There are only six days a year when all the national parks are free—and this Sunday, August 4, is one of them. If you’re close to a park, grab your backpack and slather on the sunscreen because this is your weekend to embrace nature.
You may be wondering what’s special about August 4. It’s the anniversary of the Great American Outdoors Act of 2020, which provided funding to help the parks improve infrastructure and expand their recreational offerings. A fund set up with the act (created by energy development revenue) gives the parks $1.3 billion a year for five years to significantly improve them. Many of the parks had a backlog of repair work and maintenance.
For a few quick examples, that fund helped build a new seawall to replace the deteriorating 1954 bulkhead in the Flamingo area of Florida’s Everglades National Park, creating a new maintenance building at Maine’s Acadia National Park to replace unsafe old ones, repairing the road between Badger Pass and Glacier Point in California’s Yosemite National Park and replacing the bridge over McDonald Creek in Montana’s Yellowstone National Park.
Back to you and your backpack. The free day applies to parks that usually charge admission—there are many that do not. But it also causes a bit of a crinkle since some national parks don’t charge admission but are inaccessible without paying some other fee. A great example of this is the prison island Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay. Although it is free to enter every day, the ferry that transports you to the island is not, so the free day doesn’t really apply here. This page lists all the parks participating in the free day.
Busy on Sunday and can’t get to the park? You can get into any national park any day for free if you can bring along a fourth grader in the car. Just don’t let them drive. The remaining free days for this year will be September 28 and November 11.