It was a relatively light year for me on the travel-side of things. My wife and I welcomed our second daughter in May, and with the joy of having her around came the time consumption that put a stop to almost everything else in life.
Still, I managed to sneak off to Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in April prior to her being born. I managed to set foot in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, cruise the Blue Ridge Parkway (a National Parkway), and catch a day in Rocky Mountain National Park during calendar year 2023.
As the National Park Service relayed on Thursday, I was far from alone in checking out the gems of their park system. With 400 of the 428 parks, monuments, parkways, etc. within their system reporting actual attendance numbers, some 325.5 million folks turned out to visit NPS-managed lands in 2023, an increase of some 13 million (4%) over calendar year 2022.
Newly formed New River Gorge National Park & Preserve was one of 20 parks to post record numbers last year, and as the press release noted, most all of those were some of the newer, or less-known parks and monuments within the system. In other words, adventurers are traveling farther and wider in their exploration of NPS lands, and are trusting that the newest additions to the system are worth checking out.
A closer look at the statistical breakdown of visitors shows that 2023 marked an almost complete return to pre-pandemic levels of visitation within the park system. 2019 saw some 327 million visitors flow through the system, while 2020 saw that number plummet to just 237 million.
Yellowstone National Park, for instance, saw some 4.5 million visitors last year, up significantly from the 3.2 million they saw in 2022 – a year in which the park was closed for various periods due to severe flooding and the road damage that came with it. That’s up from the 4.02 million they saw in 2019 pre-pandemic, too.
Great Smoky Mountains National Park – routinely the most visited park within the system – saw nearly 13.3 million visitors in 2023. That’s up from the 12.9 million visitors they saw in 2022, but slightly down from the 14.1 million the welcomed in 2021.
I’ve got returns to both Yellowstone and Glacier National Park on my to-do list in 2024, while I’m sure I’ll sneak up the road to Rocky Mountain for a day at some point, too. I have somehow managed to skirt Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park for the dozen years I’ve been a Colorado resident, and I’d like to rectify that this year, too. I plan on returning to Great Sand Dunes National Park and, if I’m lucky, will raft through Browns Canyon National Monument, too.
Where are you headed in 2024?
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