America’s National Parks Are Entering a New Era

A century ago, in Rocky Mountain National Park’s Kawuneeche Valley, colonies of beavers engineered a chain of ponds connected by streams and dams throughout this floodplain, cradling the headwaters of the Colorado River. Then, trapped for their pelts and cut off by irrigation ditches that reshaped the waters, the beavers vanished, and the valley’s wetlands lifeblood faltered without them, turning the once lush riparian watershed to grassland littered with overgrazed willow scrub.

Today, a renaissance is underway. Volunteers and scientists are hand-building dozens of beaver dam analogs to slow the water, coax the wetlands back to life and inspire the valley’s returning beavers to put down roots once again. As the National Park Service marks its 110th anniversary, stories like this—about the quiet, unglamorous act of restoration—are reminders of what these places were founded to protect, and how visitors can be part of it.

(First, they were pelts, then pests. Now beavers are emerging as climate heroes.)

When President Woodrow Wilson signed the 1916 Organic Act that created the park service, its mandate was to conserve scenic, natural, and historic elements “unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations,” a promise that has largely held. Glacier National Park, for example, drew a boundary across already ancient Blackfeet homeland to keep out dams, mines, and development.

That 1916 act has done that job well at all 63 national parks in the U.S.; however, the law didn't account for how forces that move beyond borders—like rivers, wind, and greenhouse gases—can change parks.

The Colorado River is case in point. It runs through eleven national parks and monuments, but by the time it reaches many of them, upstream water rights mean much of its flow is already spoken for. Wind inspires a similar imbalance, carrying industrial haze into crystal skies. 

A park can't stop what is borne by water or wind, but it can measure the change—and adapt to it. 

National Parks Are a Climate Archive

Protected and left alone for decades, the parks have become some of the country’s most valuable long-term climate datasets, recording changes such as retreating glaciers. A 2022 Climate Central analysis of 62 major national parks found that all but one had warmed since the National Park Service was founded in 1916, with nearly two-thirds warming by at least 2°F.

U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) research scientist Erich Peitzsch notes snowmelt and streamflow across the Northern Rockies arriving up to four weeks earlier now than midcentury, a pattern showing up nationwide. 

A 2016 National Park Service–commissioned study of 276 parks, drawing on records dating back to 1901, found three-quarters experiencing an earlier onset of spring, with half falling into what researchers called an “extreme” early category. Eight hundred miles south at Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks, drought and wildfires are dramatically altering the landscape. Giant sequoias, once considered untouchable by fire, have experienced substantial mortality across their native range. In the Everglades, sea levels have risen roughly four inches since 1940, and mangroves are migrating to drier land in response.

Instruments and satellites are not the only tools keeping score of climate change. At Glacier, Gheri Hall, co-director of the Blackfeet Nation’s historic preservation office, recognizes the same pattern through what tribal elders no longer see. “We’ve always had origin stories that connect our people to the land and about the abundance of elk and buffalo in the area.” Family stories tell of wagon trains taking four days to cross through vast buffalo herds, while hunters today describe elk migration routes gone quiet.  

Rethinking What Preservation and Protection Means

Peitzsch explains that the cascading effects of higher temperatures are “reshaping water, wildlife, and high-country landscapes in ways the public can see.” USGS research ecologist Adrian Das adds that “these stressors are leading to substantial and visible changes in the parks’ ecosystems.” By 2009, the Park Service itself began to speak to this out loud. A director-commissioned reassessment of the agency’s founding wildlife philosophy—holding the parks in a static “vignette of primitive America”—called instead for managing toward continuous change that is not yet fully understood. 

The fact that Glacier ice loss and Sequoia fire mortality are measurable at all is a tribute to land kept still enough to watch closely. But held steady in every other way, the parks are showing us these protections aren't enough to insulate them from climate change.

And yet there is hope among hardship. Hall finds promise more in relationship than prevention. Das and Peitzsch see actionable insight to consider in conservation decisions and building predictive tools. For instance, park managers are increasingly leaning on a formal framework known as resist-accept-direct (RAD), deciding case by case where to hold a landscape in place, where to let it go, and where to steer it toward something new. 

At Cape Hatteras, that has meant spending millions to move a lighthouse a half-mile inland, holding the line against a retreating shoreline. At Assateague, it has meant letting park facilities migrate inland with the shifting sand rather than fight it. Biologists at Glacier have already carried bull trout by backpack to a higher, cooler lake beyond the fish’s historic range, a small act of intervention meant to buy the species time against both a warming climate and invasive competitors. It is a modest gesture, but a telling one: proof that the agency once bound to leave nature alone is learning, cautiously, when to step in.

What Travelers Can Do

Visitors are part of this story too, and small choices on a trip add up the same way a beaver’s choices do, so you can travel through the parks a little more lightly this season:

1. Time your visit off-peak. Shoulder-season trips (late spring or fall) spread out visitor impact and often line up with seasonal shifts that researchers are tracking.

2. Stick to trails. Trampling near restoration sites like Kawuneeche’s beaver ponds can undo years of volunteer work in an afternoon; boardwalks and marked trails exist for a reason.

3. Skip the campfire when it’s restricted. Fire bans in places like Sequoia are a direct response to drought conditions reshaping the landscape.

4. Support the science. Many parks run citizen-science programs, from phenology logs to wildlife counts, that feed directly into the same long-term datasets researchers like Peitzsch and Das rely on.

5. Ask before you post. Sharing a lesser-known viewpoint or fragile meadow can send a surge of foot traffic somewhere the ecosystem, or the restoration effort, isn’t ready for.

A century of protection hasn’t kept the world from changing, but it has left us with the habit of watching closely enough to notice, and, increasingly, the tools to respond. For travelers, that habit is worth borrowing: paying attention, treading a little lighter, and leaving room for the parks to keep doing what they’ve always done best.