The study was conducted by Jonathan Hughes, an economist at the University of Colorado Boulder and a fellow at the Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute. Hughes, who has spent years navigating these very reservation systems himself, examined eleven reservation systems spanning more than five million reservations across seven national parks, including Rocky Mountain, Glacier, and Yosemite. His central finding is striking: among systems that offered advance reservations, people who secured permits weeks or months ahead of their visits tended to come from ZIP codes with notably higher median household incomes than those who obtained permits on the same day or just one day in advance.

The income gap was most pronounced for the scarcest reservations. For highly competitive permits, where the majority of available tickets sell out within five minutes of release, successful reservation holders came from ZIP codes with median household incomes roughly three to six percent higher than those associated with less competitive reservations. That may sound like a modest difference, but across millions of transactions it represents a systematic skew in who gets access to parks that belong, by law and by founding ideal, to everyone. Hughes points to the organic act that established Yellowstone National Park, the nation’s first, which set the land apart as a public park for the benefit and enjoyment of the people, not just rich people.

The timing of the study is significant. Rocky Mountain National Park, one of the busiest in the system, is preparing to end its timed-entry permit system for the season on October 18. Under that system, during peak hours from mid-May to mid-October, visitors must obtain a permit costing two dollars, in addition to an entrance pass, to enter the park during a specific time window. The park releases some permits on the first day of each month for the remainder of that month, while another batch becomes available the evening before each entry date. This two-tier release structure is common across the National Park Service and is precisely where Hughes identified the equity gap.

The pressure on these systems has grown dramatically over the past decade. National parks in the United States have experienced steady increases in visitation since around 2013, and the COVID-19 pandemic pushed attendance even higher as Americans sought open-air recreation. In 2024, more than 331 million people visited national parks. That surge has placed real strain on park infrastructure: crowded roads, trampled ecosystems, overwhelmed restrooms, and emergency response operations complicated by gridlock. In response, many parks have turned to online reservation systems for parking, popular trails, and entry during peak periods, effectively rationing access through a combination of technology and advance planning.

Hughes’s interest in the question was personal as well as professional. He recalls arriving on campus early to take advantage of faster WiFi connections and running two computers simultaneously to maximize his odds of securing a permit. Those experiences prompted him to think about who is actually able to participate in such a process. Not everyone, he notes, can plan trips months in advance, is comfortable navigating online booking platforms, or has access to a fast and reliable internet connection. The reservation race, in other words, rewards resources that are unevenly distributed: flexible schedules, digital literacy, and the financial security to commit to a trip long before it happens.

The new findings build on Hughes’s earlier research into river permit systems in the American West, which govern access to popular boating and fishing stretches through a combination of lotteries and advance reservation systems. In that work, he found that people who secured permits through advance reservation tended to have higher incomes than those who obtained them through lotteries. The parallel is telling. Advance reservation systems, by design, favor those with the foresight, flexibility, and technical skill to act the moment bookings open. Lotteries, by contrast, randomize the outcome and appear to distribute access more evenly across income groups.

The mechanism behind the bias is likely a combination of factors, Hughes suggests. Higher-income visitors tend to have more flexibility to plan trips months ahead, whether because their jobs allow predictable vacation scheduling or because they can absorb the risk of a nonrefundable booking. They are also more familiar with the intricacies of reservation systems, knowing exactly when permits are released and how to move quickly when they are. And they tend to be more tech-savvy, with better devices, faster connections, and greater comfort competing in a five-minute digital sprint. Each of these advantages compounds the others, producing the measurable income gradient Hughes observed across the five million reservations in his dataset.

The implications for park managers are considerable. As the National Park Service continues to adjust its reservation systems, Hughes argues that the findings could help administrators think differently about how permits are distributed. One option is to experiment with the balance between permits released months in advance and those released closer to the visit date, potentially giving spontaneous or less well-connected visitors a fairer shot. In some cases, he suggests, random lotteries may provide a more equitable alternative to first-come, first-served advance booking, echoing the pattern he documented in Western river systems. The goal is not to eliminate reservations, which have proven effective at managing crowds and protecting fragile resources, but to design them so that the benefits of access do not accrue disproportionately to the wealthy.

For Hughes, the issue ultimately goes to the heart of what national parks are meant to be. For many years, he notes, the people responsible for stewarding America’s public lands have worked to give everyone equal access, and any indication that some people have better access than others runs counter to that mission. Income, he cautions, is just one indicator; education, age, and race could also play a role in who succeeds in the reservation race, and those dimensions deserve further study. As parks grapple with record visitation and finite resources, the challenge will be to manage crowds without quietly converting shared national treasures into amenities reserved for those with the time, money, and technology to outcompete everyone else. The study, published in Nature Communications with the DOI 10.1038/s41467-026-76030-4, offers park managers a data-driven starting point for redesigning systems so that the benefit and enjoyment of the people extends to all of the people.

Subject of Research: Income-based inequality in national park reservation and permit systems

Article Title: Richer people have an edge when it comes to getting national park permits

Article References: Richer people have an edge when it comes to getting national park permits. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: national parks, reservation systems, income inequality, Rocky Mountain National Park, timed-entry permits, Nature Communications, recreation equity, National Park Service, lotteries, outdoor recreation, Jonathan Hughes, public lands

The lawsuit follows President Donald Trump’s announcement on July 13, 2026, that Bears Ears National Monument would be reduced by approximately 91 percent and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument by approximately 90 percent. Taken together, the two proclamations stripped national monument protections from nearly 3 million acres of federally managed land in Utah, a cut that represents the largest reduction in public lands protection in United States history. For paleontologists, the decision places at risk one of the most scientifically significant fossil landscapes in North America, an area whose deep sedimentary record spans hundreds of millions of years of vertebrate evolution. The legal filing is a direct continuation of litigation that the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology and many of the same co-plaintiffs first pursued in 2017, when the president initially moved to shrink both monuments during his first term in office.

