At Zion national park, a popular trail has been closed since 2010. At the Grand Canyon, a rusting pipeline that supplies drinking water to the busiest part of the park breaks at least a half-dozen times a year. At Voyageurs, a historic cabin collapsed.

The National Park Service is the protector of some of America’s greatest environmental and cultural treasures. Yet a huge funding shortfall means that the strain of America’s passion for its parks is showing. Trails are crumbling and buildings are rotting. In all there is an $11bn backlog of maintenance work that repair crews have been unable to perform, a number that has mostly increased every year in the past decade.

“Americans should be deeply concerned,” said John Garder, senior director of budget and appropriations at the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA). The National Park Service, he argued, is hamstrung by a lack of resources and is in “triage mode”.

Today the Guardian is announcing a major expansion of This Land is Your Land, our series investigating the threats facing America’s public lands.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Ingersoll Lodge after its collapse, at Voyageurs national park. Photograph: National Park Service

National parks are just one part of an unparalleled system, managed by the government and held in trust for the public, and spanning over 600m acres of forests, deserts, tundra and glacier-covered peaks, as well as historical sites such as the Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument. They are integral to American life: an ancestral home for Native Americans; a retreat for vacationers, sportspeople and hunters; a source of grazing; and an economic engine. Yet their future is uncertain.

Earlier this month 10 members of a National Park Service advisory board, which had promoted issues such as encouraging more minority visitors, quit en masse, complaining that the new administration was unwilling to meet with them and was not prioritizing the parks.

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The Trump administration has signaled that it thinks protected areas are too expansive, and recently shrunk two national monuments created under Barack Obama and Bill Clinton – Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante in Utah.

Meanwhile advocates have raised concerns that the Department of Interior, which oversees many federal lands, is staffed with lobbyists for the energy industry. Even absent such issues, climate change, privatization and energy extraction risk changing the face of the country’s public spaces forever.

The Guardian will report intensively on these protected places, covering the threats they face, the diverse people who use them, and their critical environmental and economic role in American life.

National parks recorded 331m recreational visits in 2016 (the highest ever), boast an estimated economic value of $92bn, and have totemic significance in the national imagination.

Yet signs of deterioration are evident across the park system.

At the Grand Canyon, a 1960s-era pipeline that transports all drinking water to the park’s thronged South Rim, and is also intended for fire suppression, is 20 years past its design life. It breaks anywhere from a half-dozen to over 20 times a year, requiring repair crews to helicopter in for repairs that can take days. The cost to fix each breakdown is as much as $25,000, and officials say it may take $124m to replace it.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The ageing Grand Canyon pipeline. Photograph: AP

At Harpers Ferry national park, which has civil war associations and was the location of an abolitionist uprising, officials have been unable to restore an 1848 building that they acquired decades ago. A base hospital during the war and later a school for former slaves, it is a solid-looking brick structure with tidy white verandas. Yet inside, it appears as if someone has taken a hammer to it.

There was “massive disrepair”, said Garder of the NPCA, who visited it in 2016. “The stairways were unsafe, there was water damage, the plaster was decaying and falling off the walls.”

And at a striking and exposed point at Voyageurs national park in Minnesota, overlooking the water, the former site of the Ingersoll Lodge is now bare. The historic building was reduced to rubble in 2014, probably after heavy weather disastrously combined with uncompleted maintenance work and existing structural weaknesses. The remains of the cabin are currently stored off-site as officials debate whether to rebuild it.



“You’re sad but you’re also frustrated,” said Christina Hausman, head of the Voyageurs National Park Association, a not-for-profit partner of the park. “We continually do not give the National Park Service the resources they need to protect these places.”

In this and other cases, visitor experience is directly impacted. At Zion, a trail leading to the Emerald Pools, a complex of waterfalls and ponds, has been off-limits since a 2010 landslide, and it is hoped that a philanthropic grant will allow it to reopen in 2020.

Meanwhile increased visitation has led to broken toilet seats and doors in bathrooms “not designed for the volume of numbers we have now”, said the park’s superintendent, Jeff Bradybaugh. The park is not always able to tend to them immediately because of its stretched purse strings.

While these issues sound minor compared with a collapsed cabin, “it’s like seeing trash on the sidewalk: you feel like it’s not cared for, and that no one cares, and that’s not at all what the park service wants to convey”, said Rob Smith, an NPCA regional director who complained of worn and illegible interpretive signs and “out of order” notices on rainforest trails and at a visitor center at Olympic national park, west of Seattle.

Much of the backlog dates to the era of Mission 66, a massive infrastructure push in the 1950s and 1960s that resulted in notable structures like the Wright Brothers National Memorial visitors center in North Carolina and the Blue Ridge Parkway, which winds through North Carolina and Virginia. Projects from this period are now at the end of their lifespans. Roads account for about half the maintenance backlog, and there are even $183m of repairs overdue for employee housing.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Lockwood House at Harpers Ferry. Photograph: National Parks Conservation Association

The interior secretary, Ryan Zinke, has said deferred maintenance at parks is a priority, and has proposed raising ticket prices, from around $30 per vehicle to $70 at 17 of the most popular parks, as a way to deal with the issue. Yet critics note that this might only produce an additional $70m a year, or less than 1% of the current backlog, with a possible side effect of discouraging those on a budget. “What we’re doing is we’re trying to narrow the gap,” said parks spokesperson Jeffrey Olson.

The park service’s problems are also having a knock-on effect on public lands policy at large, because the White House has used the repairs backlog to justify not investing in the acquisition of new public spaces. A spokesperson for the Department of the Interior did not provide responses to a request for comment.

Tony Knowles, the former Democratic governor of Alaska and the head of the park service advisory committee whose members resigned, said the backlog was a continual worry among his former board members. He thinks it’s a missed opportunity.

“At a time when unity is something that is so lacking in all of the discourse and political actions, if there’s one subject that really brings Americans together of all parties, all parts of the country, all standards of income, all backgrounds and cultures and races, the one thing is a love of the concept of the national parks.”