Entry is free at all National Park sites on Saturday

By Forrest Brown | CNN

Point Reyes? Free. Yosemite? Free. Muir Woods? Free!

Saturday is the start of National Park Week 2022. And in celebration, the National Park Service is offering free entry to all 423 of its sites on April 16.

That includes not only those marquee national parks, but all other types of sites the NPS manages: National battlefields such as Antietam in Maryland; national historic sites such as President Theodore Roosevelt’s birthplace in New York; national monuments such as the Native American Effigy Mounds in Iowa; and national seashores such as Cumberland Island in Georgia. (Click here for a full listing of every NPS site, which it calls “units”).

Actually, most NPS sites are free all year. Only 108 charge a fee. And as you’d suspect, it’s the big names that ask you to pay to enter: Places such as Arches in Utah, Crater Lake in Oregon and Shenandoah in Virginia.

But they’re all free this Saturday.

5 free days in 2022

Just in case you missed the free day back in January and can’t make it to an NPS site on Saturday, there are still three remaining dates when entry fees are waived for you planners:

• August 4: Anniversary of the Great American Outdoors Act
• September 24: National Public Lands Day
• November 11: Veterans Day

One catch: “The entrance fee waiver for fee-free days does not cover amenity or user fees for activities such as camping, boat launches, transportation or special tours,” the NPS says.

If you’re not much of a planner, it might be a good idea to pick up the habit — particularly if you want to see a popular site on a free day.

Of those 420+ sites in the National Park System, the top 25 got more than half of the system’s total number of visits last year. Some parks set all-time records for visitors.

Extra fees, advanced reservations, special passes, lotteries and caps on the number of visitors are all in play in 2022.

If you have a particular site you wish to visit, check its website first.

The rest of National Park Week

While the free-for-all is just one day, the NPS has a whole week of social media themes planned out, one for each day.

For instance, Sunday is “Creativity Day,” and Wednesday is “Opportunities on Workforce” when you can learn about jobs with the NPS and its partners.

Click here for details on each day.

National Park strategies

With competition to enter the Yellowstones and Yosemites of the system so fierce, you might want to come up with a strategy, whether it’s a free day or not.