The car thermostat registered 81 degrees as I pulled into the multi-level cylindrical parking lot and gathered together my skis. I exited the car and joined the packs of rabid teenagers and flustered families streaming into the mall’s blindingly white entrance. Wearing a T-shirt and board shorts and lugging my skis and a duffel bag full of winter wear, I stared up into a familiarly luminous—if not downright garish—three-level scene of suburban capitalism, the American Dream mall. I spotted a Zara and a Foot Locker and a wholly mediocre food court. (Also, lots of empty storefronts.) Then there’s the entertainment: an aquarium, several theme parks, a Zen garden, two miniature golf courses—one Angry Birds-themed, the other alien-themed—and then, skiing.

You don’t arrive at the American Dream mall so much as you’re engulfed by it. One minute you’re plodding along on a highway in East Rutherford, New Jersey (about 17 miles from New York City), surrounded by big box stores and a number of Starbucks drive-thrus; the next you’ve been whisked into a labyrinth of concrete complexes, parking garages, and digital billboards flashing the words “Welcome to the Dream.” Should you venture to crane your neck you will see jutting into the atmosphere a massive covered ramp propped up by a network of steel girders.

This architectural curiosity has a name—Big Snow—and a rather lofty status: It is the country’s first indoor ski slope and arguably the mall’s biggest attraction. Though the slope opened in December 2019, the Covid-19 pandemic shuttered the facility in March; five months later, it re-opened. In a way then, my visit, in mid-July 2021, coincided with Big Snow’s approximate one-year anniversary. It’s still a baby, as far as resorts go—and, given the fact that just five new resorts have opened in the U.S. in the last 20 years, a very unique baby indeed.

That the slope—and, really, the entire American Dream complex—is here at all is a minor miracle. Plans for the mall itself have been plagued with uncertainty since they were first announced in 1996: The original developer, Mills Corporation, ran into funding issues shortly after breaking ground on the mall in 2004. After the Mills Corporation went broke, the mall was purchased but the 2008 financial crisis doomed that enterprise. In 2011, a Canadian real estate firm bought the mall and renamed it American Dream. Ten years and $5 billion later, the quixotic dream has been realized.

Yet, in spite of everything, the mall is standing, and on a muggy summer day, I was standing in the thick of it, observing a convoy of children mounted atop motorized stuffed tigers zipping around the ground-floor atrium. I stepped between the toddlers and ascended an escalator to find myself face-to-face with the words “BIG SNOW” in bold LED lights, where I was greeted by Mark Dobrowolski, the resort’s bearded and affable manager. Strolling past the gear shop, where any mall-going schmuck could peruse the racks of outerwear and smattering of skis and snowboards, Dobrowolski told me that during the summer they see between 300 and 500 people per day. “Winter is our busiest time,” he said, “where we’re sold out day today.”

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Over his shoulder, out past the floor-to-ceiling window behind him, and straight into the wintry beast: a 1,000-foot, 16-story climate-controlled ski run (where it’s always 28 degrees) housed inside of what looks like a fairly drab warehouse. The walls and ceilings are unadorned; the only embellishment comes at the base of the slope, where the entire wall facing the ski hill has been plastered over with an image of an alpine lodge. It looked to me like a very large, and very costly, walk-in refrigerator.

Save for the small beginner section, Big Snow is really just one run, split in half between a groomer and a terrain park, serviced by a quad chairlift that runs directly overhead. Giant wall-mounted air conditioning units hum endlessly and hundreds of lights (and quite a few snowmaking guns), affixed to support beams, point down on the dozens of skiers and snowboarders below. There’s also a snowcat that grooms the hill every few hours—not exactly a Sisyphean task, given that the slope registers just a 26-percent grade at its steepest point, which is comparable to a typical intermediate run. “It’s definitely lopsided toward beginners,” says Dobrowolski. “We’ve seen days where 90 percent of the people who come through are first-timers.”

This became apparent once I clicked into my skis and took the three-minute lift ride to arrive at the summit. On the groomed side of the slope—called Switchback—a horde of neophytes, many of them sporting the facility’s red and orange rental jackets, slid slowly and awkwardly down the run, occasionally toppling over one another.

