Last summer at the gate at Acadia National Park, the ranger asked if I wanted to buy the lifetime national park pass. He said it was only eighty dollars if you are over 62. My first thought was, wait, he thinks I'm over 62?

We have been going to Maine for years and to Acadia the last two, and I had never heard of this pass.

I waited for the pitch. The fine print, the renewal, the upsell. The Cutco knives at the end for the low, low price of $99.99. I have lived long enough to expect a catch.

There wasn't one. Eighty dollars. One time. For life. Good at more than 2,000 federal sites. Whole carload comes in.

That was it. I bought the pass, drove into the park, and have been telling people about it ever since. Most don't know. Some don't believe me. The pass opens doors. The literal ones at the gate, and a few you didn't know were there.

It is the best deal I know of in American travel. As of January, the regular annual pass costs the same eighty dollars. One year for everyone else. The rest of your life, if you are 62.

If you are not yet 62, buy the annual pass anyway. It pays for itself in three or four park visits. The day you cross 62, buy the lifetime version. Treat the years between as practice.

The pass started as the Golden Age Passport in 1965, signed by Lyndon Johnson. The National Park Service itself dates to 1916. Yellowstone, the first national park, was set aside in 1872. The pass cost ten dollars from 1994 to 2017, when it went to eighty. It has not moved since.

A particularly rough period

Unfortunately, the Park Service is going through a particularly rough period. It has lost nearly a quarter of its permanent workforce since the start of 2025. Yosemite, Arches, and Glacier dropped their reservation systems this season. Deferred maintenance runs into the billions. The parks have always been built and protected by both parties, going back to Theodore Roosevelt, and as recently as 2020, Congress passed the largest park funding bill in decades on a strong bipartisan vote. They have always been ours together. We can and must do better.

What it opens

Eighty dollars and a printed card raise the gate at any of more than 2,000 federal sites: national parks, national forests, wildlife refuges, Bureau of Land Management areas, and recreation sites run by the Army Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation. The pass admits the whole carload at per-vehicle gates and up to four adults where they charge per person. Children under sixteen are always free. It also offers 50% off some campground fees. The pass works at Shenandoah and Big Bend. At Crater Lake and Carlsbad Caverns. At Indiana Dunes and Hawai'i Volcanoes. And at hundreds of others.

This is not a deal for tent campers only. We're not really tent campers anymore, I'm somewhat sad to say. But today, we use the pass at the gate, drive the loops, hike the easy ones, and pick a longer one for the day, and sleep in lodges and inns. At Yellowstone, we used it three days running and slept two nights in a lodge with a view of a meadow where bison grazed at dusk.

Some people have taken it further. Our daughter and her husband have been collecting the embroidered patches at every park they visit. The Park Service runs an official passport program, a small blue book that gets a cancellation stamp at each visitor center. People work at this for decades. Some pursue the 63 club, the travelers who have stood in every one of the formally designated National Parks. Some buy a leather holder for the pass and treat it like a credential. There is a Junior Ranger program for kids and grandkids.

If you are already a national parks person, you know most of this. The pass has been part of how you travel for years. If you have only dabbled, here is a whole world waiting. Eighty dollars buys the entry.