Beyond the Views

It’s summertime in Arches National Park, which means my family embarks on hikes before the sun — and the heat — rises. We have forgotten all but one headlamp, so we shuffle our feet in the singular beam of light, inching our way along a sandstone spine.

Though the world beyond my boots is an impenetrable black, I can sense the desert we’re hiking through is not the same as the one outside our home near Joshua Tree National Park. That place is dominated by the muscular smell of creosote bushes — a robust, resinous odor that permeates the air at the slightest hint of rain — and the sharp, sour tang of the scruffy cheesebush.

Here in Arches, the air is alive with different scents. The jagged, crisp aroma of pinyon pines and junipers cuts through the darkness. Farther along the hike, we chance upon a cluster of sand verbena, its sweet, jasmine-like fragrance blooming in the warmth of the near-dawn. Tufts of sagebrush release a gentle, powder smell.

As a travel writer, I’m often captivated by the visual beauty of the world around me. But several years ago, I had a revelation: It wasn’t the sights that truly anchored me to a place — it was the scents. The rich, varied aromas of each destination, I realized, boosted the deep connection I felt.

This is true everywhere — including, of course, in national parks. If you’ve been there, you probably remember the sweet, mulchy smell of moss in Olympic National Park or the amalgam of salt brine and woodsy spice aromas in Redwood National and State Parks. These smells enhance our immediate experience, but also, because scents are closely tied to memory, they help make fleeting moments unforgettable. They affect how we remember parks long after our trips end.

Scents are also vital threads in the web of life, driving the natural rhythms of ecosystems. Flowers rely on fragrance to lure pollinators, while apex predators, such as wolves, use scent to mark territories, find mates and track prey. Yet many national park scentscapes — the collective aromas that make up an environment — are under threat, altered by forces including climate change and pollution. Drought hinders the flowering of some Joshua tree populations, for example, while excess nitrogen triggers toxic algal blooms on park beaches and in alpine lakes, turning the air rancid.

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Initially created in large part for their visually appealing landscapes, national parks now also safeguard natural sounds from human noise and preserve the night sky, but their vital aromas have yet to receive the same level of attention. It’s time we extend the same protection to the scents that sustain both the wild and our connection to it.

Like their animal kin, early humans surely relied on the scents of nature to navigate their world, but while smells were essential to survival, they also sparked imagination and reverence for the wild. Early park visitors felt this deeply. John Muir cherished the fragrance of a sweet wind blowing through a sequoia grove in the spring, while a young Rudyard Kipling was struck by Yellowstone National Park’s blend of scents. “The places smelled of the refuse of the pit, and that odor mixed with the clean, wholesome aroma of the pines in our nostrils throughout the day,” Kipling wrote.

There is a physiological reason why scents make such an impression on us. Each of our senses has an area of the brain that’s primarily responsible for our perception of the sensation. For our sense of smell, this information is chiefly processed by the amygdala-hippocampal complex, which, among other things, handles emotional memory. Odors travel a direct route to that region, instantly triggering memories and feelings associated with those aromas.

“That’s why our essential, inherent experience of scents is so emotional and also why learning and memory are such a key feature of the olfactory experience,” said Rachel Herz, a neuroscientist who specializes in the psychological science of smell and is the author of “The Scent of Desire: Discovering Our Enigmatic Sense of Smell.”

If you’ve ever smelled cookies that brought you right back to your grandmother’s kitchen or caught a whiff of cologne that conjured up a lost loved one, you’ve experienced this. Scents fill us with nostalgia and connect us with things we’ve learned.

Scents also help us make sense of the present world around us. “Smells play a key role in what grounds us to a place,” said Will Rice, an assistant professor of outdoor recreation and wildland management at the University of Montana, who has studied how smells are increasingly relevant to tourism in national parks and other protected areas.

“Scent certainly plays a role” in visitors’ strong attachment to parks, said Rice, who cited a 2007 study in Colorado’s Rocky Mountain National Park that found 75.6% of visitors were looking forward to the park’s smells.

The National Park System is home to an extraordinary diversity of aromas, and often that’s also the case within a single park. Yellowstone, for example, includes mud pots, mountains and forests, Herz pointed out. “And each of those will have their own scentscape, depending on the weather, the season and what animals are around,” she said.

As the Japanese tradition of shinrin-yoku, or forest bathing, demonstrates, immersing yourself into a natural landscape and its sounds and smells has profound physiological and psychological benefits. The aromas of the wild also offer an olfactory escape from the built environment.

“National parks are places where you can smell natural smells, and that’s increasingly difficult in a developing and industrial world,” Rice said.

Unfortunately, climate change is already affecting scentscapes in numerous ways. It threatens native plant species with drought and wildfires, and it disrupts blooming seasons, which throws plants and pollinators out of sync. Also, the scent of snow is no longer as crisp as it once was. Snowflakes now capture more impurities from the air, absorbing smells from engine exhaust and other pollutants, while the warmer atmosphere magnifies these scents.

In addition, flowering plants are losing their fragrance. Some release fewer scent molecules in higher temperatures, while others, stressed by drought or heat, alter the aromas they emit. Air pollution also masks their natural scents.

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A few months ago, during a visit to Jean Lafitte National Historical Park and Preserve in Louisiana, I was struck by the vibrant duckweed and cattails, the lushness of the wetlands. But I was disappointed that nearby fossil fuel and petrochemical operations infected the air. The rich, earthy smells of the swamp were almost imperceptible.

To preserve the beauty of its landscapes, the Park Service limits construction of unsightly infrastructure, and the Regional Haze Rule mandates federal and state agencies to curb air pollution to improve visibility in many national parks. In addition, more and more parks have adopted the standards set by DarkSky International, which advocates for the protection of the night sky and nocturnal environment from excessive artificial light. Separately, Quiet Parks International aims to conserve quiet spaces in nature, and the Park Service monitors noise and light pollution and collaborates with partners such as local governments and nonprofit organizations to preserve ambient sound quality and night skies. There are no current campaigns to protect smells, however.

“The things that get talked about the most are sound pollution or light pollution, and that’s because we are an auditory and visual-centric species,” said Robert Pellegrino, a scientist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center, a nonprofit institute that researches smell and taste.

But Pellegrino said that just as noise pollution can prevent birds from communicating with each other, interferences with smell signals can disrupt many animals’ behaviors. The extent to which all these changing smells will have a harmful impact is still unknown, but that’s not a reason to delay intervention, Rice said. “It could be 50 years in the future that we realize the ecological importance of smell and wish we had worked harder to preserve it,” he said.

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So how do you go about protecting nature’s smells? The first step is to recognize the importance of these scents and communicate it broadly — a task national park staff are well suited for. “It’s what the Park Service does best — connecting education with resource preservation,” Rice said. In some cases, individual sources of odor pollution could be identified and mitigated, but it’s also crucial to realize that larger conservation efforts such as the global fight against climate change and campaigns to conserve endangered species can go a long way toward protecting scentscapes.

Rice has seen firsthand how legislation can reshape a natural scentscape. As an intern at Cape Cod National Seashore in 2013, he witnessed the return of seals, whose numbers had plummeted after decades of hunting. Thanks to the 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act, the animals — and their distinctive scent — have made a comeback. Not everyone may appreciate the aroma, but it restores the scent of the beach for those who remember the seals of the past, and it tethers us to the experiences of previous generations.

“That’s what Indigenous people have been smelling on that shoreline since time immemorial,” Rice said. “It’s what Thoreau smelled when he walked up the Cape Cod coast. And while that smell disappeared for a long time or became less pungent, now it has rebounded, and that’s wonderful.”