At 110, America’s National Parks still need us to say ‘hands off’

On Aug. 25, 1916, President Woodrow Wilson signed the Organic Act, creating the National Park Service and giving a single federal agency responsibility for protecting the national parks and monuments that were then under the Department of the Interior.

It stands as one of the nation’s most consequential conservation decisions

Today, the National Park Service manages 433 units covering more than 85 million acres in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and U.S. territories.

For those of us who live at the doorstep of Rocky Mountain National Park, this anniversary is more than a date on a calendar.

The park shapes the Estes Valley — our economy, our identity, our history, and our daily lives. We watch the seasons change across its peaks. We share its trails with visitors from around the world. We understand both the extraordinary privilege of living beside a national park and the complicated pressures that come with millions of people wanting to experience it.

That makes the 110th anniversary an occasion to celebrate. It should also be an occasion to pay attention.

The Organic Act gave the National Park Service a deliberately ambitious mission: conserve the scenery, natural and historic objects, and wildlife while allowing people to enjoy them in a way that leaves them “unimpaired” for future generations.

The tension in those words — use and preservation, access and protection — has existed almost from the beginning.

Stephen Mather, the National Park Service’s first director, believed Americans needed to experience the parks in order to value and financially support them. He promoted tourism and worked to make parks accessible.

Journalist Robert Sterling Yard, who had worked closely with Mather in the campaign to create the National Park Service, increasingly worried about what could happen when tourism, politics, and commercial interests became more important than preservation.

Yard helped establish the National Parks Association in 1919, the organization known today as the National Parks Conservation Association, as an independent voice capable of challenging the government when necessary.

Then, in the summer of 1920, Yard issued a warning.

“Hands off the National Parks”

Those words appeared in The Nation’s Parks, the association’s inaugural bulletin. Yard argued that an independent citizens’ organization was necessary precisely because government agencies would inevitably encounter political and commercial pressure.

He described the association as an independent and outspoken defender of the public’s parks and wildlife against what he considered the dangerous encroachment of commercial interests.

That was 106 years ago. The argument sounds remarkably contemporary.

The threats facing national parks have changed in form and scale, but the fundamental question remains: Are these places primarily resources to be exploited, attractions to be commercialized, and political assets to be controlled — or are they a public trust that each generation has an obligation to pass intact to the next?

We believe the answer remains the same as it was in 1916. They belong to the future as much as they belong to us.

The pressures are real

Our national parks are extraordinarily popular, and that popularity carries consequences. Heavy visitation strains roads, trails, campgrounds, wastewater systems, parking areas, and fragile ecosystems.

The National Park Service entered fiscal year 2026 with an estimated $24 billion in deferred maintenance and repair needs involving roads, buildings, utilities, and other facilities. The agency manages roughly 70,000 infrastructure assets, including thousands of miles of roads and trails and some 24,000 buildings.

People who love parks sometimes recoil at timed-entry systems, shuttle buses, parking restrictions, and other visitor-management programs. We understand the frustration.

But loving a national park does not mean insisting that everyone should be able to drive anywhere, park anywhere, or go anywhere at any time.

Sometimes protecting access tomorrow requires managing access today.

There are less visible but nontheless serious pressures as well.

Invasive species are changing park ecosystems. The National Park Service estimates that exotic invasive plants cover approximately 1.4 million acres of NPS lands and waters.

Climate change is also altering habitat, water availability, wildfire conditions, and the timing of migration, flowering, and reproduction. Species are moving northward and to higher elevations as temperatures change. The Park Service’s own vulnerability assessment found 71 percent of national parks in the contiguous United States face high risk from climate change.

Those aren’t abstract issues in the Rocky Mountains. We can see changing forests, wildfire risk, invasive plants, and shifting ecological conditions around us.

A park boundary drawn on a map cannot keep out smoke, drought, warming temperatures, invasive species, air pollution, or development pressures.

Nor can national parks survive indefinitely without the people required to protect them.

Rangers, scientists, maintenance crews, search-and-rescue personnel, interpreters, firefighters, resource specialists, and seasonal employees are not incidental expenses. They are the people who make the promise of the Organic Act possible.

A park that Congress creates but does not adequately staff and fund is a promise only partially kept.

And once again, there is pressure at the boundaries

There is another reason Yard’s century-old warning deserves attention in 2026.

National parks do not exist as ecological islands. What happens on neighboring national forests, Bureau of Land Management property, and other federal lands can directly affect wildlife corridors, watersheds, viewsheds, air quality, and the ecological health of parks themselves.

This month, the administration proposed rescinding the Roadless Area Conservation Rule, potentially removing protections from more than 45 million acres of national forest land. The National Parks Conservation Association argues the change could affect landscapes connected to national parks and comes alongside efforts to expand or ease restrictions on mining and oil and gas development on other federal lands.

Elsewhere, the debate has moved directly inside park boundaries.

Federal contractors recently bulldozed sensitive habitat in Big Bend National Park for border infrastructure before construction was temporarily paused following public opposition. Similar construction is underway through Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in Arizona.

Reasonable Americans can disagree about energy policy, immigration, border security, tourism, recreation, and how federal lands should be managed.

National parks, however, should not simply become collateral damage in those debates.

Their protection has survived Republican and Democratic administrations, wars, recessions, political upheaval, and dramatic changes in American society because generations of Americans have understood something important: Some places are valuable precisely because we decided not to consume them.

That principle deserves defending.

A lesson from our own backyard

The Estes Valley understands better than most communities that national parks cannot be separated from the people and landscapes around them.

Rocky Mountain National Park is our neighbor.

Its visitors sleep in our hotels, eat in our restaurants, and shop in our stores. Its employees live in our community. Its wildlife crosses jurisdictional boundaries without consulting a map. Wildfire, water, transportation, housing, and visitor management do not stop at an entrance station.

Our prosperity and the park’s preservation are intertwined.

That relationship occasionally creates tension, but it also gives this community a special responsibility.

We should be among the strongest voices insisting that the National Park Service has enough employees, scientists, and resources to fulfill its mission.

We should support responsible visitor management even when it creates inconvenience.

We should insist that science, rather than short-term political considerations, guide decisions about wildlife and ecosystems.

And we should pay close attention when policies governing surrounding federal lands could affect national parks.

Hands off — and hands on

“Hands off the National Parks” remains a powerful slogan, but perhaps the National Park Service’s 110th anniversary calls for an additional thought.

Protecting parks requires hands on, too.

Hands repairing trails.

Hands removing invasive plants.

Hands restoring historic buildings.

Hands conducting wildlife research.

Hands fighting fires.

Hands rescuing injured hikers.

Hands teaching children about geology, wildlife, and history.

Hands picking up trash left by someone else.

Hands writing letters to Congress.

Hands voting.

And hands raised when someone proposes sacrificing a protected landscape for a short-term political or commercial purpose.

Robert Sterling Yard understood something in 1920 that remains true in 2026: Government alone cannot guarantee the future of the national parks.

Citizens have to care enough to defend them.

That is worth remembering on the National Park Service’s 110th birthday.

The national parks are among the boldest promises one generation of Americans ever made to another — that some of the country’s most extraordinary landscapes, wildlife, history, and cultural resources would not belong solely to those fortunate enough to possess them at one moment in time.

They would belong to everyone, including people who haven’t been born yet.

Happy 110th birthday to the National Park Service.

And after 110 years, the responsibility handed to us remains remarkably simple:

Enjoy the parks. Support the people who care for them. Protect the lands surrounding them. And leave them unimpaired for those who come next.