Ability aside, I immediately was struck by the diversity of the crowd. I saw Black skiers, brown skiers, and white skiers; Jewish, Hindu, and Muslim, some wearing religious indicators as they slipped across the snow. I met skiers from Florida and skiers from Japan, all of them lurching clumsily down a small patch of man-made snow. This might seem anecdotal, but it’s not: In a sport that skews overwhelmingly white—three-quarters of the 9.5 million Americans who ski are white, according to a survey by the SnowSports Industries America trade group—Big Snow has already been recognized as an industry leader, winning the inaugural Burton Diversity and Inclusion Award at last year’s National Ski Areas Association winter conference.

On that note:

“It brings a lot of skiers and riders that normally wouldn’t be exposed to the sport,” says Allen Liou, a 41-year-old from Manhattan who comes up every weekend with his three-year-old son, Paxton. Big Snow provides a perfect teaching venue, Allen says, because “the conditions are pristine. It’s the perfect temperature, there are no icy patches.”

Skiing was always a central component of the American Dream, no matter who was financing it, but the development of the indoor slope was, like the mall itself, slow going. The turning point came when Triple Five brought in Joe Hession.

A native of Vernon, New Jersey, Hession grew up skiing Mountain Creek, where he got his first job as a parking lot attendant in 1994. Hession worked his way up the chain at Mountain Creek until he became the general manager in 2010.

But the Jersey boy couldn’t resist the call of the West—or, more accurately, couldn’t ignore his girlfriend’s (and now wife’s) desire to head West, and he eventually followed her out to . Not that he has any regrets about the matter. “My dream was to live in Colorado,” he said.

While living in Boulder, Hession began to wonder: Why did the ski industry have such a hard time luring in repeat customers? (According to an industry analysis, four out of five novice skiers and snowboarders don’t ever return.) And so in 2012, Hession’s consulting business, SNOW Operating, was born.

SNOW’s most significant offering is its Terrain-Based Learning program, which aims to fine-tune a mountain’s novice experience—namely by endowing instructors with a more rigid pedagogy and by constructing features like rollers and banked turns that make trails more beginner-friendly. “It’s basically shaping snow, and working with instructors on a methodology to take gravity out of your first time skiing and snowboarding,” says Hession.

It sounds a little nebulous, but his philosophy has caught on—more than 40 resorts have licensed SNOW’s program, including Killington, Aspen Snowmass, and Whistler Blackcomb, where the program caught the eye of Don Ghermezian, the CEO of Triple Five, whose family is also behind the American Dream mall. A meeting between the two soon followed, when Hession discussed the ins and outs of operating a mountain.

“I said to Don, ‘What’s your plan?’ And he explained experiential relationships, the fact that malls in the ’80s and ’90s had anchor stores—the Macy’s and the movie theaters. In the future, instead of anchors being big department stores, it’s going to be amusements and attractions,” Hession says.“ By the time we were done talking, he literally ended the meeting with, ‘You have to run this thing, it has to be yours.’” Hession’s initial skepticism quickly melted away.

His handiwork was evident from the moment I walked into Big Snow: the ticketing system that does away with wickets in favor of a scannable wristband; the three stationary gondolas that house large televisions playing a safety video on loop; the set of gates that create a series of gently banking turns along the bunny slope. (This latter feature is where you can see the Terrain-Based Learning approach on full display.) It’s all very intentional, albeit a little sterile.

So far, the formula seems to be working, even in spite of a global pandemic. That’s not to say SNOW Operating didn’t take a few hits to its business, worst of all the passing of the original general manager, Jim Haas, who died in March as a result of complications caused by Covid-19.

The resort also took some serious financial blows during its five-month closure. The government’s Paycheck Protection Program facilitated a roughly $1 million loan to SNOW Operating in April 2020. Now, nine months after the mall’s re-opening, the resort is already profitable. Given that the number of active ski and snowboard participants in the U.S. has been in a steady decline over the last 10 years, maybe Big Snow—with its $70 gear-and-instruction day tickets and its close proximity to a major city—is the life raft the industry has needed.

“There are a lot of people, especially millennials, who don’t ski,” says Chris Diamond, former president of Steamboat Resort, “but now, as they gather around the water cooler in the office, are going to be listening to their friends talk about a recent trip and how much fun they had. The indoor facility is a great bridge.”

