Saguaro National Park Visitor Use Study-Descriptive Data

Otak, Inc.

Saguaro National Park (SAGU) is located in Tucson, Arizona, and offers its visitors the experience to see enormous cacti in a desert landscape. Visitation to SAGU has increased significantly in recent years. Paired with visitation increases are anecdotal observations by park staff of visitors increasingly accessing the park from previously low-use areas. These visitor behaviors are causing crowding-related issues in the park, especially at trailhead access points, where existing parking capacities cannot accommodate the growing demand. Another key challenge for SAGU park staff is accurately defining procedures for differentiating between visitors engaging in recreational activities and those visiting the park for non-recreation purposes, such as commuting to work. Park staff’s current counting procedure relies on a method that distinguishes between visitor types (i.e., recreation vs. non-recreation visitors) with limitations. For example, estimates of non-recreation visitors to SAGU are derived from counts at limited locations near the West Picture Rocks Road area, but this approach does not fully capture the proportion of non-recreation visitors throughout the entire park. Developing a method that effectively differentiates between these visitor categories and explicitly estimates the proportion of recreation visitors to SAGU will provide valuable insights to park staff about visitation. Moreover, the findings from this study will help inform future updates and improvements to the current visitor use counting procedures.

Saguaro National Park Visitor Use Study-Descriptive Data

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