist Jonathan E. Hughes dug into reservation records from Acadia, Arches, Glacier, Haleakalā, Mount Rainier, Rocky Mountain and Yosemite National Parks, covering the years between 2021 and 2024. The dataset is substantial — Hughes examined 11 reservation systems covering more than 5 million reservations at seven national parks. Rather than relying on self-reported income surveys, he used a more reliable proxy: Hughes matched each reservation holder's ZIP code with local household income information, then compared the incomes of the areas where successful visitors lived.
The income disparity surfaced most sharply in exactly the situations where competition was most brutal. The clearest difference appeared during the most competitive online sales — when 75% to 100% of advance permits disappeared within five minutes, successful visitors came from ZIP codes with median household incomes about $3,200 to $4,200 higher, which worked out to roughly 4% to 5% higher income than the comparison group.
Day-ahead permits — the slots released 48 hours before a visit date — told a similar story. The same pattern appeared for highly competitive day-ahead permits. Successful visitors came from ZIP codes with median incomes about $2,700 to $5,000 higher, or roughly 3% to 6% higher. In other words, across multiple park systems and multiple reservation formats, the same directional result kept showing up: the people winning the hardest-to-get slots lived in wealthier neighborhoods.
The Planning Horizon Problem
The income gap wasn't only a product of who was fastest on the keyboard during a frenzied 10 a.m. release. It was also baked into how far ahead visitors could plan. In Yosemite, each additional day of advance booking was linked with about $21 to $24 more in median ZIP-code income among successful visitors — meaning moving from 30 days ahead to 180 days ahead was linked with a difference of roughly $3,150 to $3,600.
That finding cuts to the heart of a structural reality in American working life. Studies have found that fewer minorities have jobs that allow them to plan a vacation six months in advance, which is often the time required by the federal system. A salaried professional with flexible paid time off can confidently book a Yosemite Valley visit five months out. A shift worker, a small-business owner, someone juggling gig economy hours — their life simply doesn't accommodate that kind of planning certainty. The reservation system doesn't ask about any of that. It just opens a window, counts down the seconds, and rewards whoever was most prepared.
"How you allocate these permits seems to matter for who gets to recreate," Hughes told Outside. "We adopt policies, and sometimes they generate unintended consequences." That framing — unintended consequences — is important. Nobody at the National Park Service designed these systems to exclude lower-income visitors. They were designed to prevent gridlock on Going-to-the-Sun Road, to keep dawn at Cadillac Mountain from becoming a parking-lot brawl, to give fragile ecosystems a fighting chance against record visitation. Parks logged 331.9 million visits in 2024 alone. Managing that volume is a genuine and urgent operational challenge. But Hughes's data shows that the mechanism chosen to solve that problem carries a hidden cost.
Acadia: Where Seconds Determine Access
No park in the study illustrates the speed problem more vividly than Acadia. The crown jewel of the Maine coast draws visitors from across the country to watch the sun rise over the Atlantic from the top of Cadillac Mountain — a sunrise valid from 3:30 a.m. to 7:00 a.m., which allows visitors to experience the first rays of sunlight in the United States. The experience is genuinely extraordinary, and the demand for it is ferocious.
A $6 reservation is required to drive a car up Cadillac Summit from late May to late October, and virtually 100 percent of the tickets were sold out over the online reservation system for sunrise during 2021 and 2022. The demand for a parking spot on Cadillac during sunrise is so intense that tickets can "literally sell out in seconds," the superintendent of the park told the Acadia National Park Advisory Commission.
In 2022, NPS statistics showed that there were 21,895 tickets available for sunrise on Cadillac and 21,882 were sold — a near-total sellout of every available slot for the season. The morning of a Cadillac sunrise, for anyone who didn't manage to grab a ticket, simply does not exist as an option. There is no walk-up alternative for drivers, no standby line. Hiking or biking to the top of Cadillac Mountain is free and requires no reservation, which does offer an equity valve of sorts — but arriving at 4 a.m. on foot or by bicycle is its own kind of barrier, one that filters by fitness, physical ability, and the willingness to arrive by alternative means in the dark.
The system at Acadia splits reservations between two windows: 30% of vehicle reservations are made available 90 days ahead of each date, and 70% of reservations for each day are held back until 10 a.m. EST, two days prior. Demand is high for these reservations and the supply sells out quickly. That two-day release sounds like it should help spontaneous travelers — and it does, compared to a pure advance-only system. But Hughes's data shows the income gradient persists even in those last-minute competitive windows, because the people who win them are still the ones who know exactly when and where to log on.