I heard that sentiment a few times over the day—essentially, that Big Snow was less intimidating than a normal slope—even if not everyone had the acumen to cite temperatures and snow quality. “I always wanted to try it, but this is easy and safe,” said Leila Kirton, a 19-year-old from nearby Chatham, New Jersey, who wore the branded red rental jacket that marked her as newer to the sport. “When we first got here, they told us roughly the basics: how to stop and how to turn. And then,” she waved toward the bunny slope, “we did the bank turns a few times.”

The other half of the slope, Northern Lights, was littered with well-maintained rails and boxes plus a nice little tabletop jump. The crowd here was unsurprisingly younger and more skilled; also unsurprisingly, many of them wore baggy sweatshirts. One of those skiers, 17-year-old Demarco Dinsmore, said he and a few buddies drove five-and-a-half hours from Uniontown, Pa., just to get their park fix. “But I think it’s super-duper worth it,” he said. His friend, Ryan Voyten, chimed in, “Everybody’s stoked to be here. You can’t really catch any bad vibes here.”

After watching the crew of young hucksters film each other sliding down a long, kinked rail, I joined the newbies on the groomer. I set off, arcing wide turns and weaving between cautious beginners. And then, in a few seconds, I had reached the bottom. I managed about 12 turns.

The snow was granulated and approachable (“kind of like a sand-snow,” as Hession put it), and the run was perfectly serviceable. It didn’t provide anything close to the elusive rapture—that ineffable sense of invincibility—that a good powder day might, but then, you can’t easily find powder in this hemisphere in July. But isn’t that beside the point? If you are an experienced downhill skier, you’re not going to Big Snow for the thrill of the piste; you’re there to watch gleeful novices learn how to pizza their planks and to see appreciative park rats spend hours perfecting their latest maneuver. You’re there for the community, the camaraderie, and to escape the heat. Maybe you’re just there for the novelty of skiing. In a mall. In New Jersey.

After a few more runs, I decided to call it a day. As I walked out of Big Snow and returned to the mall’s dazzling signs and motorized animals, I was stopped by a couple. “So, is it real skiing in there?” the woman asked in a dubious tone.

Without pause, I answered them: “Yeah, it is.”

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In March 2021, Vail Resorts gave the snow-sports world a shock: prices for its multi-resort season pass, called the Epic Pass, would be slashed by 20 percent, from $979 to $783. Its Epic Local Pass, which grants access to fewer resorts, would also see a price cut, from $729 to $583. “We are excited to make it easier for everyone to move into a pass,” Vail’s then CEO Rob Katz in a press release, “and we remain fully committed to ensuring continuous improvements in the guest experience.”

Thanks to the price cut, and to an impressive portfolio of 40 resorts worldwide, Vail sold for 2021–22, a 76 percent jump over 2019–20 figures. As a result, earnings jumped 30 percent from fiscal year 2020 to fiscal year 2021.

“Vail Resorts took really aggressive pricing action this year on the Epic Pass, and that was undoubtedly going to trigger high sales,” said Tom Foley, a ski-industry analyst and director of business intelligence at the travel research company Inntopia. “I think it might have exceeded their expectations.”

A Breckenridge, Colorado-based ski instructor who asked not to be named had a less generous assessment. Vail hasn’t had the staff to support the huge crowds they brought in, he said. “They left local resorts ill-equipped to deal with that burden.”

Eleven months after announcing its record sales, Vail is mired in a seemingly endless barrage of complaints, social media vitriol, and negative news stories. Customers across its vast empire are about congestion, long chairlift lines, and reduced operations. Skiers at Washington’s Stevens Pass have launched a petition to ask for a refund. Local newspapers Vail for its drop in customer service. And across the internet, photos and humorous have generated tens of thousands of likes and comments.

Vail has that its deficiencies this season are a reflection of broader trends in the U.S. workforce, such as the housing crisis sweeping ski towns and the loss of labor due to the pandemic. And to be fair, 60 percent of the ski areas in the U.S. were all open positions in the 2020–21 season, according to the National Ski Areas Association.

