I recently moved to Las Vegas, Nevada, in part because of my love of climbing and my belief that Red Rock Canyon is one of the best and most beautiful places in the country to climb for most of the year, i.e. when it's not summer and 115 degrees outside.

Being a National Conservation Area, Red Rock Canyon charges entry fees, though they're relatively modest as far as entry fees to federal lands go: $20 for a single car, and the costs go towards conservation and management. Falling under the purview of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), Red Rock Canyon accepts the inter-agency "America the Beautiful - The National Parks and Federal Recreational Lands Pass". Better known to the general public and probably to you as the "National Park Pass". What would otherwise result in 100-200 dollars a month from my pocket in daily pass fees is reduced to a cool $0 thanks to the power of the subscription model.

That said, I have never visited Red Rock Canyon for free.

Introducing Recreation.gov

I'm passionate about all people having equal access to the outdoors. We may all dress up and go to work and use electronic money to buy things, and use tools like ChatGPT and toilet paper, but at the end of the day we're all walking, talking animals. So at face value, I love the idea of Recreation.gov: a public service giving ALL Americans (and tourists) equal opportunity to enjoy nature, find information about public sites and services available, and make reservations.

In recent years you may have noticed an increase in U.S. recreation sites using Recreation.gov. Secured a spot at Camp 4 in Yosemite National Park? Booked a permit for back-country camping in the Grand Canyon? Tried to snatch a highly-coveted Half Dome hiking permit, or the most-difficult-to-obtain permit for Coyote Buttes North, AKA The Wave? Then you've used the exact reservation system I'm talking about.

Like most federally-managed outdoor recreation sites in the United States in recent years, in 2020 Red Rock Canyon introduced a seasonal reservation-only entrance policy to among other reasons, restrict the flow of people through the scenic loop drive. These reservations are offered through Recreation.gov.

Cool, so what Jeff?

"That said, I have never visited Red Rock Canyon for free."

Back to this. Between December, 2023 and January 24 I spent $10 on fees from 5 different entrances into Red Rock. Just yesterday, I spent another $2. I used my National Park Pass each time, so I should have spent $120 on entrance fees during that time, but spent $14 instead. Sweet.

But wait a minute, where does this $2-per-visit come from?

Recreation.gov charges a $2 fee each time you book a reservation, as a "reservation fee".

Now you may be thinking who cares, Jeff it's just $2. It probably goes towards conservation too.

To which I say: no, remember I said that the $20 entry fee goes towards conservation and/or management? You can see in this screenshot that it isn't clear to whom the fee goes or why.

In the past, I'd have said the same thing, "who cares", and just paid the fee without paying (pun intended) much thought into where it was going. It's just 2 bucks after all. Now that I'm going much more frequently to climb, I'm paying the fee more often; logging in and taking the time to make a reservation more often. This got me thinking, does someone like Alex Honnold, who supposedly visits Red Rock Canyon nearly every day to climb, have to take his time to log in and make 30 reservations a month; to pay $60 a month in reservation fees? $720 annually? The average person likely isn't recreating every day, but that still sounds like a lot of money adding up here, and this is one person we're talking about. How much money are these fees generating and why are they levied at all?

Math time

Red Rock Canyon receives nearly four million visitors per year. If we assume that most of those people are coming in by car, that each person visits exactly one time, and that each car that comes in is full (so say five people coming in for single reservation), that means that there are by extremely rough estimation, 800,000 reservations in one year. There are some faulty assumptions here though. It's probably safer to assume that not every car coming in is full, not every full car is a five-seater, and that some percentage of visitors comes more than once in a year (observe me or Alex Honnold or any other local climber) so the real number is likely much higher. To keep this estimate conservative for the sake of argument, however, we'll leave it at 800,000 reservations.

We'll also need to account for the fact that reservations aren't required four months out of the year. Considering these months overlap with summer, there likely aren't as many visitors during this time considering the temperature is consistently in the 90s and 100s, but again, let's be conservative and remove all visitors during that period; 1/3 of the annual reservations. So with these numbers, the number of reservations per year sits somewhere around 533,333. For those following the math, at $2 per reservation, by estimation that leads to roughly one million dollars a year in reservation fees.

Now keep in mind, this is only one recreation area that Recreation.gov manages reservations for, and mind you, it's not even a national park. Note that 3,680 sites fall under the purview of Recreation.gov. On top of that, many national parks requiring reservations experience significantly higher volumes of visitors. Also consider that fees are charged by Recreation.gov for not only entry to recreation areas, but also things like reserving campsites and also lottery entries (of which the fee is much higher than $2 - last I checked, somewhere around $9.

