By Sarah Corcoran, Deputy Director, Sierra Club Pennsylvania Chapter
Pennsylvania residents are blessed to live in one of the few states where environmental rights are not merely an aspiration, but a constitutional promise. Enshrined in the state’s Bill of Rights is the powerful proclamation that “our public natural resources are the common property of all the people, including generations yet to come.” What does that mean for our public spaces? For one thing, anyone can visit Pennsylvania’s 125 state parks without having to pay an entrance fee. We are also lucky in that the roughly two dozen National Park Service sites within our state are also free.
That is not the case across much of the United States. About one in four National Park sites charge an entrance fee, and some of the best-known sites, including Yellowstone or Yosemite, can cost upwards of $35 per visit. That may not seem like much in the grand scheme of things - but when you factor in costs like travel, gear, food, and time off work needed to visit, that $35 can make or break someone’s ability to explore our most awe-inspiring places.
But I’ll let you in on a secret: if your child is entering the fourth grade this year, you can get a free National Park Pass through the “Every Kid Outdoors” program. The program was made permanent through federal legislation following years of advocacy by the Sierra Club and other outdoor groups. It takes less than five minutes to get a paper copy of your pass, which you can exchange for an “America the Beautiful” pass wherever park passes are sold. The passes are good from the beginning of September to the end of August and will grant free entrance to the whole family (in one vehicle) to any park that has a fee to get in.
This was our year! My son was in fourth grade during the 2025-2026 school year, and I couldn’t wait to get our pass and explore more of the country with him. We planned a grand adventure during the summer and had it all mapped out: fly out west, rent a car, and hit as many National Park sites as possible before my PTO ran out.
In three weeks, we visited 17 National Park sites, traveling from the Rocky Mountains south through Arches, Zion, Bryce Canyon, Grand Canyon, Death Valley, Capitol Reef, and Grand Staircase-Escalante. We then headed north through Redwoods, Yosemite, Crater Lake, Olympic, Mount Rainier, Yellowstone, and the Grand Tetons with stops at smaller monuments along the way. It was an amazing experience, and one I know will stick with him for the rest of his life.
Without the pass, it would have cost us just shy of $600 to get into all of those parks if we paid the individual entrance fees. But thanks to our free pass, we were able to experience a completely different world from the (still beautiful) forests of Pennsylvania.
If you don’t happen to have a 4th grader in your family but would like to explore multiple National Park sites in one year, there are other cost-saving options out there. An “America the Beautiful” pass costs $80 for the year and acts just like the pass you would get with Every Kid Outdoors. If you are a senior over the age of 62, you can purchase a lifetime Senior pass for $80 or an annual pass for $20, and if you are a current service member or veteran, you can get a free Military pass.
You can compare all the available passes on the National Park Service website. Whichever pass fits your family, I hope it gives you the same push as ours gave us to look farther from home and plan an adventure you won’t forget.
This blog was included as part of the September 2026 Sylvanian newsletter. Please click here to check out more articles from this edition!