But interviews with over a dozen current and former Vail employees suggest the economy and the ongoing pandemic aren’t solely to blame. Vail’s record sale of ski passes has played a part, they said. The company’s dysfunctional internal policies, as well as its low wages, have also harmed its operating efficiency. According to these employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation, the company can be just as frustrating on the inside as it is in the lift lines.

One of the criticisms sources repeated was Vail’s ignoring feedback from its boots-on-the-ground employees, who have had a front-row seat for the problems on the slopes.

“It worries me that Vail isn’t listening to their local people,” said a snowboard instructor at Boston Mills, a 79-acre mountain in northeast Ohio that was by Vail in 2019 as part of its much ballyhooed $264 million takeover of rival Peak Resorts and its 17 mountains.

In the case of Boston Mills, locals were irritated when Vail shortened the ski day (the resort used to stay open until 11 P.M. but now closes at 5 P.M. on weekends) and expanded the terrain park, which took up space typically reserved for beginner runs, crowding the available easy terrain. That congestion is especially irksome, noted one Boston Mills instructor, on a small mountain that features low vertical: “You’re talking about a place that has 300 vertical feet. People don’t drive two hours to ski all day here.” (Vail’s vice president of communications Sara Olson says local staff at each resort make decisions about daily operations.)

There’s frustration among Boston Mills staff—and locals, for that matter—with Vail’s inability to hire an adequate number of lift operators. The instructor blamed this on the position’s low pay: the job was advertised as paying $11.25 an hour, and even after Vail in January an end-of-season bonus of $2 an hour, Boston Mills’ wages are still far below, say, local amusement park Cedar Point’s offering of $20 an hour for seasonal workers. (Cedar Point has apparently finding workers.)

The complaints extend far beyond Boston Mills. Employees and ex-employees at Vail properties, including Park City Mountain in Utah, Mount Snow in Vermont, Stevens Pass in Washington State, and Colorado’s Beaver Creek and Breckenridge, all voiced frustrations with Vail’s inability to hire seasonal workers.

“You could be a part-time retail associate and make a dollar more an hour than their starting wage for lift mechanics,” said a Park City Mountain employee who works in on-mountain operations. “They’ve given no incentive to stay at the company.”

“We have a lot of well-trained, qualified instructors who are making less than burger flippers at fast-food joints,” added a ski instructor at Breckenridge. (In an emailed statement to șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű, Olson said that Vail “made a significant investment” in wages and highlighted “the $2/hour bonus added to our employees’ compensation for the rest of the season.”)

For a company that boasts just shy of $2 billion and controls a lion’s share of national skier visits (and, as a publicly traded company, has a fiduciary duty to shareholders), these may seem like small-scale problems. And Vail recently announced major improvements to many of its resorts, including a to build 21 new chairlifts across 14 resorts next season. But employees say that Vail’s wages are well below livable, especially in mountain towns experiencing soaring real estate prices and ever more second homes and vacation rentals.

In addition to wages, employees were concerned by what they see as a one-size-fits-all approach to resort management as well as by Vail’s ongoing efforts to through its headquarters in Broomfield, Colorado, as the company wrote in a 2019 statement. This process has included members of resort marketing, finance, and human-resource teams . But employees say that such centralization has created confusion and left mountains lacking key institutional knowledge.

One former Peak Resorts employee who worked in the marketing department said that soon after Vail’s acquisition, resort general managers felt they had less say over day-to-day operations—“what to groom, where to make snow, when to make snow.” Instead, regional directors and corporate employees in Broomfield took over decision-making.

“A lot of those regional directors and people in Broomfield weren’t really familiar with the intricacies of operating a ski resort in the Midwest or the East Coast, which need snowmaking early and often to maintain a proper snow surface,” the employee said. “They were used to snowmaking conditions like you find in Colorado, where you just make snow up until the Christmas holiday and then you stop because it’s supplemented by natural snow.” As a result, the employee said, Vail’s new acquisitions have seen a slower opening schedule.

Vail spokespeople say that an unusually balmy winter led to delays in opening trails to the public this year. “Regarding delayed openings of our resorts—that was the result of weather,” said Olson, Vail’s VP of communications. “At some resorts, like Park City Mountain, we had temperatures in the fifties and sixties which is not conducive to even snowmaking. At others, like our Tahoe Resorts, the warm early season was followed by massive amounts of snow that took days to dig out from to ensure the terrain was safe to ski and ride on.”

