National Parks by the Numbers

I've spent a lot of time over the last few years digging into government data on outdoor recreation. But, getting to that data can be a pain. For every data dive I've written in the past, I've been pulling PDFs and Excel files from bad government websites, converting formats, cleaning the data, reading methods, and manually running my own analysis. It works, but it's tedious, and it means the analysis lives in my spreadsheets and nowhere else.

So I built something. data.hereandthere.club is a free, interactive tool that takes all of this data and puts it in a more accessible format, for everyone. You can explore NPS visitation data for all 400+ locations in the National Park System from 1979 to 2025, and see the full BEA outdoor recreation economy data at both the national and state level from 2012–2024.

I’m not doing anything particularly revolutionary here. This data already exists, it's public, but it's a challenge to access and understand. I wanted to make it more accessible and more useful, both for people in the industry and for anyone who's curious about how we use our public lands.

If anything is missing, broken, or needs to be improved, let me know. There’s a lot of ways to slice and dice, so it might be a bit overwhelming.

The timing of this “launch” is ideal…the NPS just released their 2025 visitation numbers. So let's put the tool to work.

The top parks are mostly the same, with a few that swapped places and the most notable change being the drop at Grand Canyon, which I’ll talk about later.

The NPS press release frames this as "public interest remains strong." Which, sure. But also…the agency lost 24% of its permanent workforce in 2025. DOGE-initiated firings started in February, followed by a hiring freeze, early retirements, and probationary employee terminations. Seasonal hiring was way down, the Big Beautiful Bill clawed back $267 million in previously committed NPS funding, and a 43-day government shutdown ran through October and November.

So maybe a 2.7% decrease is actually kind of remarkable, given the amount of upheaval this year.

Visitation to the 63 national parks was nearly flat. The system-wide decline is being driven almost entirely by everything else. The NPS manages 433 units in total: 63 national parks, plus 85 national monuments, 31 national memorials, 25 battlefields, 58 national historic sites, and a bunch of recreation areas, seashores, parkways, and other designations. These sites sometimes get overlooked when we think about the “National Park Service.” But they drive a ton of overall visitation, and they’re where the steepest declines were last year. 84% of monuments saw visitation declines. 79% of historic sites. 74% of memorials. The national parks themselves were mostly fine (the avg % change across parks was +6.6).

Why? For one, national parks are more tentpole trips. You book six months out, you buy the flights, you reserve the rental hotel. You're probably going regardless of whether the visitor center is fully staffed. These trips have real economic mass behind them, and states and local partners have a financial reason to prop them up. Utah spent $336,000 to keep visitor centers running at all five of its national parks for the duration of the shutdown. Colorado chipped in $64,000 to keep two Rocky Mountain visitor centers open for the final 20 days. At Great Smoky Mountains, a coalition of state and local governments, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, and Friends of the Smokies pooled roughly $62,000 a day to fund full park operations through fall foliage season. The Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy and Alcatraz City Cruises donated week by week to keep Alcatraz open and staffed.

The shutdown created a patchwork of open vs closed vs “kinda closed?” across the system. Parks and visitor sites that collect fees under the Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act could use available fee balances to keep basic services running, like trash collection, restrooms, road maintenance. Sites without fee collections, or with insufficient balances, had to seek DOI approval and often just shut down. Muir Woods closed. Fort McHenry closed. “Smaller” park units with less staff were affected at a higher degree by changes in staffing. If you’re running a staff of 10 and lose 4 at a park that needs a visitor center experience, that’s a much bigger deal than some of the national parks where trails stay open and some changes can be absorbed.

Some of the parks that stayed open captured displaced demand. Arches, which ended its daily permitting system early when the shutdown hit, ended up with a 16% gain in October year-over-year. Though, it's worth noting that correlation isn't necessarily causation here; nearby Dead Horse Point State Park also saw an October increase without any permitting system, and Goblin Valley was up 40%.

