Hope in sight for couples planning national park wedding, as some parks, including Grand Canyon, temporarily re-open.
The government shutdown continues, but there are signs that couples planning a destination wedding at one of the country’s 401 national parks and monuments might not have to consider alternative plans after all.
At some of the more popular parks at least, where local economies are losing as much as hundreds of thousands of dollars a day, deals are being struck, involving the temporary funding of the parks by sources other than the federal government, that will allow visitors back in. The situation is changing almost hourly, but this is what we know:
Grand Canyon National Park reopened on Saturday. The $93,000 a day bill to pay for park staff and operations will be footed by Arizona, whose governor says the state can afford to do it for seven days. Some of the Destination:W staff will be at the Grand Canyon later this week, and we’ll report on what we find.
Parks and monuments where similar temporary deals have been worked out include the Statue of Liberty in New York, Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado, and Zion and seven other parks in Utah.
In California, Yosemite remains closed, but hotels and restaurants on park through-roads are allowed to re-open, including The Wawona Hotel, a popular venue for destination weddings, which started accepting guests again on Saturday.
Other national parks located in states considering some kind of funding plan include Great Smoky Mountains, in Tennessee and North Carolina, Shenandoah, in Virginia, and the Gateway Arch in Missouri. The outcome is particularly critical for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, where 28 weddings were scheduled for the first two weeks in October alone, because it is the country’s most visited, and October is its most visited month.
For the official word on park re-openings, and how long they have been funded for, here’s the National Park Services’s latest bulletin.
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Want to know more about planning destination wedding travel to hotels and resorts in or near national parks? Our travel partners at Coastline Travel Advisors, a Virtuoso agency, are ready to help.
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