Vail’s CEO, Kirsten Lynch, who was appointed to the role in November, added: “The early months of this ski and ride season were challenging for a variety of reasons, and I am proud of the tremendous work of all our teams who reacted quickly to execute improvements across our resorts. We now have nearly 100 percent of our terrain open at our ten largest resorts, with great progress at our regional and local resorts as well. Our goal is always to provide our guests an amazing experience and I am confident we have a great season ahead of us.”

Critics, however, point out that warm weather didn’t stop many of its rival resorts.Ìę“When the independent resorts have 50 percent of their terrain open, the Vail resorts have 20 percent of their terrain open,” said the former Peak employee. “They’re all in the same climate.” In Ohio, for example, Boston Mills didn’t for the season until January 7, while (about an hour’s drive away) was open before Christmas. And though Stevens Pass opened on December 15, by mid-January about 60 percent of the terrain was —an unusually high percentage compared to other Washington resorts, which had most of their serviceable terrain open by then.

Employees also expressed dismay over the removal of on-site human-resources departments in favor of an —another casualty of Vail’s centralized approach—as a major pain point. Workers say it has caused a number of headaches. In one case, a ski instructor in Colorado offered to lend money to direct reports who were unable to reach anyone on the corporate team when their paychecks weren’t processed on time.

Vail says the new system makes HR support available daily. However, some employees expressed challenges getting in contact with HR, citing slow response times.Ìę“The dismissal of [individual] HR departments made it clear that they don’t care about employees,” added the Park City employee, explaining that the outsourced system is far less expedient. “HR now takes two to four days to reply.” (Olson, Vail’s communications VP, said: “We centralized our HR function to ensure consistency, scalability and best-in-class support across all of our resorts—which has been invaluable as we navigate this pandemic.”)

Employees suggested these internal problems, when matched with the low wages, make Vail less able to hire and retain new workers. “The past ten or 15 years there’s been a gradual acceleration of devaluing employees,” said a Beaver Creek ski instructor. “Vail has these : serve others, do right, be inclusive, drive value, do good, be safe, and have fun. Most of their core values they are not living up to.”

Conversations with customers from multiple Vail-owned resorts show an exasperated clientele who have had to wait in lift lines for upwards of 30 minutes and face . “This year has been horrible,” said Jon Sleep, a skier at Stevens Pass, where closed terrain—despite snowy conditions—has prompted mass complaints from customers. “Other resorts in my area are operating like normal.” (Vail has said that lift lines at its resorts were under a ten-minute wait time 90 percent of the time during the holiday.)

Boston Mills skier Heather Johnston Welliver said the long wait times are especially vexing, since that resort is so small. “I have kids and I want them to grow up skiing, just like I did,” she said. “They don’t love getting on all their gear and going to wait in lines that are 20 minutes long to go down the hill for 30 seconds.” Vail’s attempts to its lingering lift-line problem—launching a daily forecast of wait times in its app and implementing “phone free zones” in lift lines to make sure people aren’t distracted and further exacerbating the problem—have proven largely unsuccessful, employees say.

There is at least one source of hope: growing calls for accountability from mountain-town and ski-area locals. Ski-patrol unions in Breckenridge, Park City, and Stevens Pass reached contract agreements with Vail in the last few months. Other movements have been more grassroots, relying on social media and public comment to share grievances and demand action.

In early January, Stevens Pass local Jeremy Hunter Rubingh drafted a on Change.org that claims Vail not only failed customers but might also be in violation of the Washington Consumer Protection Act because it “deceived a substantial portion of the public” by selling passes while always “[intending] to keep 60 percent of the terrain and the majority of lifts closed for the season.” To date, the petition has racked up nearly 44,000 signatures, prompted other mountain communities to of their own, and caught the attention of the after the office received over 80 complaints about the ski area.

“This was about being pro-worker and about being pro-skier, pro-snowboarder,” Rubingh told me. “This is about getting some positive changes, getting terrain opened, getting people paid. I think that’s why it resonated. It wasn’t just like, ‘We’re pissed, we hate Vail.’ It was like, ‘No, this is what it should be. Let’s do something.’”

