US National Parks Break All-Time Records: Where the Crowds Are Going and Hidden Gems to Discover

The National Park Service had its biggest year ever in 2024. About 331.9 million people visited America’s parks last year. This is almost 2% more than in 2023 and beats the previous record from 2016.

More people are enjoying outdoor activities since the pandemic, which shows how popular America’s natural and historical places are. This is happening even though parks don’t have enough money or workers.

Closures
The most popular place was Golden Gate National Recreation Area in San Francisco, California, with 17.18 million visitors, writes Alec Sills-Trausch. This was almost 15% more than in 2023. Blue Ridge Parkway, usually the most visited site, dropped to second place with 16.73 million visits because of closures after Hurricane Helene.

Among the 63 national parks, Great Smoky Mountains National Park was the most popular, with 12.19 million visitors. Zion, Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, and Rocky Mountain National Parks were the next most visited.

Yearly total
Western parks had many of the visitors, which greatly affects nearby towns. Glacier National Park in Montana had over 600,000 visitors just in September, bringing its yearly total to more than 3 million – a 9% increase from the year before. Yellowstone National Park had 838,458 visits that month, with a yearly total over 4.3 million, which is 5% more than in 2023.

All these visitors bring a lot of money to areas around the parks. Across the country, park tourism created billions of dollars and supported thousands of jobs. In Arkansas, national park visits added about $9.9 billion to the state’s economy in 2023, which was about 7% of its total GDP. In the Great Smoky Mountains area, tourism created billions in revenue and over $30 billion across Tennessee in 2023.

Confusion
But despite so many visitors, the National Park Service is having trouble keeping up because they don’t have enough workers or money. In early 2024, the Department of Governmental Efficiency cut 1,000 park workers and stopped hiring seasonal staff. Although a court later brought back many of these jobs, the confusion caused problems at many parks.

With not enough resources, parks are facing overcrowding, delayed maintenance, and safety concerns. Because of the large increase in visitors over the last ten years, popular places like Yosemite and Mount Rainier started using reservation systems to control crowds. Some visitor centers have even had to close temporarily because they don’t have enough staff.

Options
If you want to avoid crowds, you have options. Five of Alaska’s seven national parks are among the ten least visited parks. Wrangell-St. Elis National Park, on the border of Alaska and Canada, is the largest national park in the United States and has glaciers bigger than most airports. In southwest Alaska, Katmai National Park and Lake Clark National Park offer chances to see brown bears up close in their natural habitat.

You don’t need to go all the way to Alaska to find quiet parks. Great Basin National Park, four hours north of Las Vegas, was America’s tenth least visited location. Or you can visit northern Michigan’s Isle Royale National Park, which only had 29,000 visitors in its beautiful forests.

These less crowded parks might take more planning to visit, but they offer amazing experiences of nature at its best!