Visits are up at Grand Canyon, U.S. parks

The number of tourists visiting Grand Canyon National Park has risen in the past two years, the first upward streak the park has seen in the past decade.
Between January and June this year, nearly 2.2 million people visited the park, a 7.2 percent jump from the same time last year. The spike began in March, said Jim O’Sickey, a fee and revenue analyst with the Park Service.
“March, April and May totally surprised us this year,” O’Sickey said.
Visits to the Grand Canyon have been fickle in the past decade, jumping up by as much as 350,000 one year and plummeting a couple hundred thousand the next. The largest drop in recent history occurred in 2001 after the Sept. 11 attacks, which affected travel nationwide.

That year, the number of visitors dropped by about 9 percent, the biggest dive the park had seen since a 29 percent drop in 1973, the year the world oil shock began and OPEC quadrupled gas prices.

The latest numbers seem to mirror a trend throughout the country’s 388 national parks, said David Barna, a National Park Service spokesman.
Visitors to the nation’s parks began decreasing in 2000 and dropped by about 6 million visitors in 2001 from 286 million the previous year. But early numbers indicate traffic is picking up throughout the nation and will continue to do so, Barna said.

Despite a slower June this year than last at the Grand Canyon, O’Sickey said visitation this year could match or beat the park’s record 4.9 million visitors in 1999.

He said while visitors from Asia and Europe have been rising since 2003, domestic tourism has been the largest contributor to the increases. The number of foreign travelers still has yet to reach pre-Sept. 11, 2001, levels.