At least with Stevens Pass, Vail has acknowledged its mistakes. In early January the resort its general manager; two weeks later, it offered at the discounted price of $385 and finally much of its closed terrain. (Olson, Vail’s VP of communications, added that it has made improvements in both staffing and terrain in the last few weeks, with 85 percent of the mountain now open.)

Rubingh has mixed feelings about Vail’s attempts at extending an olive branch. “It’s these specific business practices that have left Vail Resorts behind compared to other resorts,” he said. “Everyone has been hit by the pandemic. But why is it that it was so exacerbated with Vail Resorts’ properties?”

Not all of the grassroots campaigns have been so diplomatic. In March 2021, after Vail announced the price slash on its Epic Passes, Alex Kaufman, a Colorado-based skier who spent two decades working at resorts across the U.S., had a feeling that conditions were about to deteriorate. For $12, Kaufman bought the domain name epicliftlines.com; he then created a corresponding . Kaufman’s premonition was, of course, all too accurate, and soon people—39,000 of them and counting—began flocking to his fledgling Instagram to air their grievances.

“This thing kind of blew up by basically just holding up a mirror to what was going on,” said Kaufman.

Kaufman pointed to a recent story about Vail’s troubles as evidence that this social media uproar might be inspiring real-world change. (And indeed Wall Street has taken notice: Vail’s stock has 26.86 percent over the last three months, from $372.51 on November 5 to $272.44 on January 28.) “In the article, I saw the word pivot come out of the CEO’s mouth,” Kaufman said, referencing a seemingly trivial line in the Journal’s reporting, where Kirsten Lynch said Vail would be “willing to hear and change and pivot.”

“That’s been the most important thing,” Kaufman said. “Now, every analyst on every call is going to be asking her about how the pivot is going.”

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Early in the morning, Davyd Betchkal is standing in the remote lowlands flanking the eastern slopes of Denali. Snow-capped peaks tower all around him; a river rushes nearby; a beaver’s tail smacks the water; a vivid chorus of birdsong fills the air; wolves howl in the distance.

For the better part of eight years, this has been Betchkal's life. As the National Park Service's soundscape specialist in Alaska, he has been tasked with studying the parks' natural acoustic environment and determining the ecological impacts of human-made noise. With his assistant, Noah Hoffman, Betchkal has documented all 54 million acres of Alaska’s parks, which constitute some 60 percent of the total area of all 58 national parks.Ìę

Two things are clear to Betchkal: sound is crucial to the health of plants and wildlife and everything from airplanes cruising overhead to the roaring of snowmobiles on the ground or the muffled ring of an iPhone in a jacket pocket affects—and often disrupts—the ambiance of our most precious natural areas.

“Listening helps people understand the importance of wild places,” Betchkal says. “It's really my first priority as an NPS ranger: making nature relevant to the American public. If it's not, these places will cease to exist.”

That’s why the Park Service invested $3.2 million this year to better understand how sounds move around the parks—many of which experienced record visitation in 2016. Noise pollution’s impact is profound and varied, but also difficult to measure and even tougher to use to extrapolate solutions. At the tip of this venture is Betchkal, who has configured and installed an array of portable recording stations around Denali.Ìę

To be clear, in the context of natural places, birdsong isn't noise; the buzz of an airplane is. Sound, by contrast, is a protected resource under the Park Service’s as part of the profile of a natural environment. According to by Park Service senior scientist Kurt Fristrup, a national park goer hears human-created noise, much of it aviation-related, during about 25 percent of his or her visit.

“Noise is just as ubiquitous and broad in its impacts on the continent as air pollution,” Fristrup says.Ìę

Research has linked noise—in particular, noise above 65 decibels—to cardiovascular disease, elevated blood pressure, and poor sleeping patterns among humans. The Environmental Protection Agency, in fact, has . While it poses a greater risk in cities, it's increasingly become an issue in nature, too, especially when the noise from a propeller plane can easily top 80 decibels, which falls squarely in the threshold for hearing loss, .Ìę

Noise can be even more harmful for animals. published last year in Global Change Biology found that noise pollution can harm birds' abilities to communicate with one another, thereby leading to their migration away from their (now clamorous) natural environments. And according to a ÌęŸ±ČÔÌęPLOS One, elk and pronghorn in Grand Teton National Park displayed a diminished ability to detect predators due to their decline in responsiveness as a result of increased noise pollution.

