When Should I Visit The National Parks?

Above, a crowd was attracted to an eruption of Old Faithful Geyser at
Yellowstone National Park two weeks ago Photo by Armand Vaquer.

My preference in visiting national parks is during the off-season when the kiddies are back in school and people are back to work. Going to a national park during the prime vacation season can put one right smack into hordes of people. I experienced this recently at Yellowstone National Park.

Some may wonder, When should I visit a national park? Fortunately, there's a new resource in finding the answer.

Fast Company posted:

Everyone loves the National Parks. Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, the Great Smoky Mountains: they’re our country’s greatest natural treasures. But if you go at the wrong time of the year–say in June, to Yosemite—you’ll wind up in a tourist hellhole. So when is the best time to visit? 

A new visualization by the designer and engineer Jordan Vincent uses visitor data from 54 national parks between 2013 and 2019 to show the peak visiting times for people using different types of lodging. (A handful of parks were excluded because of incomplete data.) Vincent uses data on how many people are staying in hotels, RVs, tents, and out in the backcountry as a proxy for how busy the parks are with different types of visitors. He also adds temperature as a variable to show the correlation between surges in park visitors and how nice it is outside.

To read more, go here.