A record 332 million people visited U.S. national parks in 2024, followed by roughly 323 million in 2025.

That’s a lot of love for national parks and lands. You might think that such big numbers of visitors automatically create windfalls for the towns and businesses that serve them. The National Park Service calls towns or counties within roughly 60 miles (about 100 kilometers) of a park boundary “gateway” communities. Gateway businesses operate in those jurisdictions.

Gateways are like the Main Street of the parks, which depend on them to lodge, feed and guide visitors. Generally speaking, stable business conditions mean less risk for businesses and a healthier Main Street.

Nationally, visitors spent a record US$29 billion at the parks themselves and $56 billion for lodging, gas, groceries and other goods and services in gateway communities. That supported about 340,100 jobs nationwide in 2024, the most recent year for which that data is available.

I research Main Street businesses, and I co-owned a company for more than two decades that manufactured oars and paddles. In the summer I live close to Maine’s Acadia National Park, where businesses in the gateway town of Bar Harbor say they’re having an off year in 2026.

And I’m concerned that gateway businesses face at least four main risks not seen in a typical Main Street ecosystem: Park boundaries can change and with them the gateway’s vicinity; park strategies to manage the surge in visitors can make the flow of customers more unpredictable; bouts of extreme weather and their local effects are growing more common; and workers who might get jobs at gateway businesses are being priced out of nearby housing.

Singly and together, these risks create a distinct category of challenge for this type of Main Street business.

First, a park’s boundaries can change.

A gateway economy........

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