Far From the Maddening Crowds
The full 2022 National Park visitation figures are out and the numbers add up to crowds (and changes) on the horizon.
The sun has just come up over the pine-fringed outline of Hermit Island. I am alone, on the Little Dipper and at least it feels like I am alone in the entire Apostle Islands National Lakeshore. I know that can’t be true but there is not the white wedge of a sail visible on any horizon, not the hum of a powerboat in the air, not another human in sight for a full 360 degrees. Floating just off shore of an island named for a hermit far from any maddening crowd, is, I recognize, an ironic place to be thinking about overcrowding but the full 2022 visitation data for the national park system has been released and the numbers and what they may add up to, are still ringing in my ears.
(promotional poster circa 1930 from the Travel America Bureau)
In the early part of the 1900’s, the “See America” campaign urged people to get out and visit our country, particularly pushing visits to our national parks. Some early proponents of national parks, including John Muir himself, welcomed the potential of crowded parks for the belief that without ever-increasing visitation parks might lose their political clout and public support. “The tendency nowadays to wander in wildernesses is delightful to see,” Muir said of growing park visitation. “Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home.”
Well, that “home” is becoming standing-room-only. Park visitation in 1914 (the year John Muir died) totaled 209,693. The 2022 total was more than 1000 times higher (311,985,998 national park visits, an increase of 15 million visits or 5% over the year before and a dramatic increase over the pandemic year of 2020 when overall visitation dropped to a 40-year-low due to COVID). One has to wonder if “delightful” would be John Muir’s word of choice today.
Some highlights of the recent numbers barrage:
— the most-visited national park was Great Smoky Mountains with 12,937,633 (a decrease of over a million from 2021 but enough to retain its #1 position).
— Grand Canyon came in at #2 with 4,732,101 visits.
— 26% of the total use of all parks took place in just 8 of the most-visited places.
— three “national park units” (which includes all types of areas managed by the National Park Service) recorded more than 10 million visits.
— 75 national park units had more than a million visits in 2022.
— 12 park units set records for visitation (and 5 broke records that were set just the year before).
From the cockpit of the Little Dipper, I undertake my own non-scientific visitation survey by turning my head and counting … today, ummm, absolutely no one. Still, the recent data shows the number of visitors to the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore again topped a quarter of a million (254,952) in 2022. That number was down, however, from the record of 290,961 set in 2021 but still the second-highest since the “Ice Caves” year of 2014 when the long lines of people making the trek to the frozen palaces along Mawikwe Bay ballooned the annual visitation number to 290,059.
Phrases such as “second-highest in history” can be jolting. But, here are some more numbers for perspective: the annual visitation in the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore would be a slow month of May in Colorado’s Rocky Mountain National Park. The total number of people who have ever visited the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore in its fifty-three year history (7.7 million) is less that half the number of visitors that the Blue Ridge Parkway sees in just a single year (15.7 million).
And if those numbers still seem high, remember this: early boosters urging the creation of the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore boldly and loudly predicted visitation of a million people a year if designated. Those boasts deflated faster than campaign balloons the day after a pep rally and use figures on that scale have never been realized. Or, at least not yet.
Some fear that they still might. Those fears gained traction when the Apostle Islands were “discovered” by National Geographic magazine with a major feature story in its April/May 2023 issue. While effects of that exposure, if any, are yet to be quantified, early figures do not as of yet show a discernible spike in visitation due to the magazine story. Something else though might and ironically it is something being pushed by the leaders of the National Park Service itself.
Faced with a growing public frustration with crowding at some of the “crown jewel” parks like Yellowstone, Yosemite, and others, the NPS has instituted measures such as timed-entry permits and more to try to mitigate the situation. But they haven’t stopped there. Among the top brass of the NPS including Director Chuck Sams himself, there have been recent and very public attempts to steer people away from those marquee parks and toward the lesser-visited parks. The numbers say it just may be working. A number of the parks that set records for visitation in 2022 are those that have been traditionally in the lower 50 percent of park use overall.
NPS Director Sams recently said, “We’re excited to see our efforts to increase visitation to parks … that are less well-known paying off. Many parks with record visitation in 2022 are on what we would call the road less traveled.”
Although use in the Apostle Islands declined last year, some fear that “road less traveled” might lead right through the heart of the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore. It is also worth asking if simply directing the hordes away from some parks and towards others that may or may not have the infrastructure and staffing to handle those hordes is truly a long-term solution or just a kind of statistical shell game.
It is that age-old dilemma: wanting people to love nature without loving it to death. Since relatively reliable record-keeping began in 1904, 15.7 billion people have visited a national park forming a strong, politically-active constituency and sending congress a strong message that people care about parks, want parks protected, want them funded, and will vote with their feet by visiting them often (perhaps too often).
Hence, the current dilemma. Too few people visiting the parks would result in waning political clout and endanger the congressional funding. Too many people and the overuse could threaten the very resources that those visitors come for in the first place. Finding the balance may mean more changes coming in the way our parks are managed and visited — more “timed-entry” systems, more parks banning private cars in favor of required shuttle buses, ticketed day use programs, encouraging shoulder-season use, more reliance on mobile apps to handle the avalanche of permits, and perhaps, more people in the “road less traveled” parks like the Apostle Islands.
Wilderness is for everyone, someone once said, just not everyone at once. The new numbers recently released add up to the stark reality that the National Park Service has yet to figure out how to abide by its 1918 mandate “that National Parks must be maintained in absolutely unimpaired form for the use of future generations as well as those of our own time.”
But on a morning like this, dire predictions and bureaucratic sleight-of-hand games seem as distant as those overblown boasts of the early Apostle Islands boosters. Just to be sure though, I spin the Little Dipper in a slow circle checking every degree of the horizon for signs of the gathering hordes.
Seeing none, no crowd “maddening” or otherwise, I take a deep breath to calm myself, put the numbers out of my mind, ease down on the throttle, and move off into the for-now-at-least empty horizons of home.
·— Jeff Rennicke
To see the full set of 2022 National Park Visitation numbers, click below:
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When the Park designation was being considered, I was living and working (momentarily) on Rocky Island. It seemed to me the landowners (fishermen, cabins, resort/restaurant, etc) felt they could do a better job of maintaining the beauty of the Apostles, without government interference/input. Envisioning crowds of people, buildings and other infrastructure, rules and regulations, denial of access and customary usage. To some extent, that did happen. I am just glad the clamoring hoards haven't!
One of my favorite parks is a lesser know park: Mesa Verde. Cliff dwellers lived there.