At the heart of the plaintiffs’ argument is a question of constitutional and statutory authority: whether a president possesses the legal power to revoke or diminish national monuments established by predecessors. The Society of Vertebrate Paleontology and its co-plaintiffs assert that the proclamation reducing Bears Ears was illegal, and that the Antiquities Act of 1906 grants a president the authority to designate national monuments but not to undo them. The Antiquities Act, enacted under President Theodore Roosevelt, has been used by presidents of both parties for more than a century to protect federal lands containing objects of historic, cultural, and scientific interest. Congress deliberately vested the power of creation in the executive while reserving the power of abolition for itself, and the plaintiffs contend that any presidential attempt to erase a monument therefore exceeds the bounds of delegated authority and encroaches on the legislative power of Congress.

The scientific stakes in the case are considerable. The Society of Vertebrate Paleontology asserts that President Trump’s actions fundamentally violate the foundation on which Bears Ears was established, noting that President Obama’s 2016 proclamation was crafted to protect vital fossil resources as well as the cultural and sacred sites of the Indigenous Tribes that trace their origins to the region. Bears Ears occupies a distinctive place in the history of American conservation because it is the first national monument created at the urging of paleontologists working together with Tribal Nations. The region’s rock layers preserve an extraordinary sequence of ancient ecosystems, and before the reduction, the monument was also the first in the nation to operate under a Tribal-led resource management plan, an administrative innovation that paired federal science and land management with Indigenous knowledge and stewardship traditions sustained for generations.

Field research in the area has demonstrated why the landscape commands such attention from the paleontological community. The monument and the lands originally encompassed within its boundaries contain thousands of documented paleontological sites, alongside thousands of culturally significant and sacred locations where Tribal partners maintain active connections to their ancestors. Fossils recovered from the region have informed scientific understanding of major transitions in vertebrate life, and researchers emphasize that much of the ground remains scientifically unexplored. The Society’s own institutional history with the area stretches back nearly 70 years, and numerous current members continue to conduct scientific fieldwork within the original monument boundaries. The loss of protective status across more than nine-tenths of that territory, scientists argue, would expose undocumented fossil sites to potential damage from unrestricted development, off-road vehicle use, and unregulated collecting.

Society president Stuart Sumida delivered a pointed assessment of the administration’s decision. “The president’s wholesale and thoughtless deprotection of Bears Ears shows a fundamental lack of understanding of its scientific and cultural significance and what it can teach us about the deep time history of our planet,” Sumida said. He added that the reduction is “profoundly insulting to our tribal partners and deeply disrespectful of their culture and history.” The statement captures the dual character of the monument as both a scientific archive and a living cultural landscape, and it frames the lawsuit not merely as a dispute over land management policy but as a defense of the principle that irreplaceable scientific and heritage resources deserve durable legal protection.

Public opinion data cited by the Society suggests that the litigation aligns with mainstream sentiment in the American West, including in Utah itself. A remarkable 91 percent of western state voters say that national monuments should retain their existing boundaries. Even in Utah, a traditionally conservative state where federal land policy has long been a source of political friction, 75 percent of all voters say they want their elected representatives to prioritize conservation on public lands over energy production, the primary objective of the Trump proclamations according to critics. The Society of Vertebrate Paleontology joined Utahns and western state voters in decrying what it described as a land grab that undercuts science, insults Indigenous Tribes, and ignores the will of the voting public, positioning the lawsuit as an expression of democratic accountability as much as scientific advocacy.

Beyond the courtroom, Sumida called on lawmakers to translate public support into legislative safeguards. “We need our elected representatives to stand up for the importance of science in the United States and around the world,” Sumida said. “In the United States we call on our elected representatives to codify the limitations on presidential abuse of the Antiquities Act and protect the public lands that belong to all Americans, and respect our indigenous groups that came long before the United States was even established as a country.” Such codification, supporters argue, would remove the recurring cycle of designation and attempted revocation that has made monument lands politically volatile, by clarifying in statute that presidents may create monuments but may not unilaterally erase the protections their predecessors established.

The outcome of the case carries implications that extend well beyond the red rock country of southeastern Utah. A judicial ruling on whether the Antiquities Act permits presidential reductions could determine the security of dozens of monuments across the national system, from marine preserves to desert fossil beds, and could shape how future administrations approach the protection of scientific resources on federal land. For the paleontological community, Bears Ears has become a test of whether fossil resources and the cultural landscapes that contain them can be defended through the courts against abrupt executive action. The Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, an organization of approximately 2,000 members from more than 50 countries working on every continent, whose stated purposes include advancing the science of vertebrate paleontology and protecting fossil resources worldwide, has framed the fight as one that concerns the shared heritage of all Americans and the ability of future generations of scientists to read the deep-time record preserved in the canyons and mesas of Bears Ears.

Subject of Research: Legal challenge to the presidential reduction of Bears Ears National Monument and its fossil and cultural resources

Article Title: The Society of Vertebrate Paleontology sues the Trump Administration for shrinking Bears Ears National Monument

Article References: The Society of Vertebrate Paleontology sues the Trump Administration for shrinking Bears Ears National Monument. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: Bears Ears National Monument, Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, Antiquities Act, Trump administration, public lands, fossil resources, Utah, Tribal Nations, national monuments, conservation lawsuit, Grand Staircase-Escalante, paleontology