Bad economy can't beat nature

As the economy has soured, visits have soared at Utah's national parks and monuments, as more locals apparently are vacationing nearby to spend less on travel.

"People certainly are staying a little closer to home and making a lot of shorter trips," said Paul Henderson, spokesman for National Park Service sites near Moab. He said the lion's share of visits there come from people nearby in Utah and Colorado.

The 13 National Park system units in Utah reported 8.8 million recreational visits overall in 2008. That was up by a quarter-million visits over 2007 (or 3.2 percent), and up by more than a half-million visits over 2006 (or 6.8 percent), new data shows.

Henderson is also acting superintendent of Arches National Park, which set an all-time record with 928,000 recreational visits last year. That was up by 68,000 visitors (or 8 percent) over 2007, and up a whopping 200,000 visits (or 25 percent) in the past five years since 2004.

"I think it's a combination of several things," including people from the growing Wasatch Front in Utah and Colorado's Front Range traveling more to nearby Moab, he said.

"There's a whole lot of people who have figured out that Moab's only four or five hours away. So our season now tends to start earlier in the spring … and it goes longer into the fall," he said. "A lot of that is regional travel. It's folks who realize that when you've still got a couple of feet of snow on the ground, they're golfing in Moab."

Another twist of the recent bad economy also has fueled more visits to Utah parks.

"The dollar was weak against European currencies. There were times in July last summer that you could go into City Market (in Moab) and not hear English. I mean, there was very strong foreign visitation here," Henderson said.

The increased visits also come while funding in most Utah parks has dwindled. The Deseret News last summer reported that visitation in Utah parks was up more than the national average from 2003-07, but cuts in employees were deeper than average — and operations budgets in most Utah parks fell further behind inflation than average nationally.

In 2008, the most-visited park in Utah was Zion, which had 2.7 million recreational visits, up 1.2 percent (or an extra 33,000 visitors) from the previous year.

Zion finished No. 8 among all national parks in the country for recreational visits behind, in order, Great Smoky Mountains, Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Olympic, Yellowstone, Cuyahoga Valley and Rocky Mountain.