If you’ve visited Zion National Park this summer and things looked more crowded than usual, there’s a good reason: It is more crowded than usual. In his regular report to the Springdale Town Council, Park Superintendent Jeff Bradybaugh said that the Zion National Park visitation figures for July had just been released.
“Year-to-date through July, visitation was up 17 percent,” Bradybaugh said. “There were more than 325,000 visitors [in July]. More than we had last year at this time which was a record year. So we’re stretched.”
According to the National Park Service, Zion National Park visitation totaled 3,211,596 in 2014, but for 2015, they’re on track to significantly exceed that number. For comparison, the most-visited national park is Great Smoky Mountains National Park. For the first six months of 2015, their visitation was up only 8 percent, less than half of the increase seen in Zion.
Bradybaugh said that one of the main goals of the National Park Service is to provide a quality experience for visitors—including even using computer modeling to assist them in facilitating this goal—but this quality experience is being threatened by current levels of visitation. The Park Service can manage visitation growth of 2 percent to 3 percent, but current Zion National Park visitation growth is far beyond that. Bradybaugh said that if the growth of visitation continues at the present pace, it will definitely be a crisis.
Zion National Park isn’t alone in dealing with this problem. Last year, the Associated Press reported that visitors to the main Yosemite Valley in Yosemite National Park would be capped at 21,000 visitors a day during peak times, and cars would be turned away once that limit is reached. The Public Information Office at Yosemite said that no visitation caps were in place yet. In the Grand Canyon, 6,000 cars compete for 2,500 parking spots on peak days, and the Park limits rim-to-rim groups to fewer than 30 people.
Bradybaugh said that no threshold limit on the Zion National Park visitation numbers is known yet. A meeting will be held next week to make that and other determinations. Although the crisis threshold wasn’t known, he did recall previous Memorial Day weekends before the bus service and the summer ban on private vehicles when the entire canyon was gridlocked from the park entrance to the end of the road at the Narrows.
The second paragraph should be, “Year-to-date through July, visitation was up 17 percent,” Bradybaugh said. “There were more than 325,000 visitors [through July]. More than we had last year at this time which was a record year. So we’re stretched.” The number of visitors is cumulative, not just for the month of July.