San Juan Islands Visitor Study

Whittaker, Doug; Shelby, Bo; Shelby, Dan

The San Juan Islands are a major northwest tourist destination, with increasing use and impacts that threaten resource health and the quality of visitor experiences. Several local, state, federal, and non-governmental organizations that manage parks, protected areas, or recreation facilities formed the San Juan Islands Terrestrial Managers Group (TMG) to address these challenges. The TMG recognizes that visitors’ experiences occur across agency boundaries, and solutions for many visitor problems require a broader view and coordinated decisions. The long-term goal is a Cooperative Action Plan (CAP) to manage visitor use to protect and enhance resources and visitor experiences. The TMG and Confluence Research and Consulting (Confluence) held a Visitor Management Workshop in October 2016 to review existing information, brainstorm and prioritize issues, and consider example management actions. Existing information and output from the workshop were summarized in a Visitor Management Assessment in February 2017. That document described long-term visitation trends, assessed recreation supply and demand, characterized recreation impacts, and prioritized “hot spots” with visitor management issues. The Assessment also identified information gaps, and reviewed study options that might be used to fill them. Several of these were funded as part of the 2017 San Juan Islands Visitor Study, which is reported in this document.

San Juan Islands Visitor Study

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