The number of hikers visiting US national parks is increasing. So is the challenge of keeping them safe | National parks

In 1974, Scott Crollard, a teen on a church youth group trip, casually climbed cables to help reach the lofty summit of Half Dome, whose name describes a unique rock formation in California from which you can see the Yosemite Valley some 5,000ft below.

“I remember sitting on the edge of the lip of Half Dome with my buddy and just gazing over the edge. And when he got off, he kind of nudged me, and I darn near fell off the thing just because we were so nonchalant about it,” said Collard, now a 65-year-old retired emergency room physician in St Louis who again ascended Half Dome in 2017 with more appreciation for its magnitude.

These days, climbing Half Dome by the terrifyingly steep cables attracts far more visitors than a half-century ago and has become more difficult to do – not because the landscape has changed but because the National Park Service implemented a lottery system in 2013 to limit how many people could obtain permits to hike it.

Since then, the number of applicants for Half Dome permits before the season starts has doubled from about 17,000 in 2013 to 35,000 in 2023, according to the park service.

That is part of a larger surge in visitors at US national parks in recent years. In 2013, the number was 273 million. Last year, 325 million people visited the parks. Not everyone sees that as a positive for the preservation of the parks’ natural beauty and people trying to escape the chaos of modern life.

Now, in the wake of the death last month of a 20-year-old woman, Grace Rohloff, who was descending the cables with her father, Jonathan, the climb has received new scrutiny, including Jonathan’s suggestion that the federal agency should install more wooden slats to help people navigate the steep, slick granite.

Others counter that there are risks in all parts of life and that people should just take proper precautions and use their judgment to determine whether the hike is worth the risk of an unlikely fall rather than adding one more thing that changes national parks from the way things used to be.

“I don’t want them to necessarily drill any more into the mountain, because I’m a naturist, and I’m a firm believer that we don’t want to ruin nature,” said Jonathan, whose daughter was planning to follow both her parents into education. “I would just like to see better safety measures.”

If you ask people who study national parks why traffic to them has increased so much over the last decade, they point to social media.

“There is this feedback effect where more people visit, take photos, share them with their network, and that begets more visits,” said Casey Wichman, an environmental economist at Georgia Institute of Technology.

That increased interest is not necessarily a bad thing, Wichman said.

People scrolling Instagram and becoming inspired to visit the parks “could generate a greater appreciation for the outdoors and more appreciation for conserving natural landscapes”, Wichman said. “On the negative side, there are certainly overcrowding issues which diminish the quality of a visit for somebody else. There is the degradation of environmental resources.”

Cris Hazzard, better known as the Hiking Guy, thinks social media has made hikes like Half Dome and Angels Landing at Zion national park in Utah especially alluring.

Rohloff and her father had hiked thousands of miles together, but many people who do the hikes often have little experience, Hazzard said.

“Everyone has the same right to experience them,” said Hazzard, 52, who has hiked Half Dome at least 10 times. “The problem lies in the fact that social media is accessible to anyone who downloads an app and can move their finger 5mm, whereas actually doing one of these hikes requires a fair degree of preparation.”

Some people want professional photos at Half Dome, like the ones they see on Instagram. At Yosemite, the photographer Shawn Reeder shoots elopements and portraits in which women wear a so-called flying dress that flutters in the wind. He has photographed three elopements at Half Dome.

He loves his work but admits the culture at the park has changed since a trip to Yosemite in 1995 inspired him to move west from Maryland.

“You just saw a lot more people being present, and as the social media era grew, you saw a lot more people going to places just to get their photo,” Reeder said.

Asked whether he thinks his business has contributed to that change, Reeder said he didn’t necessarily think so and that droves of people have long visited Yosemite.

“We live in a world now where social media is a part of it, and so there are incredible positives to that, and there are some negatives,” Reeder said.

On the suggestion that the park service increase the number of wooden slats at the cables, Reeder said it was a great idea.

“It doesn’t change the character of anything. It’s still the cables, it’s still an adventure,” he said.

And, as Grace and Jonathan Rohloff, found out, the shortage of slats can cost the lives of even experienced, careful climbers.

On 13 July, Grace and Jonathan Rohloff, who also hiked Angels Landing and the Grand Canyon together, finally reached the top after years of entering the lottery for a permit.

It was a strenuous trek, “but we’re used to strenuous”, said Jonathan, who like his wife, Astraea, is a principal in Arizona.

A park ranger warned them at the bottom that there was a heat warning and that thunderstorms could arrive in the afternoon. But atop Half Dome, as they looked around and Grace told her dad she loved him, the skies were clear. Then as Jonathan took a photo of Grace, he was startled by a boom and turned around to see a black cloud fast approaching.

They started to descend the cables as rain became heavier. A star athlete and respite care worker, Grace kept stopping because of a logjam of people below her, even though there is generally enough space for people to move around one another.

“She was concerned about the other people around her being safe and didn’t want to rush down even though we were getting drenched in rain because other people were slipping, and so ultimately, she put other people’s lives before hers,” Jonathan recalled.

Grace lost her grip and fell hundreds of feet. Jonathan descended the cables and for hours kept telling Grace he loved her and to stick with him but got nothing. A helicopter arrived with rescuers who confirmed she was dead.

“It was devastating,” he said.

Jonathan contacted the park rangers about trying to recover Grace’s backpack, which her phone with the photos she took at the top. They retrieved the backpack but the phone had fallen out, and they were not able to find it.

During an interview for the investigation, he shared his suggestion to convert the cables into more of a suspension bridge with slats a foot apart from one another rather than roughly every 10ft.

After a Los Angeles Times article in which Jonathan shared his idea, a number of readers wrote letters to the editor expressing their sympathies but arguing that cables work well and adding additional planks would just create a false sense of security on what can be a dangerous hike.

“It’s tragic that a young woman fell to her death descending Half Dome and that her father saw her die. My heart goes out to him,” one person wrote. “But we shouldn’t commemorate her death by trying to subdue Half Dome and national parks in general. Wild places, even semi-wild places, are good for the soul.”

Jonathan said he didn’t “think everybody should run around in bubble wrap”.

But he thinks adding some wooden planks wouldn’t destroy nature and that people wouldn’t have to use the extra slats if they didn’t want to.

The park service has not commented on Jonathan’s proposal and did not respond to the Guardian’s interview request.

“I don’t know why Yosemite wouldn’t do a little bit of work to the cables to make them more safe,” Jonathan said. “That’s the hardest thing for me. Grace is not coming back, so I really want to see them make it more safe so there is not another situation like Grace’s.”