Yellowstone records second-busiest year

Posted 1/18/18

The park counted 4,116,525 visits last year — about 140,600 (or 3.3 percent) fewer visitors than the record number of visits that were recorded in 2016.

On the eastern side of Yellowstone, roughly 509,000 travelers passed through the East …

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Yellowstone records second-busiest year

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Visits to Yellowstone National Park dropped in 2017, but it was still the second-busiest year on record, park managers say.

The park counted 4,116,525 visits last year — about 140,600 (or 3.3 percent) fewer visitors than the record number of visits that were recorded in 2016.

On the eastern side of Yellowstone, roughly 509,000 travelers passed through the East Entrance in 2017 and another 222,450 entered through the Northeast Gate near Cooke City, Montana.

Although Yellowstone visits dropped, Park County’s lodging taxes — collected at hotels, motels and other overnight accommodations — rose by about 5 percent from the prior year.

Beyond lodging tax collections, “We like to see people at all of our other activities and attractions and ... everybody appeared to be above where they were the previous year as well,” said Claudia Wade, executive director of the Park County Travel Council. “So it’s not just lodging tax collections, but also admissions.”

For example, through November, visits to the Buffalo Bill Center of the West were up about 3.4 percent from the prior year while visits to the Heart Mountain Interpretative Center were up 6 percent, according to Travel Council data. Yellowstone Regional Airport also had its second-busiest year on record.

The increase in lodging tax collections in 2017 came on the heels of a significant year-over-year jump of around 20 percent in 2016 — Yellowstone’s record-breaking year.

“To be 5 percent up above that 20 percent this year, that’s nothing to sneeze at,” Wade said. She said the increases in overnight stays came the later part of the year, kicking off with the total solar eclipse in August.

“We had a good August, a good September, a good October,” Wade said of lodging tax collections. “So that helped us with our year-end numbers.”

The county got a boost from the company Airbnb, which began collecting lodging taxes in 2017. Airbnb, which allows residents to easily rent out their homes or spare rooms to guests, reported that 11,100 visitors rented out places in Powell and Cody through the service last year, according to the Casper Star-Tribune.

Yellowstone managers have expressed consternation about the high levels of visitation. In  a news release announcing the 2017 visitation figures, Yellowstone officials said the park’s increased popularity has caused them “to consider many questions,” including “How can the park prepare for a future in which visitation continues to increase?” and “How does the increased visitation affect park resources and visitor experiences?”

The National Park Service commissioned two studies during the summer of 2016.

“These studies mark the beginning of our efforts to understand visitation and develop strategies to meet the challenges it presents,” said Yellowstone National Park Superintendent Dan Wenk. “In 2018 and 2019, we intend to gather more information in order to make informed decisions about visitation.”

In one of the recent studies, more than half of the visitors surveyed reportedly said there are too many people in the park. A majority of people also said they would like to see voluntary public transit and more parking to ease congestion — options that wouldn’t limit the use of private vehicles, the park service says.

A park webpage on “Summer Use Planning” says strategies for dealing with the increased visitation “might include (but aren’t limited to) communication and traffic management systems, shuttle systems or other transportation alternatives and reservations or timed-entry systems.”

It says those options could be put in place “at key locations or park-wide.”

More visitation statistics from the National Park Service are available online at https://irma.nps.gov/Stats/Reports/Park.

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