A Pattern That Predates Recreation.gov
The CU Boulder study is the most comprehensive examination of the timed-entry and vehicle-access permit universe, but it is not the first to raise alarms about the equity implications of reservation-based public land access. Researchers at the University of Montana reached similar conclusions about campsite reservations several years earlier.
Scenic national campground sites in the United States that require highly competitive reservations see more white, high-income visitors than campsites that don't require reservations — that's according to research released by outdoor recreation researchers at the University of Montana. Their methodology tracked visitors back to their home ZIP codes using cell phone location data and correlated those locations with census demographics. The pattern was consistent: campsites that require reservations see higher numbers of visitors coming from areas with significantly higher portions of white residency and higher annual incomes.
"We're seeing camping becoming more exclusive through this one reservation system," Will Rice, an expert in outdoor recreation and wildland management at the University of Montana, said. Rice's research pointed to structural barriers embedded in the system itself: obtaining a campsite ahead of time requires the ability to plan up to six months in advance, access to high-speed internet, and institutional knowledge related to the park and Recreation.gov. That last element — institutional knowledge — is underappreciated. Knowing that Yosemite Valley campground reservations drop on the 15th of the month five months out, that Arches requires a timed-entry pass from April through October, that Cadillac's 90-day slots go at 10 a.m. sharp — that's a body of knowledge that circulates primarily through established outdoor communities, gear forums, and social networks that skew toward the already-initiated.
Rice noted that campgrounds were conceptualized by the leisure class to emulate the suburbs. "And to a large degree they remain exclusionary," he said. The arrival of online reservation platforms didn't create that exclusion, but it may have given it sharper teeth.
The Congressional Response: A Bill, Some Questions, Few Answers
The equity debate around public lands access has reached Capitol Hill. Senator Alex Padilla said when he introduced legislation calling for the Interior Department to work with the National Academy of Sciences: "As more and more Americans seek out nature and outdoor recreation, it's more important than ever to guarantee equal access to outdoor spaces." His proposed legislation — the Review and Evaluation of Strategies for Equal Reservations for Visitor Experiences (RESERVE) Federal Land Act — would direct the academy to formally study reservation systems across federal lands.
Federal land management agencies have tested new visitor management methods such as online reservation systems; however, the potential for these systems to widen socioeconomic gaps in accessing nature remains severely understudied. Initial data shows that users of the reservation systems tend to be wealthier, more highly educated, and more likely to be white.
Padilla's framing cuts to the philosophical core of the issue: "Reservation systems are a critical tool for conserving our public lands and ensuring visitors have the space to explore the outdoors, but we must ensure they are designed so they can serve as a gateway to the outdoors, rather than a barrier." That distinction — gateway versus barrier — is precisely what Hughes's research now quantifies. It's one thing to intuit that wealthy people have more time, better internet, and stronger planning habits. It's another to attach dollar figures to that intuition across 5 million reservations at seven of the country's most-visited parks.
The NPS, for its part, has acknowledged the tension without committing to specific remedies. Kathy Kupper, a spokesperson for the NPS, has stated: "Parks are exploring many different tools and techniques that are most effective for their situation to help them improve how visitors get to and experience popular park resources and features." That language — deliberately flexible, studiously noncommittal — reflects the genuine difficulty of the problem. As University of Montana's Rice put it: "We can't use tools employed in the private sector. We simply can't raise prices as they do in the hospitality industry. It's a super-wicked problem."
What the Data Doesn't Tell Us — and Why That Matters
Hughes is careful about the limits of his methodology. Income was measured by neighborhood, not by person, and fixes like lotteries and staggered releases remain untested. ZIP code income is a proxy — a useful and statistically robust one, but still a proxy. A lower-income person living in a wealthy ZIP code would skew the data in one direction; a high-earning individual from a poorer ZIP code would skew it in another. The study speaks to aggregate patterns across millions of data points, not to the experience of any individual visitor.
It also doesn't measure who tried and failed to get a permit, only who succeeded. That means the income gap captured in the data may actually understate the real disparity. If lower-income visitors simply don't attempt to book competitive permits — because they lack the institutional knowledge, the reliable internet access, or the advance planning capacity — they don't show up in the dataset at all. The gap between who attempts the system and who avoids it entirely is invisible to this kind of analysis.
