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As crowding in popular national parks continues to make headlines, more visitors are shifting their travel to the shoulder season and aiming for less-popular monuments and recreation areas, newly-released National Park Service data indicate.
According to preliminary NPS data, 325.5 million visitors traveled to one of 400 reporting park sites last year – a 4% overall increase over the previous year. The increase in usage marked the busiest season since 2017, when about 330 million visitors traveled to national park sites.
However, national parks aren’t the only places that are seeing an uptick in traffic. While park visitation was responsible for 28% of the increase in visitation across park sites last year, national recreation areas, national memorials, and national parkways accounted for 48% of the increase in traffic. These lesser-known, often less-popular sites like Idaho’s Hagerman Fossil Beds National Monument are hosting more visitors, which could indicate that more people are visiting sites that are close-to-home or trading popular sites for a less-congested experience.
Seasonal usage is changing as well: In a press release, the NPS noted that the service saw a boost in visitors coming during the spring and fall, which typically lag behind the busy summer season overall.
Some park sites saw more noteworthy increases than others. At the top of the list of most-visited national park sites are the Blue Ridge Parkway, Golden Gate National Recreation Area, and Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which hosted an estimated 13.3 million visitors last year. Each of these sites experienced about one million additional visitors compared to the previous year. (It’s worth noting, however, that each site counts road traffic through the sites as visitation, meaning that the true number of visitors is harder to pin down than at other NPS sites.
Twenty national park sites also broke visitation records last year, including five national parks proper: Joshua Tree, Congaree, Dry Tortugas, Glacier Bay, and New River Gorge. California’s Mojave National Preserve was also among those 20, with a 25 percent rise in visitation.
Glacier Bay received about 700,000 visitors last year, marking about an 160,000-person (23%) increase. Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park saw about four times the amount of usage compared to 2022. The influx in traffic could indicate that visitors are willing to travel farther for a quiet, outdoor experience.
In response to last year’s visitation trends, Chuck Sams, the National Park Service Director stated,”From Kaloko Honokōhau National Historical Park in Hawai’i to Congaree National Park in South Carolina, parks are attracting more visitors each year to learn about our shared history.”
“Our national parks tell our shared American story,” Sams said. “I’m glad visitors are finding hidden gems, exploring in the off-season and finding new ways to have a great time in our national parks.”
From 2024