Pandemic boom in outdoor tourism still echoes in national parks

The little drug store in western South Dakota might as well have been in the middle of nowhere when Rick Hustead’s grandparents bought it in 1931.

But he said Ted and Dorothy Hustead thought it had potential.

Congress had recently authorized what would one day be Badlands National Park a few miles away. Tourists were already passing by on their way to Yellowstone National Park and the Black Hills.

Today, Wall Drug—with its gift shops, restaurant, ice cream parlor, donut stand, play area, and, yes, pharmacy—is a tourist attraction in its own right, with around 2 million visitors a year. But Rick Hustead said the main draw is the parks. “All this traffic is driven by the Badlands, by the Black Hills, by Mount Rushmore. I mean all this tourist traffic. The national parks have a huge impact on our business.”

The COVID-19 pandemic brought even more traffic, he said. Wall Drug struggled to hire enough workers and to streamline its operations to keep up with demand, he said. “Best year in the history of the store, 2021.”

Throughout the National Park System (NPS), many other parks reported a boom in traffic. And in the often-remote communities surrounding those parks, business also boomed. Though the boom didn’t last, it still echoes in many places today. At Badlands, the number of visits as of the end of September 2024 was 8 percent higher than in the same period in 2019 (each day a visitor is there is counted as one visit).

The increased visits and economic impact were not spread evenly, however, benefiting some while leaving others behind. Wind Cave National Park, a two-hour drive from Badlands, reported a 19 percent decrease in visits over the same period.

A boom for some

At the end of 2019, visits to NPS parks featuring outdoor recreation were close to the highest they’ve been for four decades. Visits had been declining for years until the mid-2010s when they began rising rapidly, peaking at 209 million in 2017 and then holding steady. That same year, visits to Ninth District parks peaked at 13 million.

NPS officials say the parks that gained the most in those years were ones that were already the most popular, such as Yellowstone and Glacier National Park in northwestern Montana.

According to NPS, the economic expansion that followed the Great Recession had a lot to do with it, as did an increase in the number of international tourists, whose itineraries often include national parks, and a promotional campaign celebrating NPS’ centennial.

The pandemic brought a roller coaster of change.

Visits plunged in 2020 when many parks closed partially or entirely to limit the spread of COVID-19, then rebounded sharply in 2021 when operations returned to normal. For some parks, the rebound continued into 2022.

But while some parks gained so much traffic that overcrowding was a concern, others grew quieter. As a result, the number of visits to NPS parks nationwide was about the same in 2021 as it was in 2019 (Figure 1).

NPS parks in this tally consists of all parks featuring outdoor recreation, including national parks, national recreation areas, and other outdoor places that have consistent traffic count methodology. National parks account for about a third of the visits tallied, national parkways another third, and the remainder is split among other types of NPS parks.

In the Ninth District, the pandemic traffic was more pronounced because it was dominated by very popular national parks, and most of those parks grew in popularity, especially Yellowstone. National park visits make up around 80 percent of NPS park traffic in the district, and Yellowstone visits alone make up a third.

The big increase in traffic that Ninth District parks received in 2021 didn’t last, however. But that likely had little to do with decreasing enthusiasm for outdoor recreation. Devastating floods in and around Yellowstone park in 2022 caused visits to decrease, dragging the district’s visitation numbers down with it.

Why some gained while others lost

A commonly cited reason for parks seeing an increase in visits during the pandemic is people yearning for recreation when so many forms of recreation were limited by COVID-19 precautions.

Katherine Reynolds, CEO of the Alger County Chamber of Commerce in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, observed this yearning firsthand. Visits to nearby Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore rose from 4 million pre-pandemic to 5 million in 2020, eventually reaching 7 million in 2022.

“You had a lot of people very inexperienced with the outdoors, but they were wanting just to get out,” Reynolds said. They didn’t know much about camping or about the right footwear for hiking, she said, but they knew Pictured Rocks was not too long a drive from downstate and there were things to do there.

But while many parks with growing traffic grew for the same reason, the parks with shrinking traffic shrank for a variety of reasons.

Many had already been overcrowded before the pandemic and used timed-entry reservations or other methods to manage crowd sizes. Some, like Glacier, started using these methods for the first time in the pandemic. The result: a 1 percent decrease in visits to Glacier between 2019 and 2021.

