Park visitation numbers reflect America's history

Visitation numbers for Glacier National Park this year are not just the highest on record — they’re 3 percent above last year with two months left to count.

And at a time when crowded parks and impacts to climate change by travelers are on National Park Service managers’ minds, low gasoline prices forecasted for 2015 could maintain high visitation numbers — or even drive them higher.

Official visitation numbers for Glacier Park start at an even 4,000 for 1911, the year after the Park was established, and slowly climbed through valleys and hills to 73,776 by 1930.

“Visitors were hand counted in the early years,” said Butch Street, the National Park Service’s public use statistics officer.

Glacier Park saw a 52 percent increase in visitation in 1934, following the opening of the Going-to-the-Sun Road two years earlier. Automobile use increased after that, while train ridership declined. Today, vehicles are counted, not people.

“I read in President Gerald Ford’s autobiography that when he worked in Yellowstone as a college student, he ran around the parking lot counting cars,” Street said.

Technology has changed — pneumatic tubes stretched across roads have been upgraded to inductive loops buried in the roadway, Street said. Based out of his home in Denver, Street took over how the Park Service managed visitor numbers in 1984.

“There were no computers back then — we had six statisticians in the office,” he said.

Using money allocated for Y2K fixes, Street set up the Park Service’s first online database in 2000. Staff at national parks around the country had been e-mailing him the raw data, he said.

Today, Street runs raw data from 340 to 350 sites around the U.S. through his program to get a good estimate and to avoid “bad math” at the local level. He issues revised “counting instructions” from time to time that take into account geographical differences between national parks — and between different park entrances. Buses and Park Service vehicles are counted separately.

“When I started, the national average was 3.5 passengers per vehicle,” he said. “Today, the national average is 2.7 in the busy seasons and 2.4 to 2.5 in the off seasons.”

Parks with mostly trail use see lower passenger per vehicle numbers than destination parks, like Glacier and Yellowstone. A park near a large metropolitan area, like Rocky Mountain National Park near Denver, will see more day-use and less camping.

“Visitation numbers go up and down some but have basically been flat for some time now,” Street said. “There’s a correlation between the amount of available lodging at destination parks and the number of visitors.”

To some extent, Glacier Park visitation numbers reflect U.S. history. Visitor numbers fell by 50 percent in 1918, as the U.S. entered World War I. And while the numbers slowly increased through the Great Depression, from 70,742 the year Wall Street crashed to 178,449 in 1941, visitation plummeted by 65 percent the following year, as the U.S. entered World War II.

“That probably had a lot to do with gas rationing,” Street suggested.

The post-war boom started slow, really kicking off in 1949 with visitation to Glacier Park increasing by 65 percent. The Park first broke the million mark in 1969 and never went back.

Visitation saw a slight dip in the late 1970s under stagflation and during the 1982 recession, but visitation quickly recovered, hitting the 2 million mark for the first time in 1983.

Park entrance numbers declined slightly through the 1980s before breaking the 2 million mark again in 1991 and staying there for the next three years. The numbers declined by as much 20 percent through the 1990s and early 2000s.

Curiously, visitation didn’t break the 2 million mark again until 2004 — the year after historic wildfires swept across Glacier Park, burning about 13 percent of its total area. Visitation passed the 2 million mark six more times after that, including 2010, the centennial year, and 2013, the year of the federal government shutdown, and this year.

Adding in the October numbers, Glacier Park’s total since 1911 is 99,689,749. Glacier Park is closing in on another historical marker — 100 million total visitors.