The National Parks Where People Still Own Homes Inside The Boundary

Of the 84.6 million acres inside American national park boundaries, roughly 2.6 million are privately owned. They are called inholdings, there are thousands of them, and they exist because the government spent the nineteenth century selling land and the twentieth drawing park boundaries around whatever people had already bought. Wrangell-St. Elias in Alaska contains about a million non-federal acres and an entire town. You can see For Sale signs from the park road.

Rushing river creek running through the abandoned Kennecott Mine in McCarthy Alaska in Wrangell St Elias National Park The explanation is chronological, not political. Federal land agencies were created more than a century after the government began selling land and issuing grants to fund its own administration. By the time the park system existed, much of the best country had been privately held for generations and was not for sale at any price.

So the boundaries went around it. Inholdings arise two ways: ownership that predates the park, or a later boundary expansion that swallows private property whole. The second kind still happens every time Congress enlarges a park.

Histotical Kennecott mining town in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park in Alaska The largest unit in the National Park System is also the clearest example of the arrangement, and its scale is genuinely unusual.

Approximately one million of Wrangell-St. Elias’s thirteen million acres are non-federal, belonging to Alaska Native corporations, private owners and the State of Alaska. Most of it lies along the McCarthy Road and the east bank of the Copper River.

McCarthy itself is private rather than federal, with more private homes on the ridge at Kennecott. When the park was created the Park Service bought what was available and left the rest, owners free to keep and sell. Access across Alaska Native corporation land runs on easements written into the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, and hunting or camping on them needs the landowner’s permission.

Old cabin with a copper roof in front of the Grand Teton Scarcity does what scarcity always does, and in Teton County it has produced remarkable arithmetic. A Jackson Hole real estate broker has put it concisely: only three percent of the land in Teton County is privately owned, and 95 percent of that three percent is already developed. An inholding inside Grand Teton National Park is therefore one of the rarest pieces of residential property in the United States.

Wyoming itself owns numerous parcels inside the park, a legacy of state land grants predating the boundary, and buying them back has cost the federal government tens of millions of dollars at a time.

Stone monument entrance sign marking Kolob Terrace Road against red rock peaks in Zion National Park. Editorial credit: Photo Spirit / Shutterstock.com Inholdings are tolerated right up until somebody builds on one, which is what happened in Utah. Visitors objected loudly in 2007 when new mansions began rising on private parcels inside Zion National Park, particularly along the Kolob Terrace Road. The owners were doing nothing illegal. They were building houses on land they owned, in a place where the view from the window had become the point.

Several of the Kolob Terrace inholdings have since been sold, which is the mechanism by which these situations usually resolve.

Fisherman on Snake River, Grand Teton National Park. The legal position is less dramatic than the setting suggests, and it cuts both ways. Inholders are generally allowed to use their property much as any other private landowner in their state would. They may also be subject to additional federal and agency-specific rules about access to their homes and about how federal neighbors use the surrounding land.

Access is the permanent friction. Reaching a house surrounded by wilderness means crossing federal ground, which is why limited-use roads have been permitted through designated wilderness, and why these disputes end up in court more often than any other inholding issue.

Fall colors in Cuyahoga Valley National Park. The principle governing almost all inholding acquisition is the willing seller, and it explains the glacial pace of the whole business.

The Park Service and its partners buy inholdings when owners choose to sell, not otherwise. That means acquisition depends on individual decisions and available funding, which is why parks still contain thousands of private parcels decades after designation.

Conservation groups fill the funding gap. The Rocky Mountain Conservancy bought a 42-acre riverfront tract inside Rocky Mountain National Park. The Nature Conservancy paid 16 million dollars for Follensby Pond, about 14,600 acres inside the Adirondack boundary. Private money moves faster than appropriations.

Blue Hen Falls, located in Cuyahoga Valley National Park It would be easy to read acquisition as empire-building, and the stated reasons are more practical than that. Private parcels scattered through a park complicate management and raise costs. They can obstruct public access, interrupt wildlife movement corridors, and development on them can alter the views that brought the park into existence.

None of that makes the owners unreasonable. A checkerboard of jurisdictions is harder to run than a single block, which is an administrative complaint rather than a moral one, and it is worth keeping the two apart.

Jenny Lake at Grand Teton National Park. Image credit: Burley Packwood/Wikimedia.org Inholdings have produced an organized political movement, which is a fair measure of how strongly people feel about them.

The National Park Inholders Association was founded in 1978 specifically to protect private landowners from unwanted acquisition by the Park Service, later becoming the National Inholders Association and then the American Land Rights Association.

The most publicised confrontation involved a family at Wrangell-St. Elias who bulldozed a route across park land to reach their property, arguing under a nineteenth-century statute that the path was a pre-existing right of way. These cases turn on law written long before the parks existed.

A river in the Cuyahoga Valley National Park. For scale, the most extreme version of this arrangement in America is not a national park at all. New York’s Adirondack Park covers six million acres, and about 52 percent of the land inside its boundary is private, including entire towns. A state agency writes land-use plans for public and private ground alike, channeling growth toward places that already have roads and utilities. The deliberate inclusion of human communities has been called one of the more successful conservation experiments in the industrialized world.

Which suggests the inholding is not inherently a problem to be solved. It is a different model of what a park can be.

Chapel of the Transfiguration in Wyoming’s Grand Teton National Park. About 2.6 million acres inside American national park boundaries are privately owned, with Wrangell-St. Elias holding roughly a million of them and an entire town. Grand Teton has the most valuable, Zion produced the loudest objections, and the Park Service buys parcels only when owners decide to sell.

The reason any of it exists is that the land was sold before the parks were invented, and nobody was willing to take it back by force. Those houses are not loopholes. They are what was there first.