But before we can begin to solve these problems, we need a baseline of noise knowledge for each park. This is called a soundscape—it’s basically a compilation of extensive field recordings that capture both the birdsong and the plane engine. “The soundscape tells you the truth,” says soundscape ecologist Bernie Krause, known in the field for his pioneering work in field recording. “It gives you some incredible information about the relationship between humans and the habitat, based upon the ways in which human endeavor is affecting that environment.”

Though the Park Service was created in 1916, it wasn't until 2000 that a director there issued a mandate for soundscape preservation, by which time commercial airliners had been . Before then, “there was no logical, organized plan that was developed upon which to base the U.S. noise control policy” according to presented at the International Congress and Exposition on Noise Control Engineering. The basic idea was to develop a baseline for what unpolluted ecosystems sound like, then use it to measure how noise may interrupt or alter natural processes.

“Sound, just like the availability of nesting materials or food sources, is an important element of a productive natural system,” says Frank Turina, the NPS' program manager for policy, planning and compliance. “Activities such as finding desirable habitat and mates, avoiding predators, protecting young, and establishing territories are all dependent on the acoustical environment.  When the acoustic environment is degraded by noise, these behaviors become more challenging.”

After the 2000 mandate, called Director's Order 47, the Park Service began setting up sound monitoring stations that  in parks across the country. While the early models were expensive and cumbersome, innovations in the design of the stations has allowed the NPS to increase its sound monitoring from two parks per year to upwards of 20, including Grand Canyon, Grand Teton, and Zion.

But Denali may be the most promising source of soundscape research in the parks system to date. It was among the first to begin taking inventory of sounds, in 2001. Betchkal took over the initiative in 2011 and, having now compiled his baseline data, is entering a ten-year monitoring phase that involves keeping tabs on the soundscapes and measuring the effectiveness of any future noise mitigation efforts in the park. “The inventory gave us a great idea about how sound changes with space,” Betchkal says. “The monitoring should help us understand how sound changes in time.” 

If all goes according to plan, Betchkal’s data will be used to create  of how and where sound will evolve and occur across the entire continent. They may help guide planning and policies concerning human-made sound. Once we have a baseline and register for a healthy soundscape, we can apply them anywhere, Fristrup says.

There are consistent patterns in sound levels across all the environments where the Park Service has taken recordings, Fristrup says. “Data from the southwestern deserts,” for instance, “can inform predictions regarding eastern coastal parks, despite their manifold differences.” 

Betchkal's work will also serve the Park Service as it investigates “the consequences of noise exposure for things like human health, ecosystem function, social justice, [and] visitor experience,” Fristrup says. In more practical terms, that might mean studying whether low-income Americans bear the brunt of America's human-created noise pollution—which comes, in large part, from airplanes.

In 2015, about 560,000 people visited Denali, a good many of them participating in flying sightseeing tours of the mountain peaks. In most of Alaska's parks, a visitor can expect to hear between ten and 20 planes flying overhead per day, according to Betchkal. When there are more than ten “noise events,” such as overflights, per day, true quietude—the absence of human noise for an extended period—becomes “vanishingly small,” he says.

Since 2000, the NPS had been working with the Federal Aviation Administration to develop air-tour management plans. But, due in part to fundamental disagreements between the two agencies—largely concerning the sometimes competing interests of tourism and conservation—implementation has been slow. Last year, however, the Park Service and FAA agreed to begin monitoring air-tour routes in Florida’s Biscayne and Big Cypress national parks—both popular flight-tour destinations.

Meanwhile, leading soundscape experts haven’t come to consensus on some foundational elements of the field, such as establishing appropriate terminology for characterizing the varying levels and states of noise and sound. But it seems everyone agrees on at least one thing: human beings are becoming more disconnected from the sounds of the natural world, and it’s hurting us in the long run.Ìę

“We don’t know how to listen,” Krause says. “We have to quiet the fuck down.”

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