There is good news for the Colorado Rockies. With three wins and seven losses so far in the 2026 season, they are no longer the worst team in baseball, though just barely. They are in fifth place in the West Division and just above the Chicago White Sox nationally.
The baseball season is long, so it’s way too early to celebrate anything, but with some good management and hands-on ownership, maybe things can turn around. We can always hope.
There was some other interesting baseball news this month that might give hope to fans of Colorado’s outdoors and public lands. It happened, of all places, in Queens. The New York Mets gave away tickets to a day baseball game against the Arizona Diamondbacks. All you had to do was register online and then show up to collect them for free baseball. Who doesn’t love free baseball?
Then human nature took over. The no-show rate for the game was 59%. Six out of every ten people who signed up never showed up. To psychologists and economists, there is a simple explanation for this. People don’t value free things, or even things with a negligible cost, like a $2 reservation fee.
From Swiss football to restaurants, you see this time and again. A Swiss football club that gave away free tickets to fans saw consistently high no-show rates. Conversely, research by the psychologist Robert Cialdini showed that restaurants massively reduce no-show rates by asking callers a simple question. The question: Will you call us if your plans change?
I’ll come back to that in a moment. It suggests that there are simple steps that can and should be taken to improve Rocky Mountain National Park’s Timed Entry system in 2026. I’ve suggested five of them below. The reservation system doesn’t begin until May 22, that’s more than a month from now. There is plenty of time for RMNP leadership to implement any of these solutions–or at least explain to the public in a meeting why they have chosen not to.
Changes at RMNP since implementing timed entry reservations
Three important things have changed since RMNP last rolled out reservations. You may have missed these events. Taken together, they show there’s no sensible reason for RMNP to keep timed entry in 2026, and certainly not in its current form. Let me take you through them quickly.
First, five large National Parks that had reservations last year eliminated them for this year. Yosemite and Yellowstone, both of which had more visitors than Rocky last year, got rid of their pilot reservation projects for 2026. They’ve opted for sensible and low-cost traffic management solutions.
Glacier National Park also ended its Park-wide reservation requirement, opting for ticketed shuttles and parking limits at key spots. Mount Rainier National Park also decided to get rid of reservations. All of those Parks had reservations last year. None of them do this year.
Even the Parks that kept some sort of reservation for this summer have dialed it back. Acadia, Haleakala, Shenandoah, and Zion will only require reservations for certain roads or trails – Cadillac Summit road in Acadia, Angels Landing in Zion, the Old Rag area in Shenandoah, and ‘Sunrise Summit’ in Haleakala. This is ‘adaptive’ management in action. Share the data. Talk to the public. Get rid of unnecessary reservations.
To be absolutely clear: Five major National Parks have ditched reservations and the four that kept them pared them back significantly. Rocky Mountain National Park is the only national park in the country that still has a Park-wide reservation system. Other Parks with more visitors have found a better way.
Now the second major piece of news. RMNP fell out of the top-five most visited National Parks in the country in 2025. It’s now sixth, behind Great Smoky Mountains (11.5 million), Zion (4.9 million), Yellowstone (4.7 million), Grand Canyon (4.4 million), and Yosemite (4.2 million). All of those National Parks had more visitors than Rocky last year. None of them will require reservations this year.
Visitation to RMNP is down almost 11% since 2019. There have been ten years total where Rocky attracted more than four million visitors. In five of them, from 2015 to 2019, no reservations were required. Why? They weren’t needed. Some of us still remember what it was like going outside to visit public lands without having to ask for permission.
RMNP leadership cited a 44% increase in visitation between 2012 and 2019 as the main reason to ‘redistribute’ visitation to the Park over the course of the day and over the year. Yet visitation is down 11% since 2019. Statistically speaking, the Park had almost exactly the same number of visitors in 2025 as it did ten years ago in 2015 – a year with no reservation requirement.
The data tell us that visitation has not been ‘spread out.’ It’s been reduced, something local businesses and residents might want to consider, if the trend continues. If we have fewer visitors than in 2019, and about the same number as 2015, why are reservations needed in 2026? They aren’t.
The final big change since last year is that Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum issued an order on June 25, 2025 for each National Park to establish the position of aGateway Community Coordinator. In other communities, this new position has already led to productive changes in the way local residents can help the Park service solve real problems and plan for the future together.
How does it work?
The Gateway Community Coordinator organizes four meetings a year with the public to discuss Park planning and management decisions before those decisions are implemented. It’s a way to create genuine cooperation and communication between Park officials and the ordinary Americans who value and enjoy public lands. These are not PowerPoint presentations or one-way informational reports. They are formal, public, and transparent planning sessions that bring all the stakeholders in our National Parks together four times a year to solve problems.
These gateway community meetings are supposed to already be happening. And in other Parks, they are happening. But not in Rocky.
If you haven’t heard of the Secretary’s project or the GCC position, that’s because RMNP has issued no public announcements about it. Nor have any meeting been held whose purpose is to bring the public in on Park planning and decisions. The Secretary’s guideline requires the meetings to be formal, regular, and prior to policy and management decisions. Not a word from RMNP on this.
