In the 1980s and ’90s, river runners in the southwestern United States packed their gear and headed into canyon country. Those trips were the heartbeat of their year – where people connected with nature and with each other.
Today, that tradition is dying. It isn’t dying because we’ve lost interest. It is dying because we have been locked out. The system designed to manage these lands has become broken and corrupted. It is now nearly impossible for an average person to secure a permit. The lottery system, managed by Recreation.gov (widely dubbed “Wreck.gov”), has become a barrier that keeps locals from their own backyard, while antiquated allocation subsidies allow private tour companies to sit on unused trip permits.
The numbers paint a bleak picture. Last year alone, nearly 19,000 people applied for roughly 300 private permits in Dinosaur National Monument. That averages out to a meager 1.5% (1 in 66 years) chance of success. But even that number is misleading. For popular dates – when families can actually travel, and kids are out of school – the success rate plummets to roughly 0.3% (1 in 300 years). We are quite literally waiting lifetimes for a single trip, competing against an ocean of applicants, many of whom aren’t even human.
Recreation.gov has failed to implement basic safeguards to prevent automated scripts from sweeping up scarce permits. It is well known – and Rec.gov knows it – that operators are deploying advanced bots. There are setups where dedicated machines continuously scan for any permit (e.g., “any launch between May and October”) and instantly add it to a cart faster than a human hand can click.
It isn’t just tech-savvy individuals anymore; the unfairness has been commercialized. Subscription services like Campnab and Schnerp have industrialized this advantage. For a monthly fee, these companies scan the system for you. This creates a literal two-tiered system: those who can afford to pay a third party for access to public lands, and everyone else left refreshing their browsers in vain. Why hasn’t this been fixed? The answer appears to be simple economics. Recreation.gov is run by Booz Allen Hamilton, a private consulting firm that operates on a transaction-fee model.
In fact, Booz Allen Hamilton – which has invoiced over $140 million in fees – makes more money when the system is clogged and desperate. Every rejected application is revenue. Every frantically refreshed page during a cancellation drop is potential profit. This is a pay-to-play system transferring wealth from hopeful boaters directly to a government contractor in Washington, D.C., while our local rangers remain underpaid and our recreation facilities deteriorate.
But the Rec.gov racket is only half the problem. Even if the lottery were fixed tomorrow, a separate and equally unjust system would remain: the subsidized oligopoly enjoyed by private tour companies.
While do-it-yourself public boaters fight over Rec.gov scraps, private tour companies operate in subsidized oligopolies, allowing them immediate access to the commercial side of the river. They often operate with startling inefficiency. Only 66% of the total private tour allocation subsidy is used at Dinosaur National Monument. That equates to about 100 trips annually – potential access for 2,500 people – that never launch but are in the management plan. Many of these operators consistently run less than 50% of their capacity yet retain their allocation year after year. Meanwhile, strict “no-show” penalties for do-it-yourself boaters (a two-year ban) are mathematically irrelevant when it takes 66 years to win a permit anyway.
What we need:
1. Rewrite the 1979 Dinosaur River Management Plan: We are at a critical juncture. Canyonlands National Park has recently updated its River Management Plan; Dinosaur National Monument must do the same. We cannot continue to operate on data and policies from the 1950s through the 1970s.
2. Stop the Renewal of Recreation.gov: The current contract is a scam on the American public. We must push to end this relationship with Booz Allen Hamilton and return control (and revenue) to the managing agencies like the National Park Service, U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management.
3. Stop the Bots: Implement simple human verification during checkout, such as captcha.
4. Permit Accountability: Enforce “use it or lose it” policies on private tour companies.
5. Transparency: Publicly post all lottery statistics and all private tour company actual use figures so there is actual transparency and oversight.
Our rivers are a public resource, not a corporate profit center. The current system is not just incompetent; it is apathetic to the people who love and care for these lands the most.
Tom Martin has spent 50 years getting blisters and hopelessly lost while hiking in the Grand Canyon, while writing books that help others do the same. He co-authored four river guides with Duwain Whitis, including “Guide to the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon,” which won the 2007 National Outdoor Book Award. He edited Otis “Dock” Marston’s “From Powell to Power” and received the 2016 Grand Canyon Historical Society Pioneer Award for historical research. For 25 years, he has advocated for wilderness rivers through River Runners for Wilderness and has conducted over 700 oral history recordings.
