Denali National Park is the size of Massachusetts. There are few developed or marked trails in its 7,370 square miles, and it contains six million of the wildest acres in the National Park System. And yet park officials, faced with overuse in the most popular spots, have taken the unusual step of asking people not to post GPS coordinates online or publish them in print.

“If someone says this is the greatest campsite ever and then everyone camps there on a published route, we’re going to see impacts,” Michael Raffaeli, a backcountry ranger at Denali, told Alaska Dispatch News.

Social media and blogs share the blame, but park officials said the most recalcitrant offender is Backpacker Magazine. Other publishers, such as Lonely Planet and Rough Guide, have agreed not to be too precise in their trail and campsite write-ups.

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“They’ve been very cooperative and very happy to provide the type of message that we like to provide,” he said. “That is, not providing specific route information.”

Backpacker, on the other hand, doesn’t just publish latitude and longitude, it also provides turn by turn directions with GPS data included.

The park says fighting erosion on the trails with the heaviest use is a losing battle, so it’s trying to deliver a message of dispersion in the rest of Denali. Campers who watch the required 30-minute information video are told not just how to be safe around bears, but also to camp on durable surfaces like gravel river beds and not to walk single file where possible.

In the 1950s, Denali naturalist Adoph Murie wrote, “Let the tourist be on his own, and not be spoon-fed at intervals. Let him be encouraged to keep his eyes open, do his own looking and exploring, and catch what he can of the magic of wilderness.”

Words that are even more important today.

Have an opinion on publishing GPS coordinates? Sound off in the AJ poll, “Should Travel Stories Include GPS Coordinates?“

Photo by Aaron Leavy