This past July I drove into Yosemite National Park, whereupon I purchased an “America the Beautiful” annual entrance pass. For $80 this allows me to drive one personal vehicle into all of our national parks for one year. Even at the busiest parks, that flat fee covers me and up to three passengers.
“Eighty dollars… is that okay?” the ranger asked tepidly.
“Um, yeah,” I laughed. “That’s pretty cheap.”
“I agree,” he smiled. “A lot of people don’t.”
Whether he meant them or not, he was referring to the Sierra Club.
Last week, the Trump administration introduced a new fee schedule for our national parks. On Wednesday morning, the Sierra Club blasted the changes in a news release that concluded Trump’s policies were seeking to turn the national parks into “playgrounds for the super-rich.”
Lifestyles of the super-rich
I never thought of us as super-rich, or rich at all. But the national parks will remain our playground, because even with the new fee schedule, my America the Beautiful pass will still cost $80 per year.
To say we’re getting away with legalized plunder is an understatement.
Two years ago, in the span of 12 months on one $80 national park pass we visited eight parks over two vacations totaling less than three weeks. This included headliners such as Yellowstone, Grand Teton, Zion and the Grand Canyon. That works out to just five bucks per person, per park.
And when I turn 62 (which isn’t that far off) eighty bucks will buy me an unlimited pass that will last the rest of my life.
An annual pass to Disney’s Florida theme park empire is $1,629 per person (plus tax). And just two adults visiting one Disney park for one day will spend roughly $250 just to get in the gate. Families with young kids regularly spend thousands for just a few days at Disney.
I would not begrudge even a tripling of my annual pass fee, plus the elimination of that silly-generous break when I turn 62. The people who deserve a break on entrance fees are not Gen Xers with grown kids, but young American families with small children. Young families have less time and resources to visit eight national parks in one year, even though their federal taxes have already paid for those parks.
Why Sierra is sad
The new national park fee schedule does impose some steep price increases, just not on Americans.
According to last week’s announcement from the Department of the Interior:
Beginning Jan. 1, 2026, the Annual Pass will cost $80 for U.S. residents and $250 for nonresidents, ensuring that American taxpayers who already support the National Park System receive the greatest benefit. Nonresidents without an annual pass will pay a $100 per person fee to enter 11 of the most visited national parks, in addition to the standard entrance fee.
This addresses several longstanding concerns that are clear to anyone who has recently been to the most visited parks. First, the popular parks are piteously overcrowded, which isn’t surprising since it’s so inexpensive to get in. Second, foreign visitors make up a disproportionate share of the overcrowding, which . . . isn’t surprising since it’s so inexpensive to get in.
In addition to not paying for our national parks through their taxes, foreign visitors who can afford to fly here to park hop are also obviously quite well off. Some are even “super-rich.” Hiking their entrance fees isn’t going to drive most of them away, any more than it would deter me from visiting.
And to the extent the new fees do reduce foreign visits, that will alleviate overcrowding for the Americans who paid for this stuff in the first place.
The Property and Environment Research Center (PERC), a real conservation group, has been advocating for a more rational fee structure for years.
PERC CEO Brian Yablonski had nothing but praise for the new fees on foreigners:
This is a big win for everyone who loves America’s national parks. A $100 international visitor surcharge could generate $55 million annually at Yellowstone National Park alone, more than quadrupling that park’s revenue to address deteriorating trails, failing wastewater systems, and crumbling bridges.
The Sierra Club response ignored the potential revenue boost and didn’t acknowledge any potential benefit at all from the cash infusion. Instead, they used the opportunity to denounce the Trump administration for a variety of alleged misdeeds and ended with this sour note:
Gouging foreign tourists at the entrance gate won’t provide the financial support these crown jewels of our public lands need. Without that support, we run the risk of our true common grounds becoming nothing more than playgrounds for the super-rich.
Apparently a 4x revenue boost for Yellowstone alone isn’t “financial support” that registers with the Sierra Club.
Whose side are they on?
Why is an alleged conservation NGO siding with rich foreign tourists while dismissing the strong possibility that more Americans will be able to better enjoy their own national parks?
Unlike PERC, the Sierra Club has long since ceased to be concerned primarily with conservation. But assuming instead that Sierra is just a left-wing anti-energy NGO explains nearly all of their policy choices.
No energy systems chew up more land (i.e.: “the environment”) than weather dependent wind turbines and solar panels. Even Bloomberg News has conceded that kicking out a kilowatt from wind and solar requires at least 100 times more land than doing the same with natural gas and nuclear power plants. And, because sunshine and breezes don’t magically appear whenever energy demand spikes, even more land must be filled up to build and park battery back-up systems.
But these environment-gobbling energy options are the only ones you’ll find supported on the Sierra Club website. The supposed conservationists who oppose offshore drilling for oil and natural gas enthusiastically endorse filling the oceans with wind turbines instead.
And their hypocrisy doesn’t end there.
While claiming to favor energy systems that do not produce greenhouse gas emissions, Sierra has for decades been “unequivocally opposed to nuclear energy.” According to the Department of Energy, American nuclear reactors currently produce more than triple the combined energy provided by all of our land hogging wind turbines and solar panels.
Nuclear power is the only limitlessly scalable, infinitely reliable, energy system we have that does not provide greenhouse emissions. It is impossible to claim you care about the environment and hate nuclear power.
The Sierra Club once knew this. Until half a century ago it was a promoter of nuclear power.
“Nuclear energy is the only practical alternative that we have to destroying the environment with oil and coal,” claimed famed landscape photographer Ansel Adams, a Sierra Club director back when they were not an anti-energy group.
But today’s Sierra Club is now on the opposite side of the man whose photos made the Sierra Mountains so famous.
In their last publicly available tax filing, the Sierra Club reported annual revenue of more than $173 million. PERC reported less than $6.8 million.
Keep those numbers in mind if you think you can afford to pay more than $80 a year to visit all of the national parks and want to put a little extra into the cause for some people who genuinely care about what happens in them.
