Only a few years ago, the majority of national park in the United States were seeing depressed tourism numbers. Over the decades, it had become less fashionable to visit outdoor spaces and explore, probably due to the shift in society to being more computer oriented. Quite simply, people were not spending as much time together outside as they once were, as a result not as many people were visiting national parks as a family. After some time, the lowered rates of tourism began to fuel a debate over the federal money that is allocated towards their upkeep, and those who would rather see the areas used for commercial development argued that if not enough people were interested in visiting that it did not justify the funding necessary for upkeep. This would have resulted in the land being turned over to state control, and probably would have resulted in the selling off of large portions of the parks due to the fact that the states do not have the budget to keep the parks up either. Instead of abandoning the parks, the decision was made to advertise them in order to spread awareness. The main focus of these advertisements were the parks of the southwest including Zion, Bryce and the Grand Canyon.
One issue with visiting national parks is that you have to drive to them. Parks are located in remote areas and are generally not surrounded by much as far as services. This means that unless you live in the immediate area, you are going to need to fly into a major city to begin your trip from there. The major cities that are closest to the concentration of parks in the southwest are Salt Lake City and Las Vegas, and there was one additional aspect that made Las Vegas a better choice for most visitors. Aside from being Las Vegas and obviously representing a vacation on it's own, Las Vegas is located only 2.5 hours drive from Zion. This means that not only can you visit a national park during your vacation to Las Vegas, you can get there is about half the time it would take you to get to a park from Salt Lake City. Because of this fact, Zion has become one of the most popular national parks in America, and nobody is talking about taking federal funding away from it any more.
Martin Wynn
Nguyen An Tra My