Other parks were partially closed during the pandemic because of construction or natural disasters, ranging from wildfires at Sequoia National Park in California to low water preventing boat access at Glen Canyon National Recreation Area in the American Southwest. Parks like Grand Canyon National Park that normally receive a significant number of foreign visitors reported fewer visits because of border restrictions related to COVID-19.

Echoes of the boom

The pandemic boost to traffic at many NPS parks, if they experienced a boost, is gone now.

Across the nation, the number of visits at NPS parks featuring outdoor recreation from January to September 2024 was down 4 percent compared with the same period in 2019. But, in the Ninth District, it was up 9 percent. Compared with the same period in 2023, traffic at parks nationwide was down 4 percent while traffic in Ninth District parks was up 7 percent.

Nationwide, about half the parks gained and half lost visitors relative to 2019. The changes were often extreme. Among the top 10 national parks, for example, two increased by double digit percentages and two decreased by that much (Figure 2).

In the Ninth District, gainers outnumbered losers by about 2-to-1. Among the big gainers were Theodore Roosevelt National Park in western North Dakota, with a 40 percent increase in visitors, and the St. Croix National Scenic Riverway running between Minnesota and Wisconsin, with a 38 percent increase (Figure 3).

The Mississippi National River and Recreation Area, which flows through the Twin Cities, lost the most with a 23 percent decrease.

Sticker shock for tourists

While the NPS was created primarily to preserve natural and historic areas for public enjoyment, they also have a significant effect on the economy. For example, NPS estimated that visitor spending to all its parks in 2023 contributed $32 billion to the nation’s gross domestic product. That’s close to half of South Dakota’s economy.

Recent research suggests that the impact of NPS parks could be even higher than NPS estimates.

But the economic effect of park visitors, adjusted for inflation, has grown at a slower pace than the number of visitors both nationwide and in the Ninth District, according to NPS estimates. Between 2019 and 2023, spending per visit shrank by 7 percent at NPS parks nationwide and in the Ninth District that used consistent estimation methodology through the period.

This decrease in spending appears in tourism statistics in several Ninth District states. Explore Minnesota’s recent economic impact report, for example, shows that per-visitor spending decreased by 13 percent between 2019 and 2023. The University of Montana’s Institute for Tourism and Recreation Research’s survey of out-of-state vacationers shows spending per person per day decreased by 3 percent over the same period. Statistics from Travel South Dakota show spending per visitor was flat.

One reason for visitors watching their spending may be the sticker shock of travel expenses that came with inflation, which many news organizations have reported on.

In fall 2023, for example, Wyofile, a Wyoming-based news service, visited with a Minnesota family skimping and saving to afford their vacation to Yellowstone. They stayed at the campground instead of a hotel and cooked their own meals, splurging on dining out on only the final night of their trip.

The family’s behavior is consistent with spending trends from the University of Montana surveys. The surveys show that travelers spent 9 percent more on necessities such as food, lodging, and gasoline. They attempted to save by spending less on hotels and restaurants and more on campgrounds and groceries. Less necessary expenses, such as fishing guides and entrance fees to parks, were cut by 17 percent.

Another reason spending has decreased may be that the number of overseas tourists has yet to recover to pre-pandemic levels. Overseas tourists tend to spend more and stay longer than domestic tourists.

According to the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Survey of International Air Travelers, the number of overseas tourists who traveled to a national park or monument decreased by 18 percent between 2019 and 2023. In states whose main attractions are such parks, the decrease has been severe. Wyoming, for example, lost 55 percent of these overseas tourists. Montana lost 27 percent.

More hikers, campers may be good sign for parks

While NPS parks have a mixed outlook, the activities that make them popular are trending upward.

The number of Americans participating in hiking and camping is on the rise. Between 2019 and 2023, surveys by the Outdoor Foundation, a group affiliated with the outdoor recreation industry, found the number of hikers grew 23 percent and the number of campers, 30 percent. Camping has especially accelerated since the pandemic. The increase in all outdoor recreation in the same period was 14 percent.

The economic impact of these activities has also grown significantly. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the impact of climbing, hiking, and tent camping, adjusted for inflation, grew by 64 percent between 2019 and 2023. That’s compared with a 9 percent increase for all activities.

These trends suggest that during the pandemic, many people were exposed to the great outdoors for the first time or rekindled their love of the outdoors.

Reynolds said the pandemic likely introduced a whole new group of people to Pictured Rocks and Alger County’s other attractions. “They would’ve never chosen to be in a little bitty town in the middle of nowhere,” she said. But they came to visit, she said, “and they posted their pictures online and other people have heard about it.”