And critically, Hughes looked at 11 reservation systems within the seven parks that governed either timed entrances or vehicle access to a specific park area. The study examined these parks between 2021 and 2024. Hughes didn't analyze reservations for amenities like campsites. Camping reservations — already documented by University of Montana researchers as skewing toward wealthier and whiter demographics — represent an entire additional layer of the access problem that exists alongside what Hughes measured.
Possible Fixes: Lotteries, Staggered Releases, and the Limits of Good Intentions
The research community has floated several potential interventions, each with its own tradeoffs. Lottery systems are the most frequently discussed alternative to first-come, first-served online sales. In theory, a lottery levels the playing field by removing the speed advantage of those who know exactly when a booking window opens and who have the fastest internet connection. University of Montana researchers recommend the NPS and other agencies pursue "distributive justice" and, possibly, lottery systems for campsite reservations. Hughes's prior work on river permits found a similar result: he had previously studied the river permit system in the American West, which allows visitors to boat and fish through a combination of lotteries and an advance reservation system. He found that people who managed to secure a permit through advance reservation tend to have higher incomes than those who got the permit through the lottery.
That's a significant finding. It suggests that lotteries — when properly implemented — may actually reduce the income gradient in permit allocation. The Colorado River and Grand Canyon corridor already use lottery systems for some of the most coveted river permits in the country. Extending that approach to timed-entry systems at parks like Acadia or Yosemite is operationally feasible, though it introduces its own complications around trip planning, cancellations, and the potential for ticket scalping or transfer abuse.
Staggered releases — where different booking windows open at different times, giving spontaneous travelers a real shot at last-minute slots — represent the approach Acadia already uses with its 70/30 split between two-day and 90-day releases. Hughes's data suggests that even those split systems still produce an income gradient, though the gradient may be less steep than in systems that release everything at once far in advance. The two-day window at Acadia still requires someone to be online at exactly 10 a.m. two days before their trip, knowing that window exists — which circles back to the institutional knowledge problem.
There is also the question of digital access. Making a highly sought-after online reservation requires high-speed internet and also requires institutional knowledge on how the system works, meaning fewer novice and low-income visitors may be landing coveted sites. For rural Americans — many of whom live closest to the western parks that draw the largest permit crowds — broadband access remains genuinely spotty. Competing for a Yosemite Half Dome permit at 7 a.m. Pacific time on a 4G connection that drops every few minutes is a fundamentally different experience than doing the same thing from a home fiber connection in a suburban tech hub.
The Bigger Picture: Public Lands and the American Promise
The national park system was built on a democratic ideal — places so magnificent that they belong not to the wealthy few but to everyone. The national parks of the United States are a great source of national pride and identity for many Americans, with some even likening U.S. national parks to "American covenants." Despite this, U.S. national parks do not serve all Americans equally. That gap between ideal and reality has always existed. Compared to U.S. residents in census data, national park visitors are wealthier, more educated, and vast majority white — with 95% of national park visitors identifying as white compared to 72% of U.S. residents, and only 6% earning less than $25,000 compared to 24% of U.S. residents.
The online reservation era didn't invent that disparity. But Hughes's research makes clear that the way booking systems are currently designed — rewarding speed, advance planning, and digital literacy — actively compounds it at the exact pressure points where the parks are most spectacular and most in demand. The sunrise slot at Cadillac Mountain, the timed entry into Glacier's Going-to-the-Sun Road corridor, the Yosemite Valley permit during a July weekend: these are not peripheral experiences. They are the experiences that define the parks for millions of Americans.
As more federally managed sites require reservations and as more national parks consider ticketed entry, the equity issue could get even worse without intervention. The trajectory is clear: as visitor numbers climb and as the NPS doubles down on reservation systems as its primary crowd-management tool, the income gradient in who actually gets in will grow unless the systems themselves are redesigned with equity as an explicit goal — not an afterthought.
Hughes's paper doesn't prescribe a single solution, and that intellectual honesty is appropriate given how genuinely difficult the problem is. What it does, for the first time at this scale and with this kind of data rigor, is prove that the problem is real, quantifiable, and growing. The 5 million reservations he analyzed are not a sample — they are the system, laid bare. And what they show is that America's public lands, in their most coveted moments, are increasingly sorted by zip code.
For the outdoor community — a world that likes to think of itself as egalitarian, defined by challenge and terrain rather than income — that finding is worth sitting with. The mountains don't care how much money you make. The reservation system, it turns out, does.
