Numbers show quirky nature of visits to Utah's national parks

SALT LAKE CITY — The latest numbers showing June and July visits to Utah's 13 national park facilities underscore how difficult it is to predict what parks are frequented and why.

"When you get right down to it, it's 'Who knows?' " said Cordell Roy, the state coordinator of the National Park Service.

"It is a big complicated thing," he added. "We can't begin to understand at the end of the year why one park is up or why visitation is down — the whys of it are very difficult to pin down."

As an example, Bryce Canyon National Park visitation shot up a whopping 13 percent over last year during the months of June and July, while Canyonlands was down 2 percent.

Nearby Arches National Park, however, was up 2 percent.

"When you think about the big five in Utah (Zion, Canyonlands, Arches, Capitol Reef and Bryce) you would think that if visits are up at one, they would be up at all of them," Roy said. "That's not the case."

Overall, 5.7 million people visited Utah's parks, up more than 200,000 from last year during the same time, Roy said.

A variety of factors can influence park visitation, such as economic considerations, curiosity spurred by the popular park series by documentary filmmaker Ken Burns or water levels at places such as Glen Canyon.

A nationally slumping economy may drive Americans to stay closer to home and explore the outdoors, Roy said, but a dire global economy chases away foreign visitors, which represent a significant portion of national park visitation.

Some numbers, of course, are more easily attributed to specific causes, Roy said. In years when water levels are low, visits to Glen Canyon drop off and with the quarry visitor center shut down at Dinosaur National Monument, visitation for those two months was down 47 percent from the year before.

Timpanogos was also down — 13 percent — while visits to Rainbow were up 7 percent.

Utah's overall increase in visitation is following that of Yellowstone National Park — the country's oldest — which experienced 2.5 million visits in June, July and August, up more than 200,000 visits from the summer of 2009. That's put it on track for a record-setting year.

During the entire year of 2009, Utah's national parks attracted just over 9 million visitors, up by 300,000 from 2008.

e-mail: amyjoi@desnews.com