OUTDOORS: With warmer weather on the horizon, our minds are imagining the time we’ll spend in the outdoors.
If you’re traveling cross country and looking for something to see, check for locations in the National Park System, which was quite popular in 2016.
According to Ryan Zinke, secretary of the U.S. Department of the Interior, there were 331 million visits last year to national parks. This was the “third consecutive all-time attendance record for the National Park Service,” a press release from the department stated.
Here’s a few other highlights the department shared about 2016:
• 330,971,689 recreation visits in 2016 – up 7.7 percent or 23.7 million visits over 2015.
• 1.4 billion hours spent by visitors in parks – up 7 percent or 93 million hours over 2015.
• 15,430,454 Overnight stays in parks – up 2.5 percent over 2015.
• 2,543,221 National Park campground RV overnights – up 12.5 percent over 2015.
• 2,154,698 Backcountry overnights – up 6.7 percent over 2015.
• 3,858,162 National park campground tent overnights – up 4.8 percent over 2015.
• 10 million recreation visits at four parks – Golden Gate National Recreation Area in San Francisco, Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina and Virginia, Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee and North Carolina, George Washington Memorial Parkway in Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C.
• More than 5 million recreation visits at 12 parks (3 percent of reporting parks)
• 80 parks had more than 1 million recreation visits (21 percent of reporting parks)
• 382 of the 417 parks in the National Park system count visitors and 77 of those parks set a new record for annual recreation visits. This is about 20 percent of reporting parks.
• 4 parks were added to the statistics system and reported visitation for the first time. They added about 300,000 visits to the total.
Here are the 10 spots in the National Park system that had the most visitors in 2016:Golden Gate National Recreation Area, San Francisco, Calif.; Blue Ridge Parkway, Asheville, N.C.; Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Gatlinburg, Tenn.; George Washington Memorial Parkway, McLean, Va.; Gateway National Recreation Area, Staten Island, N.Y.; Lincoln Memorial, Washington, D.C.; Lake Mead National Recreation Area, Boulder City, Nev.; Grand Canyon National Park, Ariz.; Natchez Trace Parkway, Tupelo, Miss.; and Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Washington, D.C.