I’ll be the first to admit that I can’t be fully certain of the reason behind every decline. The methodologies for counting visitors vary quite a bit across the system, and it's entirely possible that some of these decreases reflect fewer staff dedicated to counting and reporting rather than actual decreased visitation. I'm inclined to believe we're seeing real declines because of closures, decreased international travel, and more, at most of these sites. But it's a good example of how messed up things are right now. We can't even fully trust the numbers because the people who collect and analyze them have been cut too.

Outside of the the top 10, a few of the biggest year-over-year percentage changes tell some of the more interesting stories.

North Cascades was up 185%, from about 16,000 visitors to 47,000. This is a more of a rebound, not a sudden surge in interest. Wildfires in 2024 suppressed visitation well below normal. North Cascades still remains one of the least visited national parks in the system (57 of 63).

Crater Lake jumped 25%. A major construction project starting in 2026 will close the Cleetwood Cove Trail, the park's most heavily used trail and the only permitted access to the lakeshore, for at least three years. The bump could be a "see it now before it's closed" rush. It's also possible some visitors saw headlines about a multi-year closure and assumed the whole park was shutting down, which may have driven urgency beyond what the actual closure warrants.

Grand Canyon was down 10%. The Dragon Bravo Fire hit the North Rim hard. Olympic down 2.6% after a 3,000-acre fire closed sections of the park. The Grand Canyon Lodge burned down and closures resulted in a 18% reduction to overnight stays. This is an impact likely to continue through 2026.

Black Canyon of the Gunnison dropped 26%…and this is yet another fire story. Wildfires over the summer destroyed infrastructure across thousands of acres and campgrounds and trails remain closed.

There are also a few fun/interesting things, like Isle Royale and Wrangell-St Elias having by far the highest average visit duration. Which makes sense, because, one is an island, and the other is…out there. But Kings Canyon and Sequoia were also quite high, probably because of a high percentage of backpackers. Golden Gate NRA and Blue Ridge Parkway have more raw visitors (albeit of a different kind) than the top National Park, Great Smoky Mountains.

Honestly, 2026 is harder to forecast than usual.

Let’s start with gas prices. The war with Iran has spiked the national average to just under $4. Even if things somehow get resolved and the Strait of Hormuz opens soon, prices wont magically fall back below $3. That matters for park visitation because national parks are, overwhelmingly, road trip destinations.

Consumer sentiment also hit its lowest point of 2026 in March, and there’s a spending slowdown that hits exactly the categories that feed park visitation: discretionary travel, vacations, and big-ticket experiences. Morgan Stanley forecasts consumer spending growth dropping to 2.9% this year, down from 5.7% in 2024.

In a normal year, I'd say increased visitation from the World Cup this summer would result in tourism spillover to parks as international visitors tack on road trips and longer stays. But I have no idea how that's going to play out this year. People are going to come, it’s a World Cup, after all, and we’ll probably get great articles written about that tourism boost. But I don’t think it will be as significant as it could have been. A meaningful amount of international travelers view the US as a less than welcoming destination, and I think the percentage that extend to longer stays around the even won’t be as significant.

Bookings for U.S. national park tours are currently down 42%, per Intrepid Travel. One UK travel agency scrapped its Montana, Washington, and California itineraries entirely. Canadian residents' return trips from the US were down 24.3% in January 2026 versus January 2025. Add to that the DOI directive that raised entrance fees for non-US residents to $100 per person at 11 of the most visited parks, I’m not totally against that in practice, but it comes at a poor time. It’s just another negative-feeling headline for international visitors.

323 million people showed up to national park sites in 2025. A lot. But that number is more about the inertia of domestic travel demand than the true health of the parks, or visitation patterns. I don’t think the question for 2026 will be the headline count. There’s a decent chance it’ll be another banner year, there are a lot of people. But I think there’s open questions about whether the data will even be reliable, whether the smaller sites will keep bleeding out, and whether the parts of the industry that depend on international visitors are about to have a very bad year.