I recognize that there are other incorrect or missing assumptions here. The exact number of American simoleans that collectively we're paying in reservation fees isn't necessary for my argument here, my argument is more a general issue of magnitude; that someone is profiting handsomely off of our recreating.

Taking a step back...

I work as a software engineer. I have worked on large, multi-million dollar web applications for small companies and for corporations alike, and also many micro personal projects that will never see the light of day. I'm acutely aware that building web applications has financial and temporal cost, and that cost is generally speaking, always high. Exact figures vary depending on the project, but there are financial costs that exist universally across all projects; costs for computer hardware and electricity to power said hardware, funds to pay developers. For a larger project like this, especially one run with government funds, there's a need for project managers, product designers, graphic designers, Quality Assurance, etc.

Then there are maintenance costs. Initial delivery of software usually isn't the bulk of the cost-- it's actually in maintenance, which can account for 90% of the total cost of a project.

Regardless of how much it cost to develop Recreation.gov, I can assure you a few things:

1. While the cost to host the site might scale linearly with the number of people visiting the site and making reservations, the maintenance costs likely do not. The maintenance costs are likely constant.

2. The cost of Recreation.gov, split per reservation/site visit is far below $2. Considering there are hundreds of millions of visitors to national parks a year, and there are also likely millions of visits to the site that don't result in a reservation, the cost of each reservation made is likely a small fraction of a dollar.

Even if the up-front costs to develop Recreation.gov were high, the site has been active since 2018 so it's probably prudent to assume the $2 figure is not purely recouping for the initial cost to launch the service.

So at this point you may be thinking: ok so government is inefficient and it's probably bureaucracy that causes these fees. It's a .gov website after all so the money is going to the government.

That's what I thought initially as well. After all, the .gov in Recreation.gov implies that the site is owned by a government agency, and therefore, it's not a stretch to think that any money you pay through the site probably goes to the government agency, for no profit.

Introducing Booz Allen Hamilton - the team that brought you Recreation.gov

If you haven't heard of Booz Allen Hamilton, remember that name. They're one of the largest technology and consulting firms in the United States, with an overall company value of roughly 18 Billion USD. The United States federal government is one of their largest clients, and they fulfill many millions of dollars in government contracts each year.

You can read about their strategy for delivering Recreation.gov here but I'll share an important snippet:

"Recreation.gov was an investment for Booz Allen, designed collaboratively with participating agencies, but at no cost to the federal government. Instead of a traditional cost structure, the unique contractual agreement is a transaction-based fee model that lets the government and Booz Allen share in risk, reward, results, and impact. This is a true public-private partnership—it uses no government money."

At first glance, you might think "oh wow! Benevolent capitalism! You love to see it." At second glance, you might see what Booz Allen Hamilton saw: deferred payment in lieu of a a per-transaction fee would be tapping into a goldmine, with hundreds of millions of visitors annually visiting national parks. An ever-expanding gold mine when you consider that more parks have gradually started requiring reservations during peak seasons.

Let me be clear: I have no qualms with capitalism. Quite the opposite actually. I am a small business owner myself, and believe capitalism is the most productive means of addressing people's needs AND wants.

That said, when you consider the larger picture of what is happening here, it is quite insidious. The lands managed by Recreation.gov are public lands. We already pay to maintain them with our access fees, yet a private company now receives money nearly every time we visit. Consider this: If you purchase a national park pass for the low price of $80 a year, during every day of the year you could make 3 reservations and visit 3 different parks, for a total of 1,095 park visits. In that time frame, the federal government received $80. Booz Allen Hamilton received $2,190.

I'm not the only one who sees the absurdity in this fee structure. After a bit of research I found out that there's an ongoing lawsuit over the fees that started in the State of Nevada, Kotab v. Bureau of Land Management, the impetus for this lawsuit: the reservation fees at Red Rock Canyon, with the plaintiff arguing and the court ruling that reservation fees were implemented without proper public approval.

A small excerpt from the ruling:

"Because the record does not show that BLM complied with the FLREA's public-participation requirements before imposing this $2 processing fee, I find that this charge was adopted in violation of the statute."

As of today, February 2, 2024, Red Rock Canyon is still charging reservation fees (along with all other sites as far as I know).

This isn't the only legal action that's come out of this matter. There's another lawsuit Wilson v. Booz Allen Hamilton that's yet to reach resolution.

You can read great summaries about both of these suits here.

The effects of these suits are still playing out, and the outcomes are yet to be seen. whether they're successful at eliminating these fees is yet to be seen. As long as reservations are required, and the whole reservation fee goes to a private entity, we're being charged to use land that we collectively own, and a private company is the sole beneficiary; exploiting our human need to be outside for unbounded profit; turning our natural desire to be outside into a money faucet in which they have full control over the tap.