I've been going to the national parks my whole life, back when you could roll up to Yosemite on a July afternoon and find a spot without a fight. Those days are gone, and I'll be honest with you about why: the parks are more beloved than ever, and the most famous handful of them get loved half to death every summer. But that hasn't stopped me, not once, because I learned a long time ago that the crowds are a solvable problem — and that a park is at its best as the heart of a trip, not the whole of it.
So here's how I build one of these, after more years of it than I'll admit to.
Make the park the anchor, not the entire plan
The mistake I see folks make is treating a park like the destination, full stop — drive straight there, spend two days, drive straight home. You'll have a fine time and you'll have missed the trip. The better way is to make the park the anchor and string a route around it: the drive in through country worth seeing, a town or two on either side, maybe a second smaller park you'd never have stopped at otherwise.
Some of the best routes practically build themselves this way. Point at Glacier up in Montana and you've got the whole Going-to-the-Sun Road and the high plains getting there. Anchor on Moab's two parks — Arches and Canyonlands sit right next to each other — and the red-rock driving between them is a trip in itself. The park gives the trip its reason; the road gives it its life. We keep a whole stack of routes like that in our Epic Trips if you want somewhere to start.
Beating the crowds is mostly about timing
Here's the part that matters most, and it's all in the timing. The crowds everybody warns you about are concentrated in a few predictable places, and you can sidestep nearly all of it:
- Go in the shoulder season. This is the whole ballgame. May and June, or September into October, the big parks shed most of their crowds and put on some of their best weather. Fall in the high country especially — the aspens turning, the air gone crisp, the summer mob gone home. Same park, a tenth of the people.
- Weekdays over weekends, always. A Tuesday in a popular park can feel like a different place than the Saturday. If your schedule bends at all, bend it toward midweek.
- Be at the gate at dawn. This is the one that's never failed me. The crowds roll in mid-morning and thin out by late afternoon. Get up before them — first light at a famous overlook with nobody else there is worth every lost hour of sleep — then take your midday rest while everyone else fights for parking, and come back out as the day cools and the place empties again.
Know the reservation rules before you go
Here's a newer wrinkle that catches people flat-footed. A number of the most popular parks now run some form of timed-entry or vehicle reservation during their busy stretches — you book a window ahead of time to get the car in the gate. It's a sensible answer to the crowds, but it'll ruin a morning if you show up not knowing about it and get turned around.
These systems change from year to year and park to park, so the rule is simple: check the park's official site on the National Park Service page a few weeks before you go, and book your entry window the moment they open if one's required. While you're there, look at whether a popular trail or road needs its own permit. Five minutes of homework saves the one bad surprise.
Don't sleep on the quieter parks
Now here's where I really want to earn my keep. Everybody chases the same dozen marquee names, and meanwhile some of the finest parks in the country sit half-empty because they're not on the postcard rack. If solitude's any part of what you're after, point the car at these instead:
- Great Basin out in eastern Nevada — ancient bristlecone pines and some of the darkest night skies left in the country, and hardly a soul there.
- North Cascades in Washington — alpine country every bit the equal of the famous ranges, an easy drive from Seattle, and quiet as a church.
- Capitol Reef in Utah — the overlooked one of Utah's five, with the same red-rock grandeur as its mobbed cousins and a historic orchard you can pick fruit in.
- Lassen Volcanic in northern California — bubbling mudpots and a drive-through volcano with a fraction of the traffic of the big California parks.
- Big Bend down on the Texas border — enormous, remote, and gorgeous, and so far from anywhere that you'll have whole vistas to yourself.
Any one of these makes a better anchor for a trip than elbowing through a crowded headliner, and you'll come home with the place to yourself in your memory of it.
The gateway towns make the trip
A park gives you the days; the gateway town gives you the nights, and the right one is half the fun. Most every park has a town just outside the gate built to take care of travelers — a place to sleep, a hot supper, a local who'll tell you which trail's worth your morning. Springdale outside Zion, Estes Park below Rocky Mountain, the cluster around Moab — these are destinations in their own right.
A few things I've learned about sleeping near a park:
- Book the in-park lodges a long way out — they're wonderful and they fill the better part of a year ahead. If you didn't plan that far, don't fret; the gateway town's got you.
- Campgrounds inside the park are gold for beating the crowds — you're already in when the gate line forms — but they book up early too. The reservation sites open a set number of months ahead; mark the date.
- Stay a little farther out to save real money. A town thirty or forty minutes from the gate often costs a fraction of the one right at the entrance, and that's an easy dawn drive in.
Give it more than a day
Last thing, and the one I'd press hardest. Don't try to do a great park in an afternoon. Give it the dawn and give it the dusk — those golden hours at the start and end of the day are when the light's best, the wildlife's out, and the crowds are thinnest, all at once. A park you rush through is just a parking lot with a view. A park you give two unhurried days becomes the trip you talk about for years.
Get the route and the overnights sorted ahead of time and you free yourself up to do exactly that — be at the overlook at first light instead of hunting a room at dark. That's the part I let the app handle now, so the only thing left to do at the park is stand there and let it work on you.