Other National Parks and gateway communities have enthusiastically embraced this chance to bring more local input to a federal agency. It’s an opportunity to make things better, not shout slogans or talk in circles, or worse, nod politely and do nothing. This new partnership replaces the status quo, where local mayors and tourism officials are kept in the loop informally, but the Park keeps its plans and its decisions to itself.
Don’t get me wrong. Cordial personal relationships are great. Informal conversations and information are fine. But regular meetings, accessible to the public, with real collaborative planning to solve ongoing operational problems…well, that’s a new level of opportunity that Park and local officials should be jumping all over.
Sadly, they aren’t. But that doesn’t mean the public can’t get involved directly. But how? And more to the point, what should RMNP do now? I have five suggestions, although only one of them is really necessary if taken.
Five suggestions
First, get rid of Timed Entry in RMNP now. Go back to the drawing board. Consult with the other National Parks on what traffic and visitor management solutions they’ve adopted in lieu of reservations. Hold a meeting. Invite the public. Both of these things were required by the Secretary’s Order last year. But instead of ‘informing’ the public of your plans, open up the planning process. Let the sunshine in. You might be surprised at what you learn and the help you get!
Second, get rid of reservations for everything but the Bear Lake corridor. Do that now. If the Park believes that, as Secretary Ingram has said, “Timed Entry is an established visitor management use strategy,” having gone through the National Environmental Policy Act process, then prove you’re as adaptable as you said you would be. There is no good reason for RMNP to require Park-wide reservations when the rest of the National Park system has soundly rejected that path.
Third, require a check in the night before to reduce the no-show rate and/or make unused reservations available to the public. Other Parks have looked at real-time technology solutions for traffic and reservation management. It’s the 21st century. Let’s join it.
Fourth, hold a formal, public meeting before Memorial Day to review the thresholds and indicators the Park said it would be monitoring in the Environmental Assessment that made Timed Entry permanent in 2025. These were the objective, measurable standards the Park promised to follow up on to measure the ‘success’ of Timed Entry. Let’s see the data. Let’s analyze it. And let’s either get rid of reservations or improve them.
Fifth, allow drive-up visitors to use reservations that have gone unused due to no-shows. No visitor should be denied entry to public lands when there is room in the Park. Park administrators know when a visitor who made a reservation didn’t show up. They know there is space in the Park and they’re still keeping people out. In the interests of fairness and common sense, there is no reason this should not change for 2026.
A no-show rate of 60% to a baseball game is understandable. Human nature and psychology show that people tend to hoard things that are made artificially scarce. Plus, it’s the New York Mets. The ticket may be free, but you’ll never get that time back. What about a 30% no-show rate for reservations?
Mystifyingly, the Park has said it is content with a no-show rate of 30%. Other Parks learned from their pilot programs, and rather than using the NEPA process to make reservations permanent, found a better way to solve their problems.
Stubbornly, RMNP leadership refuses to change course. Why?
Somewhere along the way the people running our National Parks, and the local officials in Colorado, took the point of view that the visitation is the enemy of preservation. They locked the gate and threw away the key.
The rest of the country and almost all of the National Park System has moved on to summers without reservations. The rest of the National Parks have begun using the new Gateway Community Coordinator position to build regular and productive planning–as real partners–with Park management. RMNP stands alone. It seems to have dug its heels in and taken the position that Timed Entry is here to stay no matter what the alternatives are and what the data say.
It’s sad. But so was the Colorado Rockies baseball team last year. Fortunately for us die-hard fans, you can’t get much worse than they were. Ownership vowed to get better. Management has followed suit with practical steps, including learning to pitch at home and hit on the road.
The Colorado Rockies are owned privately. Their management is evaluated based on performance. That’s about where the analogy with our public lands ends. And a real principle is at stake: do public lands belong to the people or not?
I believe they do. The American people own the National Parks. The managers of the Parks, who clearly have a difficult job to do in a difficult environment, are still accountable to the American people.
America is still a democracy. But only if we insist on it and engage in the management of public lands with good faith and a fair balance between visitation and preservation. It’s time to move on from Timed Entry. Everyone else has. What are we waiting for?
We all care about public lands and our precious natural resources and want to preserve them for future generations. Preservation requires active stewardship by ALL Americans.
The directive from the Department of the Interior requires National Parks, through the Gateway Community Coordinator position, to hold regular meetings with the public prior to planning and management decisions. Timed Entry is not somehow magically exempt from this.
Perhaps some of the current or newly elected Town of Estes Park Trustees, when they see how other communities are taking a more active role in helping the National Park solve its problems, will step up and lead the way.
With visitation flat and declining relative to other National Parks, I can’t think of a better time to begin a new, more transparent, and collaborative long-term relationship with the Park’s administrators and not to put too fine a point on it, but this is now required. It is not a suggestion from the Secretary of the Interior.
There are a lot of local pressing issues that require attention, but this is a problem we can actually do something about. And it’s not that complicated. Timed Entry is not a fact of life we must learn to live with forever. The operational problems it was designed to solve have other solutions. It’s time to learn what we can learn from others and do better for future generations.