The Most Visited National Parks

October 9th, 2006
Some see park rankings as just a numbers game
http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2006/Oct-09-Mon-2006/news/10093981.html
By HENRY BREAN - REVIEW-JOURNAL

If you’ve ever waited in line on the Callville Bay launch ramp or steered a boat through traffic in Hemenway Harbor, you know that Lake Mead can be a busy place.

But just how busy might surprise you. Last year, Lake Mead National Recreation Area attracted nearly 8 million visitors, almost twice as many as the Grand Canyon and more than twice as many as Yellowstone or Yosemite.

Of the 390 sites managed by the National Park Service, only four draw more people than Lake Mead. And earlier this year, the 1.5 million-acre recreation area east of Las Vegas was poised to rise to third or fourth on the list of busiest parks, though its numbers appeared to fall off a bit in September.

The last time Lake Mead ranked as high as third was in 1995, when the park drew 10.2 million visitors, its highest total ever.

“We’re in the upper tier in terms of visitation. There’s no question about that,” said Jim Holland, park planner for Lake Mead. “We’re one of the most visited units of the National Park Service.”

But some staff members think Lake Mead gets cheated out of even higher rank because of the way visitation is counted at other park sites.

Lake Mead spokeswoman Roxanne Dey said some of the parks near the top of the list are located along commuter routes and report numbers unavoidably inflated by traffic unrelated to visitation.

Of the four sites with higher visitation totals than Lake Mead, two — Golden Gate National Recreation Area in San Francisco and Gateway National Recreation Area in New York City and New Jersey — are bisected by major highways.

The site at the top of the list actually is a highway. Blue Ridge Parkway is a 470-mile scenic road that meanders through two states from Shenandoah National Park in Virginia to Great Smoky Mountains National Park on the Tennessee-North Carolina border.

Last year, the parkway reported nearly 18 million recreational visits.

“That has been a sore spot for some (Lake Mead) park employees who feel we should be even higher up the list, if not first,” Dey said. “We don’t have our counters out on U.S. (Highway) 93. We don’t count every car that drives by the road to our visitor center.”

The park also doesn’t count the roughly 1 million people a year who visit Hoover Dam, which is surrounded by the recreation area but is managed by the Bureau of Reclamation.

“They want the bragging rights,” Holland said of some Lake Mead staffers.

Management Analyst Butch Street, who has been in charge of visitor statistics for the National Park Service for 25 years, said comments like that “sound like sour grapes to me.”

Street insists his office produces what he called “very remarkably good estimates” that account for everything from commuter traffic to the comings and goings of Park Service employees.

“We go through a tremendous amount of effort to get the right numbers,” he said.

At Florida’s Biscayne National Park, where there are no roads, that means using aircraft to count visitors in boats. At seven of the monuments the Park Service manages in Washington, D.C., that means sending rangers out on foot to count heads six times a day.

“You can’t manage an area if you don’t know what’s happening there,” Street said.

Golden Gate National Recreation Area, for example, takes in the iconic bridge and sites at either end, as well as Alcatraz Island in the San Francisco Bay. What it does not include is the busy stretch of Highway 101 that runs across the bridge.

As a result, great pains must be taken to exclude Bay Area commuters from the park’s visitor count, which topped 13.6 million people last year.

Including such traffic “would skew our numbers significantly,” said Golden Gate spokesman Rich Weideman.

Brian Feeney, a spokesman for the heavily urbanized Gateway National Recreation Area, put it another way. “That would be cheating if we counted (commuters). We don’t cheat like that,” he said.

Things get a bit more complicated on the Blue Ridge Parkway, which has 94 access points but no entrance fees.

“It is very difficult to differentiate commuters from other travelers,” said Blue Ridge spokesman Phil Noblitt. “It’s impossible for us to know with any degree of certainty exactly how many people visit the parkway.”

What Blue Ridge staffers end up with instead, Noblitt said, are statistics compiled using “a lot of estimation and extrapolation” that are most useful for identifying trends in visitor volume.

Lately, Street said, the trend at National Park Service sites has been downward.

“We’ve been down seven out of the last 10 years,” he said. “I hate to argue with George Bush about the economy. There’s just not as much money out there, and let’s face it, most of our parks are destination parks.

“People are staying closer to home lately. They just don’t have the dollars.”

Lake Mead has seen its annual visitor volume drop by more than 2 million people over the past decade, despite rapid population growth in the region.

Holland said he can’t explain that, but he isn’t too worried about it. “In this case, there’s no real advantage to being number one” in visitation, he said.

The budgets for National Park Service sites are not directly tied to how many visitors they attract, though Street said being high on the list can impact staffing levels and road maintenance money.

“If you don’t think we in the Park Service don’t sit down and look at this … you’re sadly mistaken,” he said.

Holland said Lake Mead’s ranking is used mostly for political purposes. “The fact that we have high visitation is written into every one of our justifications” for budget requests, he said.

Holland said it doesn’t really matter whether the lake ranks first or fifth on the list of the nation’s most visited parks.

“If we’re providing recreational opportunities for almost 10 million people,” he said, “I feel pretty good about that.”