The men who fought to create and enlarge Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks envisioned them not just as preserves for natural objects but also very much as recreational resources for citizenry. In their vision they were supported by the National Park Service Act of 1916, which clearly specified both protection and recreation roles for national parks. As 1990 approached, the traditional recreation role of the parks remained clearly visible, albeit significantly reshaped. Originally, it was assumed that if visitors were prohibited from pursuing a few specific forms of behavior, including hunting and vandalizing natural features, the parks could otherwise sustain human presence indefinitely. As the number of visitors grew, however, this concept faded in the face of a long series of specific problems. As those problems multiplied, the initial resolution was simply to extend the list of prohibitions. This band-aid approach eventually produced formal campgrounds, the closing of certain streams to fishing and meadows to grazing, limits on firewood collecting, and myriad additional specific restrictions.

Not until the parks were into their fifth decade did the managers of the two reservations begin to consider that the solution might require limiting human numbers rather than just human behavior. In the 1930s, the first historic limits on parks' development occurred in Giant Forest, first not only for the Sierran parks, but for the entire national park system. However, like the specific rules they partially superseded, these initial limits were site specific, that is responses to particular problems at particular sites. Only in the postwar years did inadequate Park Service budgets force park managers to admit for the first time that they could not always serve everyone who might want to come to the parks. Significantly, when Mission 66 did arrive in Sequoia and Kings Canyon, with seemingly limitless development funds, none of those funds was spent in ways which enlarged the parks' visitor capacity. Park planners hesitated to expand operations in the face of demand, hesitated in fear of allowing another unstoppable, irreversible "tradition" to become entrenched.

By the 1970s, when combined annual visitation to Sequoia and Kings Canyon began regularly to exceed two million visitors, it became a tenet of management that potential recreational demand would always far exceed that which the two parks could reasonably supply. This thought, a radical one when compared to the national parks concept of the Mather/Albright years, represented the continued development of the Park Service reaction, personified by Colonel John White, to the overdevelopment of the 1920s. Despite this evolution toward control and partial rejection of recreation demand, the 1971 Master Plan still called for construction of new campgrounds and additional recreational features like the Alta Peak tramway. The recreation mandate still commanded the attention of many park planners.

That these ideas died in the bureaucratic womb reflects the enormous impact of public input during the planning which the parks carried out during the 1970s and 1980s. It also reflects the startling transformation of the public toward environmental ideals and wilderness appreciation. A conservative public, defending the status quo, repeatedly turned down opportunities to significantly enlarge recreational facilities in the two parks. In this process campsite numbers remained permanently frozen in Kings Canyon National Park at 1940s levels, while nearly half the campsites in the Giant Forest/Lodgepole area disappeared. At the same time limits remained in place on total concessioner accommodations and, as the likelihood of the relocation of Giant Forest's visitor facilities rose after the mid-1970s, nearly seventy-five dilapidated rental cabins disappeared from the area one by one. It simply did not seem worthwhile to repair them.

Eventually, Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks refined and expanded limits on visitor use in two ways. Beginning in 1974 in the backcountry, park rangers enforced actual quotas. Because of their structure, these quotas tended more to disperse use than to prevent it, and the earliest years of the quota system were the busiest ever in the parks' backcountry. That the public accepted the quotas with almost no significant complaint represented a great victory for the Park Service in its attempt to redefine a proper balance between preservation and recreation. In the frontcountry, where limits ultimately were far more necessary than in the wilderness, the Service continued to pursue the more subtle approach of leaving the parks open to all comers but limiting the facilities that served them. Unlike the well-publicized effort to establish backcountry quotas, establishment of de facto frontcountry limits was done piecemeal and quietly. Once again, because these measures protected the existing character of the parks, visitors did not object.

By the end of the 1980s, therefore, the two parks had established a recreation policy that supported their redefined purpose. If the parks existed to preserve all the elements of a complex biological world, then recreation had become philosophically a secondary value, endured, but hardly encouraged. Ironically, despite this philosophical shift, the parks continue to spend more than 85 percent of their total annual budget on either direct visitor services or the upkeep of visitor facilities.