Statistical abstract: 2020

Ziesler, Pamela; Spalding, Claire

In 2020, National Park Service (NPS) recreation visits dropped to a 40-year low with 237,064,332 recreation visits recorded across 389 reporting parks. This is a decrease of over 90 million recreation visits (27.6%) from 2019. One must go back to 1980 (220 million recreation visits in 277 reporting parks) to see lower visitation. Recreation visitor hours (1.05 billion) and overnight stays (8 million) were also down compared to recent years. The decrease is attributed largely to temporary park closures and restrictions implemented in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Although overall NPS visitation dropped, open spaces at parks provided safe ways for visitors to recreate and some parks still experienced record crowds and welcomed new visitors. The pandemic affected operations at nearly every park. At the peak of closures for the pandemic, 66 parks in the National Park System were fully closed for two months or more. Parks in designated Urban Areas (see Definitions) saw a 51.5 million decrease in recreation visits from 2019. For parks that reported visitation in both 2019 and 2020 (385 of the 389 parks reporting in 2020), 323 parks had fewer recreation visits in 2020 and 60 parks had more recreation visits. Modified operations in 2020 also prevented many parks from collecting visitor use information in the usual way. Data users are advised that methods for collecting and estimating visitor use statistics at many parks had to be altered for 2020, and that official statistics reported here may be more approximate than usual. Other factors also affected visitation, but impacts were local to a few parks or regional in nature instead of systemwide. Several parks on the west coast and in the intermountain west were impacted by an extremely active and destructive wildland fire season. Parks and communities in California, Colorado, Oregon, and Washington experienced intermittent evacuations, area closures and heavy smoke. Three hurricanes – Hanna in July, Laura in August, and Sally in September – occasionally closed some park areas along the gulf coast. Also, some parks have lingering closures from hurricanes and wildland fires in previous years. Despite the factors limiting visitation in 2020, fifteen parks set a record for recreation visits and five parks broke a record they set in 2019. See Appendix B for a listing of record-setting parks. Also, the NPS passed 15 billion accumulated recreation visits since data collection began in 1904. This milestone was passed sometime in August 2020. Four parks began reporting official visitor use statistics in 2020 and were responsible for an additional 331,185 recreation visits: Boston Harbor Islands NRA, Dwight D. Eisenhower MEM, Katahdin Woods and Waters NM, and Valles Caldera NPRES. Several parks passed annual visitation milestones in 2020: Eugene O’Neill NHS passed 10,000 annual recreation visits for the first time, Niobrara NSR passed 100,000 annual recreation visits for the first time, and Pictured Rocks NL passed 1 million annual recreation visits for the first time. Other parks passed milestones for accumulated recreation visits including Paterson Great Falls NHP (2016-2020) passing 1 million total recreation visits, Canaveral NS (1976-2020) passing 50 million total recreation visits, Chattahoochee NRA (1980-2020) and Mount Rainier NP (1904-2020) each passing 100 million total recreation visits, and Cape Cod NS (1964-2020) passing 250 million total recreation visits. In the pages that follow, a series of tables and figures display visitor use data for calendar year 2020. By documenting these visits across the National Park System, the NPS Statistical Abstract offers a historical record of visitor use in NPS units and provides NPS staff and partners with a useful tool for effective management and planning. In 2020, 389 of 423 NPS units collected and reported visitor use data; the remainder are unable to do so for a variety of reasons, such as administration by another agency...

Statistical abstract: 2020

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