National Parks Are America’s Final EV Frontier

Many of the US's most popular parks don’t have chargers — and aren’t likely to soon.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
National Parks are America's final ev frontier. By Kyle Stock
red by Mara Finnerty. The one hundred and forty two
mile Grand Loop Road in Yellowstone National Park is a
nearly perfect place for an electric vehicle. The speed limit
hovers around forty five miles an hour, and the sweeping vistas,

(00:22):
the spaghetti western meadows of Hayden Valley and the technicolor
pools of the Midway Geyser Basin encourage rubber necking, which
tops up the battery. Every time a bison stops traffic,
which is often, It's a boon for the ev adventurer.
There's just something magical about having your windows down, says

(00:42):
Clint gouty Nie, a software engineer who visits every year.
There's a very minimal road sound, just the peaceful serenity
of the park. The charging infrastructure, however, is still pretty
wild west. There are only nine spots to fill up
an electric car or truck in the park boundaries, all
of them slow and subtle, tucked deep into the bustling

(01:06):
parking lots of the park's handful of lodges. US National
Parks remain the last rugged frontier for eve's in a
country that has largely filled in the map for battery
powered pilgrims, that is starting to change. Many new plugs
are popping up in rural areas As travel centers and

(01:26):
retail hubs hustle to attract the growing hordes of EV
road trippers. The charging map is slowly spreading from Whole
Foods to waffle House. The proliferation of cords means that
most iconic American road trips are now possible via electric car,
that includes national parks, though visiting in an EV still

(01:48):
takes careful planning and hours of down time. Gaudy Nice
was taking his Yellowstone Tour in a Tesla long before
there was charging inside the park or nearby. In twenty sixteen.
He talked his hotel into letting him plug into an
old washing machine outlet. We just made it happen, he says,

(02:08):
and on the way we planned our breakfast, lunch, and
dinner around charging. There are now about one hundred EV
charging stations in US national parks, almost all of them
relatively slow, so called Level two facilities. National parks have
only added nine charging stations since the start of twenty

(02:29):
twenty three, according to the Department of Energy, What's more,
twelve of the twenty largest national parks have no charging
at all, collectively, a landmass the size of the state
of New York. Stranded motorists should blame economics. To make
a profit, chargers need to be churning somewhere around fifteen

(02:50):
percent of the time, according to stable Auto, a start
up that helps networks place charging infrastructure. This is a
challenge at national parks, which see very little traffic most
of the year and then are inundated with cars for
a few months. In Yellowstone, the charging landscape is particularly austere.

(03:10):
In winter, the roads are close to everything but snowmobiles.
Nearly sixty percent of visitors come over the summer. The
government hasn't offered a contract for charging services, so while
the companies that operate the park's facilities can offer charging,
they can't collect money for it. Every year they say
there's a tesla or two that has to get towed

(03:33):
because they thought they would get somewhere and couldn't, says
Alicia Cox, executive director of Yellowstone Teeton Clean Cities, a
nonprofit that aims to displace petroleum emissions. It's hard to
put that much money to infrastructure that is only used
a few times a year. Derek Nutter, who lives in

(03:53):
Salt Lake City and drives Yellowstones Loop Road three to
five times a year, never considered taking his Tesla until
a bank of superchargers opened in West Yellowstone, Idaho, just
outside the busiest entrance to the park, in the parking
lot of the Grizzly and Wolf Discovery Center, a short
walk from the Chochkey shops hawking huckleberry taffy and moose

(04:16):
poop earrings. Nutter tops up before entering the park. Now,
it's doable, but it can be busy, he says. We'll
get there at seven thirty in the morning and there
will be a line. The last time Nutter made the trip,
a guy pulling a fishing boat blocked three of the
eight chargers. When asked about future infrastructure plans, a National

(04:39):
Park Service spokesperson forwarded a link to a January twentieth
executive order in which President Donald Trump froze funds for
new charging stations. Yet EV sales keep rising in the US,
and as a result, charging stations have never been busier.
The newer cohort of buyers tends to drive more than

(04:59):
those who made the switch earlier, and they are less
likely to have a charging option at home. Already, fast
charging stations around the US are full roughly twenty percent
of the time, according to Stable Auto. America's nature preserves, meanwhile,
are also welcoming unprecedented crowds. Last year, a record three

(05:21):
hundred and thirty two million people visited US national parks,
and this year may top that. Kitty Adams, whose nonprofit
Adopted Charger Incorporated cobbles together sponsors for new stations, is
convinced a dearth of charging in rural areas and national
parks is a major impediment to EV adoption. I used

(05:42):
to hear it all the time. I want to go electric,
but I want to go to Yosemite, she says, so
I'm going to keep my Toyota. To date, Adopted Charger
has catalyzed one hundred and twenty four charging cords in
national parks. Often the sites are each work of philanthropy.
Adams cajoles one company into donating the hardware, enlists another

(06:06):
to pay for the construction, and finds a third to
bankroll the electricity. One of the group's largest backers is
Rivian Automotive Incorporated. In a Venn diagram of park visitors
and ev enthusiasts. Rivian figures there's quite a bit of overlap.
Rivian now has three hundred and ten charging stations around

(06:27):
the country, almost one in five of which is strategically
humming in or near a national park. According to Sarah Eslinger,
who runs the company's charging initiative, about one third of
the sites are fast and all of them are free
to Rivian drivers. Its station in Gardner, Montana, has put
Yellowstone's northern entrance on the charging map. Tyler Melban just

(06:51):
drove from Iowa to San Diego for his wedding in
his twenty twenty one Ford Mustang mach Ee. When he
stopped at tour Zaion National Park, he booked two nights
at a Lakinta inn nearby, in part because of its
proximity to an overnight charger. From there, he breathed by
the Grand Canyon, one of the few national parks that

(07:12):
has a bank of fast charging units. It takes a
little bit more planning than gas, Melbourne says, but it's
still reasonable. Sergio Rodriguez, a veteran who works on military housing,
has made nine coast to coast trips in various EV's,
three of them while towing a camper. The only front

(07:32):
sections were years ago around the Bighorn National Forest in
Wyoming and the Gulf Islands National Seashore in Pensacola. Both
now have fast charging stations nearby. I really don't get
the whole range anxiety thing anymore, Rodriguez says. It's just
a whole different ballgame now. It's not like we're an

(07:54):
island here, says Dylan Hoffman, director of sustainability at Zantera
Travel Collection, which runs the lodges and campgrounds at Yellowstone.
There are five entrances to the park, and most of
those have some type of fast charging. For the time being,
that seems to be enough. The chargers in Yellowstone are

(08:14):
full about half the time during summer peaks, but average
fourteen percent utilization, less busy than most US stations. On
a recent Saturday in July, the West Yellowstone Tesla station
was about half full. The nearest fast charger for a
different brand of vehicle was twenty eight miles down the
road in Island Park, Idaho, Alas. That station was on

(08:38):
the blink. Another twenty seven miles, however, brings one to
Ashton Idaho. Its frost top drive in a malted milk
oasis in oceans of wheat and sugar beets, crop dusting
plains drawn above the offices of the Fall River Rural
Electric Cooperative, where there's a single charger in the back
corner of the parking lot by the giant propane tanks.

(09:02):
It fires right up