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| Above, the South Entrance to Yellowstone National Park. Photo by Armand Vaquer. |
This should not come as any surprise to regular readers of this blog.
Fox News is reporting that crowds are swarming our national parks after a year of lockdowns.
They start it off with:
There’s an epidemic of post-pandemic visitors at national parks.
Lockdown-weary Americans are flocking to the nation’s most beautiful natural environments en masse — to the degree that it’s causing an overcrowding problem at the parks and in nearby towns.
"Anywhere you go, there’s going to be a line," Libby Preslock told the Wall Street Journal following a recent visit to Utah’s Arches National Park. Preslock arrived at the park at 9 a.m., only to learn that it was full. Signs recommended eager visitors try back in three to five hours, so she decided to try her luck at Canyonlands, another national park in the area.
There, too, she encountered a wait but was able to enter after an hour.
The wait times were not a one-off, but part of a recent trend: About 194,000 people visited Arches in April, a 15% increase from the number of visitors in 2019 — and a 100% increase from April 2020, when it was closed due to the coronavirus pandemic, the Journal reported.
Canyonlands saw a 30% increase in visitors in April, compared with April 2019.
According to the Bureau of Land Management, the increase is significantly due to more first-timers checking out the parks.
To read more, go here.
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