For some communities, the crush of tourists has become too much of a good thing.
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Cloudland Road is a narrow ribbon of gravel, winding through the foothills of Pomfret, Vermont. With space barely wide enough for two cars to pass each other, it’s a quiet, unobtrusive way to pass through a town of fewer than a thousand residents. Appearances can be deceiving, though. For a few weeks in autumn, Cloudland Road is packed with out-of-towners, looking to get the ideal shot for social media.
The visitors have come for Sleepy Hollow Farm, a private residence on Cloudland Road, with an idyllic framing of autumn in New England. Before them lies a farmhouse, pond, and gravel driveway with a blanket of maple leaves, laid out as if it were a painting used for a jigsaw puzzle. Conveniently missing from most photos is a blocky, metal gate stretched across the driveway. The farm is old, but the gate is new.
Fed up with congestion and crowds, residents of Pomfret have finally had enough. They’ve decided to ban travel on Cloudland Road in the autumn months. While photographers visit the farm most frequently in autumn, it’s a year-round destination. The gates and road closures are one of many attempts done by small, delicate areas to limit the damage done by excessive tourism.
Remote areas like Pomfret exist all over the world, with scenic beauty and few permanent residents. Tourism is often a boost for their local economies, but when does tourism become too much? How can we better manage the footprint when we travel?
Learn how responsible tourism can help preserve the places and resources we treasure most in this MagellanTV documentary.
Where Did All These People Come From?
Pick almost any community, large or small, and the benefits of tourism are apparent. Tourists support local restaurants, patronize hotels, and most importantly, tell their friends if they had a good time. For popular areas, some visitors talk themselves into becoming full-time residents.
Communities try to draw a healthy number of tourists each year, but there are those who’ve been saddled with more than they’ve bargained for. To address this problem, we need to look at how it got this way in the first place.
For decades, tourist spots were discovered in guide books, travel TV shows, and racks of brochures in hotel lobbies. But once the entirety of humanity entered our pockets, vacation spots were only one scroll away. Using a combination of smartphone cameras and geo-tagging features, social media launched tourism into a new era.
Pent-up energy during the COVID-19 pandemic caused record numbers of outdoor recreation and travel. According to the Outdoor Foundation, outdoor recreation in 2020 saw a growth of 7.1 million more people, compared to 2019 levels. By 2023, international travel bounced back to pre-pandemic levels, after hitting a 30-year low in 2020.
Protecting Land Is Hard, and Protecting Public Land Is Even Harder
The dusty hills of Walker Canyon rise high above I-15, just outside Lake Elsinore, California. Heat radiates off the three-lane highway, a busy counterpart to the quiet dirt roads of Pomfret, Vermont. Despite the contrast, both areas have felt the smothering hug of attention.
Walker Canyon is home to the poppy field “superbloom,” which comes alive when carpets of wildflowers cover the dusty hills. This occurs when a long drought is followed by a period of heavy rain. Superblooms typically happen only once a decade, attracting tourists who don’t want to miss out. The painter’s palette of color draws visitors who rush over from nearby Los Angeles.
Hordes of visitors jam highway to view the Lake Elsinore superbloom. (Source: Adobe Stock)
Patches of wildflowers are trampled underfoot, as crowds jostle to get the right photo. The 2019 superbloom brought a surge of new visitors, causing the typical issues of road congestion and landscape abuse. In Antelope Valley, two hours north, a pair of tourists landed a helicopter on top of the flowers they came to see.
Unlike Sleepy Hollow Farm, which is private property, Walker Canyon faces the challenge of being a public place. Closing off a gravel road in Vermont is one thing, but what do you do when tourists swarm a public 490-acre nature preserve? The politics get harder when there’s a sense of taxpayer ownership over the space. Public ownership can cause tourists to feel more entitled to their right to experience the space.
A city like Lake Elsinore has many priorities to juggle, alongside tourism. Decisions on what to do with all the visitors, and if they can handle them to begin with, are likely to be contested by city residents. The superbloom isn’t an annual event, so where should it fit in local government’s priorities? (Just ask towns in the Sun Belt if they own snow plows.)
The 2019 superbloom, and ensuing damage, prompted Lake Elsinore city officials to ban visitors from the hiking trails. Parking lots were shut down, and PSAs were broadcast towards would-be photographers on the shoulders of I-15. The ban was repeated in 2023, with the city acting preemptively out of public safety concerns.
In spite of the bans, local officials reported dealing with hikers parking cars elsewhere and getting there on foot. It takes a lot to separate people from something they expect to access for free.
How Do the National Parks Do It?
A small city might have few options other than tourist bans in key spots. But larger, more established tourist destinations can afford a more nuanced approach. This is particularly relevant in the U.S. National Parks system. Crowd management can be the key aspect to sustaining an area into the future.
Weeping Wall on Going-to-the-Sun Road, Glacier National Park (Credit: MPSharwood, via Wikimedia Commons)
Glacier National Park in northwest Montana features pristine lakes, pine forests, and sweeping views of the Rocky Mountains as they stretch into Canada. Attracting nearly three million visitors a year, Glacier’s roads, parking lots, and bathrooms are intended to shoulder the weight of the masses. This is especially relevant on sunny summer weekends when it seems like everyone has the same good idea.
