Two national parks that shouldn’t be, and two that should take their places

Gateway Arch National Park: worth the visit, if not the name. (Image courtesy National Park Service.)

Whenever someone tries to rank their favorite American national parks, a pair always end up near the bottom of the list: Gateway Arch National Park and Hot Springs National Park. The explanation given is typically apologetic — they’re interesting places and worth visiting, but they don’t really live up to the name of national parks.

Hot Springs has the distinction of being the oldest park in the system, by some measures, having been acquired as the Hot Springs Reservation back in 1832 — decades before the establishment of Yellowstone, the world’s first national park to be so called. It consists of the titular springs and several historic bathhouses where visitors once came for therapy and relaxation. But it’s small — at 5,550 acres, it’s vastly smaller than the next biggest park (the still-tiny National Park of American Samoa, 8,256 acres).

Even smaller is Gateway Arch, at a puny 91 acres. The park contains the arch grounds plus the old federal courthouse where the Dred Scott decision was handed down. The site was originally called the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial; I’m not sure at what point a renaming was first considered, but the certain concept of “national expansion” isn’t viewed as uncritically as when the memorial was initially envisioned in the 1930s. In any case, almost everyone knows it as the Gateway Arch or St. Louis Arch.

Bathhouse Row at Hot Springs National Park, seen from above. (Image by Mitch Smith, NPS.)

So why are these units even national parks? Well, Hot Springs was incorporated into the system when the National Park Service was new and the concept of what constitutes a “park” was a little less well defined. (See also the since-disbanded Mackinac National Park and Platt National Park.) The reasons for dubbing the Arch a national park are a little more obscure, but it seems to have been a tourism-boosting act of Congress that even the Park Service argued against.

Now, the two units undeniably belong in the national park system. (I haven’t been to Hot Springs, but the Arch is pretty neat.) But in both size and significance, Hot Springs would be better off as a national historical park and Gateway Arch as a national monument. The main obstacle to this would be outcry from politicians representing those states who would protest taking away their states’ sole national parks.

But allow me to propose a swap: Allow the Park Service to reclassify these two parks as above…and simultaneously rename Missouri’s Ozark National Scenic Riverways as “Ozark Riverways National Park” and Arkansas’ Buffalo National River to “Buffalo River National Park.”

Rocky Falls, Ozark National Scenic Riverways. (Image courtesy National Park Service.)

I’ve advocated for creating these new parks before. Both park units conserve far more land than just the riverbanks — sometimes including land miles from the rivers themselves. They have not just rivers but also campgrounds, hiking trails, and historic sites. They’re both popular destinations for float trips. And they’re pretty big: Ozark NSR is 80,784 acres, and Buffalo NR is 94,301 acres, both bigger than better known parks like Arches or Mesa Verde. They’d be handsome additions to the system, and very unlikely to rank near the bottom of people’s lists of favorites.

A hiker at Steel Creek Overlook, Buffalo National River. (Image by Christina Flood, NPS.)

I’m on the record saying that the NPS portfolio could use some pruning. I also think some cleanup of classifications is in order, although I’ll reserve that for a future essay. Unfortunately, given the current administration’s hostility to the very concept of public goods, I have no hope for any sort of thoughtful improvement in the next few years. Ideas like this will have to wait for the next president; for now, we need to fight like hell just to keep the status quo.