In recent years, the park has instituted a timed-entry system for visitors in automobiles. This is done to alleviate stress on the popular Going-to-the-Sun Road and North Fork. These scenic routes are the main draws of the park, but no one wants to pair their drive through the sky with the smell of traffic exhaust. Passes are booked well in advance during the park's busiest months of June through September, since they're required for the daily window of 7:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m.
Permits and bans are two ways for tourist spots to control surges in visitors. They can provide rest for sensitive areas, at the cost of enforcement and time. Still, it’s only one side of the story. To fully tackle the burden of overtourism, the travel community needs to look inward.
Canyonlands National Park (Photo by Travis Norman)
What Does It Mean to Travel Responsibly?
When we travel, our impact goes beyond the footprints we leave in the sand. The places we choose, attractions we support, and behavior we demonstrate all contribute to the impact of tourism.
In MagellanTV’s The Last Tourist, directed by Tyson Sadler, responsible travel is offered as a counterweight to the burden of tourism as we know it. This concept suggests we look at the socioeconomic and environmental impacts of our travels, factoring it into where we choose to go and what we do when we get there.
A common aspect of responsible travel is choosing how we spend our money. Animal attractions, such as riding elephants or getting your photo with tigers, are commonly exploitive to the animals they claim to protect. Sadler’s work demonstrates that tourists are typically shielded from what goes on behind the scenes. A trained animal in a circus is meant to dazzle the crowd, but this obedience in an animal is often a result of prolonged, systemic abuse by handlers. By choosing to spend money elsewhere, tourists can vote with their wallets.
Elephant rides in Thekkady, India (Source: Linji Jinaraj, Wikimedia Commons)
Avoiding Harm to Local Populations
Aside from the abuse of animals, the dark side of tourism can bring about the abuse of people.
“Voluntourism” refers to the act of travel with the intent of helping others. This can encompass everything from building low-income housing to cleanup after a natural disaster. Despite the mission-based nature, voluntourism can prop up nefarious organizations whose sole purpose is to make money off visiting do-gooders.
In The Last Tourist, for example, filmmakers visit a Cambodian orphanage filled with groups of happy, smiling children. The kids are described as orphans, but it’s unclear how many actually are. In fact, sham orphanages are set up to capture voluntourist dollars, funneling money away from the children they claim to help. Voluntourists receive the validation of helping others, usually with a picture or two in the process, at the cost of supporting an essentially unregulated industry.
While a fake school or orphanage can be nearly indistinguishable from the real thing, the responsibility for due diligence falls back on the shoulders of those visiting. Responsible tourists can research any accreditations or affiliations an organization may have, before deciding to make the trip. If it’s too easy to get a teaching gig booked, chances are it’s too good to be legit.
Outside the tourist spots, away from the resorts, people can still travel responsibly when no one is watching. Hikers are taught the principles of “Leave No Trace,” which encourages visitors to leave as little impact, if any at all, when they pass through natural settings. These principles apply whether you’re in the Alaskan wilderness or walking a path at a resort in Jamaica.
Popular tourist spots can be overrun by litter, crowds, and footsteps veering off the trail. Cleaning up afterward can only do so much to alleviate the burden of popularity. By focusing on individual behavior, tourism can start to become more responsible and ethical.
Santa Monica, California (Photo by Travis Norman)
How Do We Turn the Tide?
We can teach people to stay on the trail, to pick up after themselves, and to be courteous to others. But that won’t change the fact that millions of people will continue to tell themselves, “I want to see the Eiffel Tower someday.”
Tourism is both the loving embrace of visiting spenders, and the crushing weight of everyone who has the same idea for a vacation. Finding a path through this mess is critical for popular tourist spots. In some ways, it’s self-correcting. How many visitors of the Louvre pass on the Mona Lisa because of the long lines to see it? A point is reached where the crowds become inseparable from the experience, whether climbing Mt. Everest or trudging through Times Square in New York City.
We can choose lesser-known areas to visit. Whether they be more remote parks, trails, or countries, there’s excitement in the discovery of something new in the shadow of something else.
Ryan Resatka, a notable adventure photographer, stopped geotagging his shots on Instagram. When a single tap of “post” on a phone can bring nearly a million people to see a small trail in New Hampshire, a certain responsibility comes with it. Instead, ambiguous location tags can give viewers a sense of bearing, without attracting them like wasps to a picnic.
Iconic spots don’t become that way by chance. Places like Machu Picchu and the Great Wall of China exist with few analogs. For those places, we have to decide what’s most important for us. Do we travel to see the seductive view from Instagram, or do we travel to see what we find in ourselves? Both reasons have their time and place. But, if we’re to soften our impact as travelers, the destination has to become less important than the experience of being away from home.
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Travis Norman is a writer and photographer, focusing on travel, cycling, and tabletop gaming. Originally from the Hudson Valley of New York, he now resides in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. He can be found on Instagram at @travis_norman.
Title Image: Scene at Angel's Landing trail at Zion National Park in Springdale, Utah (Credit: Allen.G, via Adobe Stock)
